Word Freak : Heartbreak, Triumph, Genius, and Obsession in the World of Competitive Scrabble Players (9780547524313)

by Fatsis, Stefan

  Alfred Mosher Butts was born in 1899 in Poughkeepsie, the youngest of five boys of Allison Butts, a prominent local attorney, and the former Arrie Mosher. After graduating from the University of Pennsylvania in 1924 with a degree in architecture, Alfred joined a New York firm, Holden McLaughlin and Associates, and took an apartment on the Upper East Side with his new wife, Nina. He worked on suburban homes in Westchester and Fairfield counties and a boys’ club housing project in Madison Square. In 1931, as the Depression deepened, the firm cut salaries by 20 percent, and later laid off some employees. Butts was among them. He was thirty-two years old.

  Butts tried to put his dilettantish interests in writing, painting, and illustrating to the test. He created a dozen prints of New York scenes, using India ink on architect’s linen, which he ran through a blueprint machine. Butts called them “Vandyke prints” because he used brown tones. He made 150, and sold a few at $3 apiece. (A local dentist gave three to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, which bought three more. They’re still in the Met’s permanent collection.) Butts painted watercolors. He wrote essays and plays, which garnered rejection notices. Nothing generated much income. Even after landing a job as a statistician with a federal welfare agency, he had plenty of time and not enough money.

  Games, he thought. People need distractions during hard times. He studied three types: “men on a board” games, numbers games that used dice or cards, and letter games. “These are all of ancient lineage,” Butts wrote in his three-page “Study of Games,” which continued, “The origin of board games is unknown, but in the seventh century in India we find the highly developed game of chess. The simplest number games are played with dice, forms of which have been found with the remains of the earliest civilized people. The playing cards of today, combining numbers and symbols, still bear their medieval designs. Alphabet games were known to the Greeks and Romans.”

  Chess is a game of pure skill, Butts wrote. Backgammon combines luck and skill, providing “a much more satisfactory and enduring amusement.” Contract bridge was sweeping the nation, but was too intricate for the masses. Butts noted that those three games are of his first two schools: moving pieces on a board and numbers. “It is curious,” he wrote, “that while two of the three bases of table games have yielded such interesting developments, the third has produced nothing better than Anagrams.” Not that there was anything wrong with Anagrams. Butts and his brothers played the boxed game growing up. But it was not as popular as chess or bridge. It needed tweaking.

  In the study in Stanfordville, Bob Butts pulls down Alfred’s 1904 edition of The Works of Edgar Allan Poe. Marked with a deposit ticket from the Stissing National Bank in Pine Plains, New York, is the first page of the short story “The Gold Bug,” in which the character Legrand solves a cipher about a hidden treasure by comparing its symbols to letters in the alphabet. “Now, in English,” Poe wrote, “the letter which most frequently occurs is e. Afterwards, the succession runs thus: a o i d h n r s t u y c f g l m w b k p q x z.” (Poe wasn’t even close.) “E, however, predominates so remarkably that an individual sentence of any length is rarely seen, in which it is not the prevailing character.”

  Poe inspired in Butts a eureka moment.

  “It follows that word games should be played not with a jumble of letters,” he wrote, “but with a mixture so proportioned that the individual letters will occur in the same frequency as they do in normal word formation.”

  That would solve one problem with Anagrams. It would be easier to make words if letters appeared proportionately to their use in the language. Another problem, he wrote, was that the game was too slow. Rather than draw one tile at a time, Butts suggested giving players a handful of letters that they would rearrange into words by drawing and discarding. The result would be a word game with “a proper speed and snap; an excellent balance between the skill of the players and the luck of the draw.”

  He went on: “It is neither childish nor complex, yet may be played and enjoyed both by children and the deepest of students ... The true worth of a game depends, of course, on its entertainment value, but, if in addition its players gain an increased vocabulary, a further knowledge of word structure and of spelling, it possesses something of which no card or board game can boast ... LEXIKO (Greek lexikos, of words) is that game.”

  Alfred Butts was a linguistic layman. Other than Poe’s fictional musings, he had no secondary source to tell him the frequency of letter usage in the English language. Butts hadn’t been much interested in words before deciding to invent a word game. But he was suited to it: In everything he did, Butts was meticulous. On graph paper, in block capital letters, he recorded the precise time of departure and arrival and distance traveled, to the tenth of a mile, of automobile excursions. A postcard collection was indexed according to a personal classification system (amphitheaters, 3E4; balloons, 4E2; Catskills, 2E3; servants’ quarters, 3F1; stockyards, 6C). Even as he disdained games playing as a serious avocation, Butts had the organized, mathematical mind of a games player.

  Butts pulled out his architect’s supplies and got to work. His files are thick with spreadsheets containing twenty-six rows, one for each letter, and slash marks in groups of five denoting their appearance in one publication or another. The popular story is that Butts figured out the breakdown of the letters in Scrabble by counting letters from the front page of The New York Times. Actually, he used several sources, including the Times, the New York Herald Tribune, and The Saturday Evening Post.

  On October 5, 1933, Butts underlined in green and brown ink all of the words of nine letters or more on page 21 of the Herald Tribune, the obituary page; the notice of the death of Earl Cadogan, the British representative to the International Olympic Committee, included landowner, hereditary, succeeded, assisting, lieutenant, commandant, secondary, and viscountcy. There were 125 nine-letter words in all, and Butts wrote them down in long columns in block caps on the left side of a page, then tallied up the frequency of their letters in a column on the right:

  A-71, B-5, C-50, D-55, E-157, F-13, G-36, H-18, I-107, J-2, K-4, L-33, M-27, N-105, O-98, P-34, Q-2, R-92, S-76, T-97, U-36, V-12, W-10, X-5, Y-16, Z-1

  He increased the number of words and broke down letter frequency by percentage: He created a list of one thousand words of four letters or longer and recorded the percentage by word length. He compared letter frequency of varying word lengths on a page of the dictionary versus a page of The Saturday Evening Post, sampling a total of 12,082 letters and 2,412 words. He combined samples from different sources; one study of 18,165 letters included 6,083 letters from the Times.

  Page after page after page of tattered, fraying paper with the notations of a bean counter spill from the Archives. I imagine tiny Alfred, who looks so meek in photographs, balding and bespectacled, like an expressionless Don Knotts, hunched over some newspaper or magazine in the fifth-floor walkup in Queens, counting letters. It wouldn’t have mattered to the success or marketability of his game whether there were ten or eleven or fifteen E’s. But Butts’s perfectionist mind insisted that he figure it out. That the game be right was paramount.

  Based on his calculations, Butts decided that Lexiko should contain one hundred tiles. To start the game, each player selected a letter; closest to A went first (just as in Scrabble). Everyone then drew nine letters. The first player would draw another letter, add it to his rack, and try to make a nine- or ten-letter word. (Good luck.) If he couldn’t, he would discard a letter, placing it face up in the center of the table. The next player could take a letter from the pool or draw a face-down letter. Play continued until someone made a nine- or ten-letter word, at which point the other players would form the best single word possible from their racks and tally their scores.

  A four-letter word was worth one point, and each letter used thereafter was worth an additional point. Letters of which there were two each were “minor honors” and marked with a blue square below the letter, and worth an extra point. “Major honors,” those of which ther
e were just one, were marked with a red square and doubled the entire score of the word.

  Butts manufactured the game in his living room, cutting and shellacking the square, plywood tiles and long racks made from baseboard molding. He printed the letters in India ink on architect’s linen, as with his Vandyke prints, and glued them to the plywood.

  He gave a few sets to friends to test out and then began selling them from home for $1.50. He sold two in October 1933, four in November, and nineteen in December. On the telephone, he spoke to a Mr. Carpenter from the Adult Game Company. His notes reveal a rude welcome to the business world: “would not be interested in manufacturing—selling is his line ... take a year to do anything ... need capital—sell in department stores ... game business very tricky—never can tell—might take and might not ... two big game companies—Parker and Milton Bradley—if you go to them first they’ll say they have one like it—if they take your game on royalty they won’t give any guarantee—then they’ll just put it on the shelf because they have their own games to push.”

  Milton Bradley, Parker Brothers, and the publisher Simon & Schuster all rejected Lexiko. By August 1934, Butts had sold eighty-four sets. Receipts: $127.03. Expenses: $147.46.

  But he persevered. He made sets whenever orders came in—and they did, entirely by word of mouth, from London, Louisiana, Washington State, Mississippi, from P.S. 26 in Albany, from a convent in Rochester. In 1935, he couldn’t meet a rush of Christmas orders and the next spring began turning down requests. By now, he had his government job and part-time work for an architect. He told inquirers he would be happy to have someone else manufacture the game and pay him a small royalty. In 1938, he told a would-be customer, “I do not make the Lexiko sets any more as I am now working on a game which I believe will be an improvement over Lexiko. I expect to have this new game ready in a few weeks and will let you know the details and price as soon as I am ready to take orders.”

  Butts had been tinkering. When Lexiko didn’t find a manufacturer, he decided that the fault lay in the game itself. It needed a board. Butts made blueprints of various designs and pasted them onto a checkerboard. It needed better scoring. Butts assigned the letters specific values that corresponded with their frequency; the more frequently the letter appeared, the less it was worth. He reduced the number of tiles on a player’s rack from nine to seven, which was easier to manage and, based on his word-length studies, offered more chances to use all of one’s letters. To enliven scoring and strategy, he decided that placing letters on certain squares on his board would result in doubling or tripling the value of the letter or word.

  And Butts kept toying with letter distribution, his primary passion. One sheet of paper in his files includes four charts describing various letter distributions. One has eleven A’s, nine E’s, and four I’s; another ten E’s, nine A’s, eight I’s; a third twelve E’s, ten I’s, nine A’s. He varied the number of E’s from ten to fifteen, and the total number of tiles from 100 to 110. He added a blank that could be designated as any letter. He fiddled with the ratio of vowels to consonants.

  With every change, the Buttses would play. “I was the guinea pig,” Nina told a reporter. “It began as a simple game and got more complicated. He’d come home at night and say, ‘I have a new idea.’ Then we’d try it out and he’d incorporate it or discard it.” And as they had done with Lexiko, the couple invited friends to their Jackson Heights apartment, or reserved the social room at the United Community Methodist Church, and on Sunday nights they would test the game and ask for feedback.

  Rehired by his architectural firm in 1938, Butts regained financial security, but he still wanted to market his game. He couldn’t come up with a good name, though. For a while he called his creation “it,” until finally settling on “Criss-Cross Words.” He was convinced that this time his game was a winner. But while Butts may have solved the mysteries of letter distribution, he still didn’t have a clue about product distribution.

  He hired a patent lawyer who told him that a patent already existed for a word-formation game using a grid-like board and letters that “almost completely anticipates your game.” The lawyer told Butts the basic principles were so similar that any manufacturer would have to pay royalties to the holder of the other patent, someone named Beckwith. “In view of this situation, it appears to me that the possibilities of realizing any profits from your invention are very small and do not warrant that you should incur further expenses in connection with this matter,” the lawyer wrote.

  My jaw drops. Was Scrabble a ripoff? I had come to admire little Alfred for his ingenuity and stick-to-itiveness. Butts was no architectural wunderkind, his artwork was unrefined, his writing was pedestrian, he wasn’t financially ambitious or savvy. But he showed a surprising single-mindedness when it came to developing his games. Untrained in linguistics or mathematics, he used logic to determine the best way to manipulate the alphabet to offer the best chances of creating a multiplicity of words. And he obsessed over it. He may not have gotten it later in life—it being the lengths to which his game was carried—but I have decided that Alfred Butts really was one of us. Counting letters was no different from memorizing words.

  But a cheater? I feel on the brink of unmasking a fraud, of rewriting games history. In the 1926 volume of musty U.S. Patent Office indexes, I find the Beckwith patent. It’s four pages long, including two pages of diagrams. Reuben P. Beckwith of San Francisco invented a game, and it was a word game, and it used two to four boards. Each board was divided into sixteen squares. Players were dealt sixteen letters and tried to make as many words as they could in their grids. They discarded and selected letters one at a time. First player to make four words won.

  It wasn’t Scrabble, and I can’t find any evidence that it was ever manufactured, or that Butts ever heard of it. But it did pose a problem. Beckwith claimed a patent on a game “combining with a playerboard divided into rows of squares, or the like, each square being provided with a scoring number, a plurality of player-pieces, some of said pieces being provided with letters, and others of said pieces being blanks, said lettered pieces being adapted to be placed upon the numbered squares to form complete words, either horizontally or vertically.” The Patent Office twice rejected applications from Butts.

  Still, he kept tinkering. He tried a fourteen-by-fourteen grid, a fifteen-by-fifteen, a sixteen-by-sixteen, a seventeen-by-seventeen. He placed the “star”—the starting point for the game—in the upper left-hand corner. He placed it in the center. He placed it five columns in and five rows down. He put a quadruple-word-score square in the lower right-hand corner. He tried four triple-word-score squares. He tried six. He increased and decreased the number of double- and triple-letter-score squares. He changed the colors of these squares. He tweaked the letter distribution. He included a blank. He tried two.

  Perfection isn’t arrived at overnight, and the more I play, the more Alfred’s game seems perfect. I think he was like Alexander Cartwright’s Knickerbocker Base Ball Club laying the bases ninety feet apart or James Naismith setting the height of his peach baskets at ten feet. The distances and location of the premium squares are just right. The game is a carefully choreographed pas de deux, a delicate balance between risk and reward.

  The first player is rewarded for making a five-letter word, since the value of the first or last letter is doubled; but five-letter words are pretty difficult to find when you have just seven letters on your rack. The first player also benefits from a free double-word score, the star; but laying a tile on the star means the second player can reach a triple-word score, which is seven squares away. Butts wanted scoring to increase as the game progressed away from the center, with the most lucrative plays on the fringes. On the board’s second interior row or column, a five-letter word can hit a triple-letter-score square and a double-word-score square simultaneously, one of the juiciest spots on the board; use it, however, and you are likely to give your opponent access to a triple-word score. On the board’s perimeter,
a word can start on a double-letter square and reach a double-word; but that creates a lane for the game’s holy grail, hitting two triple-word scores at once, a triple triple.

  “The arrangement of the premium squares took a long time,” Butts said years later. “It’s not hit or miss. It’s carefully worked out.”

  When I think of Butts, I imagine the ancients in India deciding that the knight should move two squares over and one up or one up and two over. I think of the Greeks or Egyptians determining what to do when a black backgammon chip landed on a space occupied by a white one. Because Butts lived in the twentieth century, his game had to be protected legally; it couldn’t just exist. Just as war begat chess, the advancing state of communications in America all but mandated creation of a language-based strategy game. Butts invented a game that filled a void in the hierarchy of games, and in the culture.

  Butts started selling Criss-Cross Words as before: filling word-of-mouth orders from his living room, waiting for someone who could help to notice. For $2 a set and 25 cents for shipping, Butts satisfied customers in Washington, D.C.; Bryn Mawr, Pennsylvania; Hagerstown, Indiana; Louisville, Kentucky; Oshkosh, Wisconsin; and Oneida, New York. He mailed about a hundred sets in all, and complained. “I have found it practically impossible to get a patent on any game,” he told one buyer. “The commercial houses do not want games unless they have been proven successful, but if a game is successful there is no protection for the idea.”