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

by Fatsis, Stefan

  From the start, Selchow’s involvement with Scrabble was pure chance. In 1949, a retired buyer for the Marshall Field department store in Chicago named Lester Twitchell stopped in on Marion Stringer, a longtime company employee who worked at Selchow’s office in the Toy Manufacturers Association building in Manhattan. Twitchell and a friend, James Brunot, had just acquired a game they had renamed Scrabble and wanted to offer it to Selchow.

  “What an odd name and what does it mean, if anything?” Stringer recalled thinking. “It was certainly not very attractive in appearance, with its nondescript playing board, crude racks, and heavy cardboard lettered square pieces.” They played a bit. “I did not dislike the game,” Stringer wrote in the company history. “I thought it had some merit. But at that time word games were out.”

  A year later, Twitchell and Brunot visited Harriet Righter at Selchow’s Brooklyn headquarters. “I looked at it and said, ‘It’s a nice little game. It will sell well in bookstores,’” she recalled. But Twitchell and Brunot said they wanted Selchow just to make the boards. They ordered two thousand, disappeared for a year, ordered four thousand more, and then another ten thousand.

  It was the summer of 1952, and Scrabble still was being sold by word of mouth. Some Selchow executives didn’t even know it existed. When a customer called Marion Stringer to place an order for Scrabble, she remembered the game’s name but told the caller Selchow didn’t make it. A few minutes later, a man who worked in a neighboring office told Stringer he had played a fascinating game over the weekend called Scrabble. Within the hour, a Macy’s buyer called in a panic because the chairman, Jack Straus, “had just come in to get a game of Scrabble and was annoyed to learn that his toy department had never heard of it.” Stringer tracked down Brunot’s Production & Marketing Company in Connecticut and learned that Selchow had been manufacturing Scrabble boards for two and a half years.

  Miss Righter, as everyone called her, dispatched her factory manager to inspect the little Scrabble operation. Brunot and his wife, Helen, carried chairs onto the grass next to the old one-room schoolhouse at the country crossroads where the game was being manufactured. They confessed that they were burned out. They couldn’t handle the flood of orders. Toy companies were pressuring them to sell. A few months later, a Selchow contingent led by Miss Righter went to Connecticut and reached a deal to take over the manufacturing and marketing of Scrabble.

  Selchow & Righter didn’t have to figure out how to sell the game. Buyers thronged the company’s offices and calls jammed its switchboard. Scrabble “became a raging battle by day and a nightmare in our dreams,” Stringer wrote. But Selchow decided not to contract any manufacturing outside of its Brooklyn factory. For three years, it allocated shipments to give customers a fair share. Finally, realizing the game was here to stay, Selchow built a new factory and offices in Bay Shore, on Long Island. Selchow assumed production of the travel and deluxe editions from Brunot, and introduced Scrabble for Juniors, the rules of which were devised by Marion Stringer. Through the sixties and seventies, sales remained steady and the company’s profits were modest, just as Miss Righter had wanted.

  In the 1960s, television became the games industry’s chief medium. Quiz shows like The $64,000 Question, Password, and Concentration were turned into popular boxed versions. In turn, the business began producing so-called “skill-and-action” games like Kerplunk, Mouse Trap, and Connect Four because they were easier to advertise on TV than static board games with complex rules. But Selchow didn’t change. Scrabble and Parcheesi sold themselves, so that’s what the company sold. Its catalogues were filled with boxed puzzles and slow-moving board games. Selchow periodically rolled out dull brand extensions, like Scrabble Crossword Cubes, but refused to push products on stores or the public. “They were not marketers,” says Gene Murtha, a toy-industry veteran. “They were manufacturers with a sales network.”

  Into the 1980s, there was little pressure on small, privately held outfits like Selchow, Ideal, Lakeside, and Pressman—no stockholders to report to or share price to worry about. Salesmen got favors from buyers to get products onto the shelves. If you had a staple, like Scrabble, or a hot newcomer, like Uno or Aggravation, you could make it without being a marketing heavyweight in the mold of Hasbro or Mattel.

  Thanks to its two perennials, Selchow’s revenue—80 percent of which came from Scrabble—trailed that of only Milton Bradley and Parker Brothers in the games business. Yet the company maintained such a low profile that many people in the industry didn’t even know how to pronounce its name (SELL-shau rhymes with “now”). In the late 1970s, when Selchow needed a new president, rather than recruit from the toy industry its board tapped Richard Selchow, a grandson of Elisha Selchow. An engineer by training, Dick Selchow had never worked in the family business. He had spent ten years with a plastics molding company, then in R & D at a semiconductor plant. When he agreed to take over, Dick Selchow was the full-time business administrator of his Episcopal church in Greenwich, Connecticut. At Selchow & Righter’s spartan, one-story headquarters, the new president of the number-three U.S. games company worked at a metal desk.

  Dick Selchow was a competent caretaker. But he made one visionary and ultimately calamitous move: He acquired Trivial Pursuit from its two Canadian inventors. After a slow start, a couple of well-timed magazine stories triggered a craze unprecedented in toy-industry history. Selchow sold 1.5 million units of Trivial Pursuit in the second half of 1983, tripling company revenue. Then the rush started. It was like James Brunot trying to meet the demand for Scrabble from the Connecticut schoolhouse. By February 1984, Selchow faced back orders of a million units; by August, they had hit 11 million. Selchow sold more than 20 million units of Trivial Pursuit worth about $750 million at retail in 1984, tripling the size of the entire U.S. games industry.

  Little Selchow was in over its head. Shipping agents grew testy. Overwhelmed salespeople didn’t return calls. Customers were hung out to dry. Eager to meet demand, Selchow kept the factories churning out boards and cards and boxes. Then the market for the game crashed, and Selchow couldn’t shed its inventory, which reached 20 million units. Like James Brunot before him, Dick Selchow and his company just weren’t prepared.

  Unable to manage the inventory fallout, with no family members interested in succeeding him, Dick Selchow decided to sell the company. Hasbro made a lowball offer. Coleco Industries, trying to rebuild via acquisition after the collapse of its big hit, Cabbage Patch Kids, paid about $60 million in cash, plus notes. In May 1986, Coleco pledged to keep Selchow’s management and employees. In December, Coleco announced that it would shut down and sell both of Selchow’s Long Island factories.

  Most Selchow executives had cashed out but were irate nonetheless. They hadn’t trusted the brash, smooth-talking Coleco suits who persuaded the timid, honorable Dick Selchow to sell them his cherished, 119-year-old family business. Coleco, they believed, coveted Selchow as much for the tax write-off as for the three solid brand names—Trivial Pursuit, Scrabble, and Parcheesi—that would give it instant credibility.

  Dick Selchow stayed on as a consultant, only to watch his employees lose their jobs and his family business lose its identity. “He felt betrayed,” says Gene Murtha, who was Coleco’s marketing vice president at the time. “Absolutely betrayed.” Less than three years later, Dick Selchow suffered a stroke and died. He was sixty-seven.

  Selchow & Righter’s tradition of stewardship over innovation was nowhere more evident than with its prized word game. The formation of Scrabble Crossword Game Players Inc. in 1973 as a subsidiary was pitched to the new ranks of competitive players as a way to market their emerging world. In reality, Players Inc. was intended to ensure that the company retain control over that world, because protecting the trademark on the name Scrabble was more important to Selchow’s survival than promoting a tournament scene.

  The Official Scrabble Players Handbook made the company’s priorities clear. The first chapter was titled “What Is Scrabble Cros
sword Game Players Inc.?” The second was “What Is a Trademark?” “SCRABBLE is always capitalized and is never the name of the game,” the manual stated. To protect trademarks from becoming generic terms, companies use them as descriptive adjectives rather than as nouns. The Scrabble handbook explained that Selchow’s products actually were named Crossword Game, Crossword Game for Juniors, Sentence Cubes, and Crossword Cubes. “SCRABBLE is their point of origin,” the manual said.

  The company was wise to protect the name so assiduously: The name was all that it had. But almost from the beginning, the players believed Selchow didn’t understand their needs. As Players Inc. became more involved in establishing tournament rules and other guidelines, the players chafed. The first head of Players Inc., a Selchow executive named Lee Tiffany, didn’t play Scrabble and had little interest in learning about those who did. Asked by a player how he could run the organization if he didn’t play, Tiffany replied, “I don’t have to wear Kotex to sell it.”

  Tiffany’s successor was Jim Houle, who had been a manufacturing executive before being assigned to run the players’ organization. To Houle’s credit, the number of Scrabble clubs grew in less than a decade from a handful to more than two hundred, and the newsletter became a forum for the evolution of Scrabble theory, which Houle encouraged. But Houle didn’t involve the players. The experts wanted their voices heard in building the competitive scene, but aside from filling the newsletter, they weren’t. Not one player worked for or was involved in decisions made by Players Inc.

  On a corporate level, Scrabble chugged along. After Alfred Butts made himself known to the company, Selchow trotted him out on a publicity tour. It spent some of its Trivial Pursuit cash on print ads—cartoons depicting characters in awkward positions (Santa Claus stuck in a chimney, the Statue of Liberty encased in scaffolding, Gulliver tied down by the Lilliputians), saying, “I’d rather be playing Scrabble.” The ads were placed in mainstream publications, a first for Scrabble. Another first: a television commercial, using the same theme.

  Selchow also used its Trivial Pursuit money to expand the Scrabble line (most of the products flopped, like Scrabble People, plastic building blocks shaped like people into which letters were inserted) and to back a television show (hosted by Chuck Woolery, Scrabble, which bore little resemblance to the actual game, ran from 1984 to 1990). And Selchow put on its most lavish event to date, the 1985 Nationals in Boston, which attracted three hundred players.

  There the conflict between the experts and the company came to a head. John Nason, Selchow’s marketing vice president, knew Players Inc. was perceived as ineffectual. So in Boston, he asked John Williams—the brother-in-law of a former colleague at J. Walter Thompson, who had been helping with Scrabble public relations—to moderate a roundtable with a handful of experts. Dick Selchow wanted to hear their grievances. Jim Houle wasn’t invited.

  “As it is now, the game does not belong to the players,” the expert Albert Weissman proclaimed in a letter read at the meeting. The gripes poured forth. The official newsletter was published inconsistently. Qualifying tournaments for the Nationals were a disorganized mess.

  Then there were complaints that Selchow had become too zealous in protecting its trademark. In one instance, it had sought a court injunction to stop publication of a book by Joel Wapnick, who settled by agreeing to give the company 25 percent of any royalties. Jim Neuberger, the New York lawyer, who should have known better, said: “I don’t see why anyone has to get a license from Selchow & Righter to publish a book that they want to publish about this game that we all love.”

  The Selchow executives were learning how much the players cared —that they sincerely believed the game was so much a part of American culture, or at least their lives, that it shouldn’t belong to anybody. But the company stood its ground. “It is a valuable trademark and we want the publicity,” Dick Selchow said. “It is good business for us to get royalties.”

  “You have to understand we are in the games-making business. We are not in the altruism business,” John Nason added. “We conduct these tournaments and we invest money in these tournaments so that the world at large will know about Scrabble, will go out and buy Scrabble games. You have got to know this.”

  Dick Selchow listened to the players and promised to make changes. Afterward, he told John Williams to revamp the newsletter and begin overhauling the players organization. Then Dick Selchow sold the company.

  Coleco was the antithesis of stodgy Selchow. For a year, it treated Scrabble like a hot item, commissioning a TV commercial aiming the brand at a younger adult market. (In it, a man and woman bantered while playing Scrabble; all the viewer saw was a deluxe board spun back and forth.) Sales spiked above 1.5 million sets in 1987. But it wasn’t enough to save the company. By the middle of the next year, Coleco was in Chapter 11. By the time Hasbro acquired its assets the following year, Scrabble was wounded.

  “They almost lost the brand,” says Dave Wilson. “They weren’t games people to begin with. They came from the toy business, where if something is good one day and a year from now or two years from now it’s not so good, well, move on to the next. It goes, it dies. I’d commit suicide if on my watch Scrabble died.”

  At the annual International Toy Fair, Hasbro’s showroom on West 23rd Street in Manhattan is a bombardment of bright colors and brighter lights. Four actors dressed as futuristic NASCAR racers greet visitors who emerge from a tunnel illuminated with neon signs flashing the names of some of Hasbro’s four-hundred-plus products. The ninety thousand square feet of showrooms are a sprawling testament to the power of children’s culture in America and an almost obscene paean to the breadth and depth of the world’s number-one toy company. Nerf. Star Wars. World Championship Wrestling. Monopoly. Trivial Pursuit. G.I. Joe. Tinkertoy. Play-Doh. Room after room, familiar name after familiar name, slogan after slogan. It is a blend, notes John Williams, of the classic and the opportunistic, with the opportunistic usually receiving top billing.

  We cruise past the NASCAR guys, past Barney the purple dinosaur, past enormous cardboard displays featuring the Pokemon logo, and hang a left into a room dedicated to board games. Attempting to retool the image of some older brands, Hasbro has dedicated reasonably prominent Toy Fair real estate to its “Kool Kids” campaign promoting baby boomer-era lines: Battleship, Mouse Trap, Perfection, Connect Four, Twister, Trouble, Operation. Farther down the same corridor, in a quiet rear corner, far from the glamorous displays staffed by smiling young actors hired to deliver cheery spiels, are the even older and stodgier chestnuts: Monopoly, Life, Sorry!, Clue, Yahtzee.

  Here Scrabble gets its modest display. Various versions of the game are mounted on a wall. Next to them four placards describe the activities of the National Scrabble Association. They note the number of NSA clubs, tournaments, and members. They mention the burgeoning School Scrabble program and the 2000 Nationals to be held in Providence, Rhode Island, just a short drive from Hasbro’s headquarters in Pawtucket.

  For Williams, getting his informational material on the wall at Toy Fair for the few buyers and journalists who will pause to inspect the old standards on the way to the hot, new games is a small coup, of which he is proud. But to the passing eye, it’s boring, and even among the stalwarts in their familiar packaging, the Scrabble display looks hopelessly square.

  “Actually, it’s the best we’ve ever been represented,” Williams says. “Last year, the Scrabble display consisted of these three boxes,” he says, pointing to the wall.

  Still, Scrabble is lost amid the acres of World Championship Wrestling action figures and Pokemon gewgaws. Even when it sells two million sets in a year, Scrabble doesn’t make or break Hasbro. Generating annual sales of about $25 million, Scrabble is a consistent, but ultimately insignificant, source of revenue for the $4-billion-a-year company.

  Hasbro may not get it—it being the fact that never in the two-hundred-year history of the U.S. toy industry has there been such a highly developed community for a pr
oprietary game; that there is intellectual heft to Scrabble; that it isn’t a board game at all in the way that Clue or Monopoly is a board game, contrived, redundant, and temporal, but rather a brilliant, organic, seemingly inevitable creation in the same way as chess or backgammon or the Mona Lisa. But Hasbro knows enough to keep funding Scrabble, at levels that may or may not be sufficient to encourage growth in sales and in the ranks of tournament players.

  Williams tries to balance the fanaticism of the top players he at once jokes about and admires with the reality of the toy industry. He can’t offend the Hasbro executives who could boot competitive Scrabble off the corporate gravy train. He knows that Scrabble will sell with or without tournaments (though not as much without). But he also knows that inside Hasbro, where landing the Next Hot Toy is more important than tending the old-fogy ones, the game amounts to little more than a pimple on Barney’s ass. Which is why amid the sonic boom of Toy Fair, Williams and I talk in a quiet, lightly trafficked, far corner that most visitors politely blow right past.

  That’s the paradox of Scrabble. It may be the trademarked property of a major multinational corporation, and it may never attract the money and attention that it “deserves.” But it transcends the little display at Toy Fair, transcends the pedestrian boxed games with which it is lumped, transcends the benign neglect of the Selchow years and the stable but, from some players’ perspective, disappointingly uncreative ownership of Hasbro. What the game does for the people who play it, for me, can’t be measured in commercial terms.