Bad speller scrabbled to a small fortune

Press, 12 July 1984, Page 28

Bad speller scrabbled to a small fortune

NZPA-Reuter New York

For a man who was out of work and could not spell, Alfred Butts has done pretty well for himself.

So well, in fact, that he was the principal attraction at a recent party on top of the Rockefeller Centre.

“I am so lucky. I am so lucky,” the 85-year-old retired architect kept saying as one stranger after another was introduced to him, each.nudging the other and saying: “Hey you gotta meet Alfred Butts.” So who is Alfred Butts?

He is the inventor of the wordgame, Scrabble, and by his own admission one of the worst players in the game’s history. “My problem is I can’t spell. My wife could spell and she used to beat me all the time. She once got 284 points with a single word, that’s how good she was.”

The word was quixotic from Don Quixote’s name, which signifies the idealist’s tilt against windmills and that pretty well describes Alfred Butt’s struggle to succeed with Scrabble.

It is now so accepted that it will soon become a United States television game show, the reason why Alfred Butts found himself at N.B.C.’s Rockefeller Centre headquarters. An Australian gameshow producer, Reg Grundy, who was awarded the 0.8. E. for services to television quiz shows, has developed a modified version of Scrabble for American television audiences.

It requires selecting only two letters at a time and Mr Grundy admits: “It’s not pure Scrabble. The point about TV games shows is that people at home have to play along and talk to the set.

“Pure Scrabble won’t work on television. Audiences don’t want to see players draw seven letters' and then think about the words they will make. It would be too much like watching grass grow.” Mr Butts is delighted that his game is going to be played on television, even in a truncated form.

Mr Butts says he is delighted when anyone plays Scrabble, even though he no longer receives royalties from the millions of sets sold in the United States.

“Scrabble is a game of luck and skill. It’s luck if you draw the letters with, the high points and skill if you play them well. I owe my invention entirely to being out of work in the Depression,” said Mr Butts. He specialised before the Depression is designing luxury houses on Long Island. The demand for luxury houses disappeared with the stock market collapse and Mr Butts found himself with time on his hands.

He started counting the frequency of letters in words found in the “New York Times,” carefully adding up the frequency of use and finding that the letter “h” appeared less often than the letter “i.” His wife and relatives thought him mad, he recalled.

“I was a fan of word games and thought I would make up my own. I finally did but no-one wanted to buy it. Eventually I found work designing buildings again and put my invention in the closet.”

Invented in the early 19305, Scrabble did not find a true supporter until after World War II when a friend decided to devote his time to manufacturing the game. The friend, after a few

years of getting nowhere, finally found himself flooded with orders and he sold the rights to the Selchow and Righter game manufacturing company. Mr Butts, who had been receiving a few cents for each game sold, got 20 per cent of the sale price. “Ask me if I am a millionaire,” Butts said, his bright blue eyes shining with joy. “Everybody asks me if I am a millionaire.”

“Are you a millionaire?” he was then asked. “No. But I am well off. I am a very lucky man.” Although it took years to become popular, when it finally did, the game, originally called Criss-Cross Words by Mr Butts and later retitled, became an international craze.

In 1954, the “New Yorker” magazine ran a cartoon taking note of Scrabble’s success. It showed a bride complaining as wedding guests and groom ran out of the cathedral: “Somebody made an announcement that the store next door has Scrabble.”

“It’s unbelievable. I don’t believe it. Such luck I have had,” said Butts.

“If I hadn’t lost my job, none of this would have happened.”