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A Short History of Scrabble (and Some Fun Scrabble Facts)

Starting in 1938, every single giant toymaker in the United States rejected Alfred Butts’ idea for a new word game. All, that is, except for a retiree in Newtown, Conn., who saw the potential in the game we now know as Scrabble.

Official Scrabble board

Aversion to Spelling

Alfred Butts was a shy architect from Jackson Heights, Queens, who lost his job in 1931. As an amateur artist he tried making a living at painting, but that didn’t work. So he got a part-time job as a statistician and decided to create a game he could sell.

Butts came up with the idea for Scrabble while reading a short story by Edgar Allan Poe. In Poe’s The Gold Bug, a character decodes a message by comparing symbols to letters. Poe wrote,

Now, in English, 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.

Ironically, Alfred Butts didn’t like to spell.

It took him seven years to come up with the right balance of numbered letters. He figured out the number for each letter in the Scrabble game by counting the letters from such newspapers as The New York Times, the New York Herald Tribune and the Saturday Evening Post. He sampled 12,082 letters and 2,412 words to come up with the — presumably — statistically reliable breakdown of letters. Then Alfred Butts called the game Lexiko.

Lexiko

The game had no board. For four years Alfred Butts sold Lexiko to friends, and tried to interest the Parker Brothers in Salem, Mass., and Milton Bradley in Springfield, Mass. No dice.

He added a board to Lexiko so words could be created crossword style, and called the game Criss-Cross Words. He made the games himself, hand- lettering the tiles and gluing them to balsa wood. They sold for $2.

Somehow Butts came into contact with James Brunot, a former social worker looking to start a business in his home in Newtown, Conn. They struck a deal that gave Alfred Butts a small royalty for each copy of the game sold.

Scrabble, Finally

James Brunot

Brunot bought strips of scrap lumber, silk screened letters onto them and hired woodworkers to saw them into tiles. He ordered the boards from a New York game company, Selchow & Righter, which made games for other companies. Brunot and his wife Helen renamed the game Scrabble and assembled 2,251 copies in their living room during 1949. They lost $450.

But the Brunots soldiered along, selling a few hundred games a week, until one day in 1952. That day they came home from a week’s vacation to find orders for more than 2,000 games.

According to legend, a Macy’s department store executive had discovered the game while at a summer resort and ordered copies for the department store shelves. To keep up with demand, James and Helen Brunot moved production to an abandoned schoolhouse in Newtown, then to a converted woodworking shop.

They hired workers to put the game together, but by late 1952 they could only make 6,000 games a week — not enough to keep up with orders. Brunot licensed the game to Selchow & Righter, but kept the rights to make a deluxe version himself. Why was it deluxe? Because pieces were made with plastic.

An Enjoyable Life

In 1953, Selchow & Righter sold 800,000 Scrabble games, but still couldn’t keep up with demand. Christmas shoppers had to either put their names on a waiting list or linger by a store counter hoping for a new shipment to arrive.

Scrabble sales peaked in 1954, with 4 million copies sold. Today 150 million Scrabble games have been sold in 121 countries in 29 languages.

Coleco bought Selchow & Righter in 1986. Then three years later, Hasbro — a Pawtucket, R.I., based company — bought Coleco.

Alfred Butts retired on his Scrabble royalties. He liked to say, “one-third went to taxes, I gave one-third away, and the other third enabled me to have an enjoyable life.”

Alfred Butts

Scrabble Fun Facts

Three out of every five American households has a Scrabble game – and more than half of British households.
There are an estimated 1 million Scrabble tiles lost in the world — somewhere.
The North American record for high-s coring tournament game was set in 2011 by former World Champion Joel Sherman when he scored 803 points at an event in Stamford, Conn.
Benjamin Woo discovered a way to earn 1782 points – the highest possible score — for OXYPHENBUTAZONE. He played it across the top of the board, hitting three Triple Word Score squares while making seven crosswords downward.
In 2006, a carpenter named Michael Cresta and a supermarket worker named Wayne Yorra set three records for sanctioned Scrabble in North America while playing in a Unitarian church in Lexington, Mass. They set records for most points in a game by one player (830), the most total points in a game (1,320) and the most points on a single word (365, for QUIXOTRY).
John Chew, co-president of the North American SCRABBLE Players Association (NASPA), got death threats when he removed the two-letter word ‘da’ from the Scrabble Dictionary.
Richard Nixon regularly played Scrabble in the White House. Other aficionados included Queen Elizabeth, John Travolta, Mel Gibson and Vladimir Nabokov.
Every hour, people start at least 30,000 Scrabble games.
The Metropolitan Museum of Art acquired six of Alfred Butts’ paintings.
The first annual National School SCRABBLE® Championship took place in Boston on April 26, 2003.
In New England the literacy rate was 60 percent between 1650-1670, 85 percent between 1758- 1762 and 90 percent between 1787-1795 – far higher than in other parts of the country. Maybe that’s why Scrabble took root here!
In November 2022, the seventh edition of the Official Scrabble Players Dictionary included the words COVID, VAX, GUAC, ZOODLE and SKEEZY.

Want to win at Scrabble? Click here for the top Scrabble words that will give you a huge advantage.

With thanks to Timeless Toys: Classic Toys and the Playmakers Who Created Them by Tim Walsh. This story about Scrabble was updated in 2023. If you enjoyed it, you may also want to read about the Parker Brothers in Salem, Mass., here.

Images: Scrabble board By thebarrowboy – Flickr, CC BY 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=22817231. Alfred Butts By https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/find-a-grave-prod/photos/2012/94/19851353_133354897401.jpg, Fair use, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?curid=52441823. Official Scrabble board By Denelson83 – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=14794773.

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Helen Metcalf, The Mom Who Founded RISD With Some Leftover Dough

In 1877, a Providence mom named Helen Metcalf persuaded her women’s club to spend money left over from a fair to found an art school.

It wasn’t just any fair. It was the Philadelphia Centennial Exposition. And it wasn’t just any art school. It was the Rhode Island School of Design, or RISD, one of the world’s most prestigious art and design universities. It is also the principal art museum for Southeastern New England.

An early classroom at RISD

RISD Alumni include designer Nicole Miller, New Yorker cartoonist Roz Chast, Family Guy creator Seth MacFarlane and three members of the Talking Heads.

At the time of the Philadelphia Exposition, Helen Metcalf was a 46-year-old mother of five, married to a wealthy textile manufacturer, Jesse Metcalf. She taught Sunday school and played the organ in church.

Art Lovers

It was an era when wealthy Americans were turning their attention to art. The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York and the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston were both founded in 1870. The School of Practical Design started in Lowell, Mass., in 1872 (it’s now part of the Museum of Fine Arts).

Rhode Islanders wanted to partake in the cultural life as well. The president of Brown University, Ezekiel Gilman Robinson, in 1873 noted in his annual report, that many ‘intelligent citizens of our State’ wanted a ‘Scientific School of high order.’ That school should also teach Design, Drawing, Civil Engineering, Architecture and Fine Arts, he said.

The Philadelphia Exposition

Women’s Pavilion at the Philadelphia Centennial Exposition

The 1876 Philadelphia Centennial Exposition was the first major world’s fair in America, and it was huge. At a time when the U.S. population was 46 million, 10 million people paid to enter the Exposition.

Alexander Graham Bell wowed the crowds by demonstrating his telephone at the Exposition. The biggest attraction, though, was the steam engine invented by Providence’s George Corliss. The engine was a mammoth piece of equipment that powered the 14 acres of machinery at the fair.

Many states sponsored exhibition buildings. Helen Metcalf chaired a committee of 35 women who raised money for Rhode Island’s exhibit hall. While at the fair, the committee visited the Women’s Pavilion, where women demonstrated products and processes they had developed.

The Pavilion displayed the inventions of 75 women who held patents for such things as emergency flares, model interlocking bricks and a patent land pulverizer. It was the brainchild of Elizabeth Duane Gillespie, great-granddaughter of Benjamin Franklin.

Helen Metcalf was especially impressed by what she saw in the Women’s Pavilion. She had already established herself as a benefactor of the poor. When her husband’s workers went on strike, she helped them too. Now she wanted to help working women by raising the status and quality of the applied arts.

When the Philadelphia Exposition ended, the Rhode Island Women’s Centennial Commission had $1,675 in leftover funds. Helen Metcalf persuaded them to spend it on an art school. Another option was a drinking fountain in Roger Williams Park.

RISD

Helen Metcalf

The school was to be devoted to the “useful arts, as, for example, designing for calico printers, for jewelers’ designs, for carriage and furniture making.” Calico was a major employer in Providence, as the Sprague family had dominated the world market for calico for generations.

So were jewelry factories and silverware manufacturers. In 1875, Providence had 130 jewelry companies employing 2,700 workers and would soon become the leading American city in silverware production.

RISD opened in a building at the base of College Hill, next to Brown University. Most of its 43 first pupils were women.

The Waterman Building (1893), RISD’s first permanent home, was built to house art galleries, classrooms, and studios.

Helen Metcalf directed the school until she died in 1865. She raised money, encouraged students, supervised teachers and arranged furniture. When necessary, she swept the classroom floors.

Her husband Jesse Metcalf covered the school’s losses for years. After she died in 1895, he donated a building, land and three exhibition galleries in her memory. Their son, Steven Metcalf, became the school treasurer in 1884. Another son, Jesse, became a U.S. senator and RISD trustee. Their son-in-law, Dr. Gustav Radeke, contributed to the museum casts, models and industrial materials he had collected in Europe.

In 1913, the Metcalfs’ daughter, Eliza Greene Metcalf Radeke, became president of the college and served for 18 years. From 1931 to 1947, Stephen Metcalf’s daughter Helen Metcalf Danforth became president of RISD, and then chair of the board of trustees until 1965.

RISD’s focus eventually shifted from the industrial arts to fine art.

This story about Helen Metcalf was updated in 2023.

Images: First RISD building By Kenneth C. Zirkel – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=78733848

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A Fulfilling Story: New England Pie History

In the annals of pie history, New England holds a special place.

Pumpkin pies and Thanksgiving dinner at the home of Mr. Timothy Levy Crouch, a Rogerine Quaker living in Ledyard, Connecticut. Photo by Jack Delano, 1940. Photo courtesy Library of Congress.

A moment in pie history: Pumpkin pies and Thanksgiving dinner at the home of Mr. Timothy Levy Crouch, a Rogerine Quaker living in Ledyard, Connecticut. Photo by Jack Delano, 1940. Photo courtesy Library of Congress.

Pumpkin pie might not have happened without New England, where rhubarb pie is revered in the springtime. In New England’s Little Canadas, Franco-Americans celebrate the Christmas holidays with spiced meat pies called tourtiere. Vermonters favor maple pie, and Boston is the birthplace of the Boston Cream Pie — which really isn’t a pie, but then again neither is Maine’s official state treat, the Whoopie Pie.

The late Robert Cox, head of Special Collections at UMass-Amherst, delved into New England’s pie history in his book, New England Pie: History Under a Crust.

The New England Historical Society interviewed Cox in 2015 about his book on pie history. He has also written about New England chowder and cranberry culture.

Why Pie History?

Cox told us he explores food history because it is one of the most enduring cultural traits. Food preferences will linger for three or four generations as a central part of family ritual and family life.

“It can be more revealing about our attitudes, our hopes and fears, than anything we ever write,” Cox said.

As a historian, Cox said he hesitates to claim New Englanders eat more pie than people in other regions of the United States. But pie culture is definitely deeper in certain parts of the country, he said, and, ‘pie is quite deep here.’

New England’s pie culture does differ from the rest of the United States because it has more of a balance between the savory – the chicken, the turkey or the clam pie – and the sweet – the apple, the pumpkin, the squash, the blueberry or the cream pies.

Cox found it hard to pin down regional pie-eating differences within New England. An apple pie on Cape Cod isn’t that different from an apple pie elsewhere, with the exception of Central Massachusetts. There, Cox said, apple pie is more likely to have raisins in it, something he considers an abomination. And Northern New Englanders are more apt to eat apple pie with cheese.

There are some ethnic variations – Franco-Americans have their tourtiere, Italian-Americans have their ricotta pie and Portuguese-Americans have their custard tarts. Clam pie is stronger on Cape Cod than elsewhere.

In his quest to record pie history, Cox only found maple pie in Vermont.

French Pie History

A tourtiere ready for the oven

French meat pies are special, a celebratory food eaten in the shortest days of winter, Cox said. Cooks make them to show how much they care about their family and to show off cooking skills.

Cox’s home town of Easthampton, Mass., has a strong Franco-American presence. There, stores sell French meat pies, traditionally made with ground meat, potato and spices like cloves and allspice.

In New England Pie: History Under a Crust, Cox recounted how he ate a French meat pie with his in-laws – and learned it was made with Bell’s Seasoning. The cook had gotten away from her mother’s recipe. Her daughters didn’t like cloves and allspice, so she substituted the Bell’s. She was mortally embarrassed when Cox found out. But he was okay with it.

“Bell’s is kind of traditional,” he said. “Taking what’s available and meeting the needs of your family is traditional.”

Rhubarb Pie History

Rhubarb

People know about rhubarb pie in other parts of the country, but New Englanders eat more of it then they do anywhere else.

Rhubarb originally had a medicinal use as a purgative and laxative. Not until the American Revolution ended was it used in pies. Then in the early 19^th century an unnamed genius renamed it ‘pie-plant,’ and rhubarb took off.

Cox was convinced New Englanders love rhubarb because it’s the first fresh produce in the market – a bright presence of the New England spring.

“For two or three months, you would have had older fruits and vegetables and preserves,” he said. “Since the 1790s, it’s really been a New England pie.”

Revolutionary Roots of the Boston Cream Pie

Boston Cream Pie

A French chef brought to the Parker House in 1855 invented the Boston Cream Pie. The hotel owner wanted his hotel to be the finest in the country, and needed a good restaurant to earn that reputation. The chef came up with a signature treat, a cake with cream in the middle and a ganache top with chocolate – the distinctive Boston Cream Pie that became a regional favorite.

“It’s very close to pies that weren’t pies floating around New England at the time,” said Cox. People called those false pies Washington Pies, light cakes with a cream or fruit filling. Lafayette Pies resembled the Washington Pies.

“There was an immense nostalgia for the simplicity of that generation,” Cox said. “Naming a dessert after Washington and Lafayette was a way of commemorating the independence and history of the country.”

The Parker House presented the Boston Cream Pie as a high-class, high-status dessert that echoed the Washington and Lafayette pies.

In a note of historical irony, Vietnam’s own revolutionary, Ho Chi Minh, worked in the Parker House bakery and probably made Boston Cream Pie. Another revolutionary, Malcolm X, worked as a waiter in the Parker House and probably served Boston Cream Pie.

This story about New England pie history was updated in 2024.

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Nonantum, the New England Town With Its Own Special Language

No matter where Nonantum natives go, they can tell someone is from their village when they hear them speak Lake Talk. Lake Talk is the unique argot of Nonantum, one of the 13 villages of Newton, Mass. Unintelligible to outsiders, it binds tighter the already close-knit Italian-American community.

Skating on Silver Lake around 1900.

According to Lake Talk, a mush (pronounced moosh) is a man, a jival is a girl, and a quister jival (quis-tah jiv-il ) is a pretty girl.

One mush might point out to another a quister jival walking down the street. Or he might tell him ‘cuya moi,’’ – ‘shut up’ or ‘go to hell’

Joe DeNucci grew up in Nonantum. He parlayed a middleweight boxing career into a 24-year stint as Massachusetts state auditor. In 2001, he gave the Boston Globe an example of Lake Talk: “Mush is the earie.” That means “The guy is listening.”

Nonantum

The lake in Lake Talk is Silver Lake, a water body mostly filled in and now more of a pond in the heart of Nonantum. Nonantum is an Indian word meaning ‘blessing’ or ‘prayer.’ The village was the home of Waban, one of the first Indians converted to Christianity by the Puritan minister John Eliot.

Nonantum has also been known as Tin Horn, after the large horn used to call workers to the mills; North Village; Silver Lake; and The Lake.

Silver Lake Mill

Nonantum was little more than Yankee farms until the Bemis Mills (the first to use gaslight in America) were built along the Charles River in the late 18^th century. For 150 years, the center of Nonantum was dominated by wool, cotton and rope mills owned by companies like Nonantum Worsted, Saxony and Silver Lake.

John Barleycorn

Waves of European immigrants came to Nonantum to work in the mills. They lived in crowded tenements and boarding houses right next to the tall smokestacks of the factories. Sometimes entire families lived in one room.

In 1889, Moses Foster Sweetser, in his King’s Handbook of Newton, Massachusetts, described the English, Irish and French-Canadian immigrants who were working the mills.

The devotion of many of these hardworking fellows to “John Barleycorn” results in many shrewd devices to evade the local liquor-laws.

Liquor, he wrote, was slyly peddled on Bottle Alley, the nickname for Adams Street. It was a raucous, rough-and-tumble district of speakeasies and numbers running shops.

Jewish immigrants moved to Nonantum from Russia in the 1890s, followed a decade later by a wave of Italian immigrants from San Donato Val di Comino, a city about 70 miles east of Rome.

Nonantum kept its Italian-American identity, which it celebrates during annual street festivals such as the St. Mary of Carmen Festival in July.

Lake Talk

Gypsy tent.

Everyone knew everyone and the immigrant communities stuck together, from their difficult early arrivals through a strike at the mills in 1912, the decline of the textile industry in the 1920s, the shutdown of Saxony Worsted in 1930, the Great Depression and World War II.

During the 1930s and 1940s, Nonantum locals went to work for the traveling gypsy carnivals that came through the village. The carnivals generated their own secret jargon, or carnival cant, so outsiders couldn’t understand them. The Nonantum locals mixed their own Italian and English slang with the Romany carnival cant to com e up with Lake Talk.

So, for example, Lake Talkers can refer to a non-Lake-Talking boss as divia — crazy, jerk – or a gash, which means girly man.

Or it might be useful to tell someone, “That mush has some overshay” (“He’s a liar”). Or “Mush has a coramunga in his cover!” (“That guy is carrying a gun”).

Wicked Pissah

A Gypsy girl around 1940. Photo courtesy Library of Congress.

The Massachusetts expression wicked pissah is considered Lake Talk. The word chabby, which means boy, sounds a lot like the Romany word for boy – chavvie.

According to Lake Talk lore, a Nonantum marine named Joseph Rousseau was wounded in the Battle of Chosin Reservoir during the Korean War. Lying on a train taking him from the battlefield, he had given up the will to live. But then he heard an MP in the next car shout, “All you divias sit down!”

Here are a few more examples of Lake Talk:

chor’d— stolen
chuccuo— (chu-co, also pronounced as “chew-ch”) – donkey, horse’s ass
dikki ki dotti— unreal or unbelievable
geech— “go away”
inga— unattractive or bad-tempered person or junk or crap
jawl— steal or look at
minje— dirty or unattractive woman
oy— eat
pukka to the mush— “tell the guy
quister (also pronounced as “quish-ta”)– awesome, good, beautiful
shapdude(shup-dude)– “how’s it going?”
suv— to have sexual relations
wonga– money

For a more complete dictionary of Lake Talk, click here.

With thanks to Erica Noonan for her story, In Newton, they still speak the language of the lake. This story last updated in 2023.

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We Wuz Robbed, or How Jack Sharkey Boxed His Way to a Catchphrase

Jack Sharkey not only won the world heavyweight championship but was responsible for the classic sports expression: We wuz robbed.

Sharkey, nicknamed The Boston Gob, was the only man to fight Jack Dempsey and Joe Louis. After he retired, he became an outstanding fly fisherman who teamed up with Ted Williams to promote the sport.

Along the way, it was a a controversial fight that inspired the phrase, We wuz robbed.

Becoming Jack Sharkey

He was born Joseph Paul Zukauskas on Oct. 26, 1902, in Binghamton, N.Y., the son of Lithuanian immigrants. As a young boy his family moved to Boston.

He ran away from home as a teenager. In his own words,

I slept in YMCAs, worked the bars and shoveled coal, worked for the Diamond Match Company, and I come back to New York, scared to go home, and the money ran out and I had to walk across the Brooklyn Bridge and I joined the navy, five cents in my pocket.

He took up boxing in the navy, where he won 38 fights. His ship’s home port was Boston, and he fought for pay on liberty in the city. He was told he couldn’t fight under the name Joseph Zukauskas, so he chose the names of his boxing idols: Jack Dempsey and Tom Sharkey.

By the time Sharkey was honorably discharged, he was earning write-ups in the Boston newspapers and earning good money for boxing.

Sharkey was a powerful boxer who could take punishment, but didn’t always focus and fought erratically. “I was a hothead,” he later said. “You could never tell what I would do.”

In 1927 he faced Jack Dempsey in a fight to determine who would take on heavyweight champion Gene Tunney. Sharkey turned his head to complain to the referee that Dempsey hit him with a low blow and Dempsey knocked him out.

Original caption: Jack Sharkey examines his mitts after he used them to defeat Jack Stribbling in their 10-round bout in Miami. March 3, 1929. Photo courtesy Boston Public Library, Leslie jones Collection.

Two years later he won the heavyweight championship of the world, and he bought a $100,000 house in Chestnut Hill.

We Wuz Robbed

In 1930 he lost a fight for the vacant heavyweight championship to Max Schmeling on a foul. The referee ruled he hit Schmeling below the belt.

Sharkey described Schmeling as ‘a methodical, cruel, terrific puncher.’ Two years later, they faced each other again, and Sharkey was declared the winner though Schmeling seemed to have outboxed him.

After the match, Schmeling’s manager, Joe Jacobs, uttered those classic words, “We wuz robbed.”

Sharkey later said the fight was fixed.

Jack Sharkey, wife and son at home, Photo courtesy Boston Public Library, Leslie Jones Collection.

If Jack Sharkey inspired “We wuz robbed,’ while working, he came up with a second oft-quoted comment in retirement.

He finished his career in 1936 after Joe Louis knocked him out in Yankee Stadium. Sharkey’s career record was 38-14-3, with 13 knockouts.

He saved his money and opened a saloon named Jack Sharkey’s in Boston, but closed it in 1943. (There was another Sharkey’s in New York City, a private boxing club famously painted by George Bellows.)

He earned a living as a boxing and wrestling referee. He and his family moved to Epping, N.H., in 1954, where he pursued his love of fly fishing.

Jack Sharkey with Jimmie Foxx and Ted Williams. Photo courtesy Boston Public Library, Leslie Jones Collection.

He and Ted Williams teamed up to promote the sport at sporting shows. He was asked at one show whether he preferred fishing to boxing.

“It doesn’t pay as much,” he replied, “but then the fish don’t hit back.”

Jack Sharkey died on Aug. 17, 1994, at the age of 91 in Beverly, Mass.

To see a video of Jack Sharkey fighting Jack Dempsey, click here.

This story about the phrase, We wuz robbed, was updated in 2022.

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Louis Sockalexis, The Indian Athlete With the Tragic Flaw

Louis Sockalexis broke a different color barrier in baseball 50 years before Jackie Robinson started for the Brooklyn Dodgers.

He was a red man. And unlike Jackie Robinson, he couldn’t handle the taunts and insults, the war whoops in the stands and the racial jeers.

Sockalexis had a sensational start to his Major League Baseball playing career, dubbed a ‘wonder’ and ‘the most talked about’ young player on his team.

But he would only play 97 games in the Major Leagues, spend time in jail and die young.

After his playing days ended, he was arrested for vagrancy in Holyoke, Mass. Unshaven, with toes protruding from his shoes, he explained his downfall:

They liked me on the baseball field, and I liked firewater.

Louis Sockalexis

On Oct. 24, 1871, Louis Francis Sockalexis was born a member of the Penobscot tribe in Old Town, Maine, where both money and jobs were scarce. He was the son of Francis Sockalexis, a logger who became governor, or chief, of the Penobscot tribe, and Frances Sockbeson Sockalexis. He grew to six feet tall and excelled at sports.

Sockalexis at Holy Cross

In the summer of 1894, Louis Sockalexis played outfield for a baseball team sponsored by the Poland Spring Resort. One of his teammates was Mike ‘Doc’ Powers, a summer visitor to Maine and captain of the baseball team at the College of the Holy Cross. He persuaded Louis, a Catholic, to enroll in the Jesuit school.

He tried out for Holy Cross’s baseball coach, Jesse Burkett, a future Hall of Famer who played for the Cleveland Spiders. Burkett offered the 24-year-old Sockalexis a full scholarship. He rewarded Burkett with outstanding play for two seasons, batting over .400. He once stole six bases in a game against Brown and is credited with setting a world’s record for the longest baseball throw – 138 yards.

Burkett moved to Notre Dame, and Louis Sockalexis followed him. In the spring of 1897, Burkett helped him get a contract with the Cleveland Spiders.

He made a splash.

Deerfoot of the Diamond

“I unhesitatingly pronounce him a wonder,” former New York Giants Manager John Ward told the Sporting Life.

His Indian heritage and outstanding play was catnip for sportswriters. They called him the ‘Deerfoot of the Diamond’ and ‘Chief of Sockem.’

When he hit a game-winning home run for the Spiders’ first victory of the season, a newspaper headline read, ‘Indians Hang One Little Scalp on Their Belts.’

The team went on a tear, led by Sockalexis’ hitting heroics. The Cleveland Plain Dealer reported ‘a visibly larger percentage of women than usual’ came to the ballpark when he played. Fans also came to jeer at him with war whoops and war dances.

He cheerfully shrugged off their taunts — he claimed.

Wild Bird

Off the field, Sockalexis liked to drink and carouse at night. A teammate called him a ‘wild bird.’ In early July, a foot injury hampered his play. How he got it is unclear. According to some accounts, he jumped or fell from the second-story window of a brothel. According to others, he injured his foot while running the base paths.

His drinking caught up with him, his play clearly suffered and his boosters in the sporting press turned on him. Suddenly Louis Sockalexis fit all the stereotypes of the drunken Indian. When he made a fielding error, he was called ‘a wooden Indian.’ In late July, the Plain Dealer reported, management couldn’t control him anymore.

Sockalexis’ demeanor changed; he grew angry and sullen. He spent the end of the 1897 season on the bench.

And then he spent most of the 1898 season on the bench.

The 1899 Spiders, worst team ever in baseball. Sockalexis wasn’t good enough for them.

In 1899, most of the Spiders were sold to St. Louis, except Sockalexis. He stayed behind with the Spiders, who won only 20 games that year with a team made up of rejects, prospects and semipro players.

Early in the season, the Plain Dealer reported, ‘the big Indian seems to have come to his senses.’ But then his play quickly deteriorated. On May 13, he twice fell down drunk in the outfield.

The once promising star wasn’t even good enough to play for the worst team in baseball, and the Spiders released him.

Last Years of Sockalexis

Louis Sockalexis played minor league ball for a few months, then dropped out of the game. Over the next two years he was arrested and jailed for drunkenness, public disturbance and vagrancy. He returned to baseball in 1902, playing for a Lowell, Mass., team, and in 1903, playing for Bangor.

He returned to the reservation in Old Town, where he coached teams and piloted a ferryboat. In 1913, he joined a logging team. He died of a heart attack on Dec. 24, 1913, only 42 years old.

The Indians

The evolution of Chief Wahoo

Back then, baseball teams changed their names frequently. The leagues had merged, and Cleveland’s American League team was known as the Naps, after their best player, Nap Lajoie. But Lajoie had been traded, and the team needed a new name. In 1915, the team’s owner asked local sportswriters to come up with one.

They settled on the Indians. Perhaps they remembered that brief period of excitement when Louis Sockalexis made his major league debut nearly 20 years earlier. Perhaps they were thinking of Boston’s miracle Braves, who won the World Series the year before. At any rate, the Indians adopted the image of Chief Wahoo as their logo.

The grinning, dark red caricature has come under criticism recently, much like the name of the Washington Redskins. The team tried to deflect its critics by saying the team was named in honor of Louis Sockalexis.

Louis Sockalexis was voted into the American Indian Athletic Hall of Fame in 2000. And in 2021, the Indians changed their name to the Guardians.

This story was updated in 2022.

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