The Bridgewater Scrabble Club is the brainchild of founder and Director Emeritus Scott Kitchen, now directed by me, Ed Horch.

Having read The Book, Scott started playing at the (now sadly defunct) Princeton Scrabble Club, and not soon after, convinced me to read The Book and give the game a shot. I went to the Princeton club, and despite a long initial string of defeats, got hooked, too. In the meantime, Scott played in a few tournaments, and decided that Bridgewater needed its own club.

In late 2002, he told me of his idea, and that he was going to start having meetings at the (also now defunct) Sanctuary Coffee House in Somerville. Not wanting him to just sit there by himself, I came too. For the first several weeks, it was just him and me.

Being Mondays, the deadest night of the week for the food and beverage industry, the coffee house decided to add to their attractions by bringing in karaoke. This would not have been so bad, but the speaker was just a few feet from our playing table. While it made playing untenable, it started one of the club’s longstanding defining characteristics: We can play under any conditions!

While this was going on, Scott’s Scrabble-widow wife, Jen, was working in the (also also now defunct) Borders bookstore, and was able to get permission from the cafe manager to let us play there. Our first session at Borders was on July 7, 2003. This is when the club started to take off, as curious cafe customers became some of our earliest long-term members.

It took about a year and a half for us to take over enough of the cafe that there wasn’t enough room for all the regular customers. As the time, few of our members were also members of the local Jewish Community Center, which enabled us to use one of their community rooms free of charge. It was then that we explicitly established one of our defining principles, that we would never charge dues for club membership. (We have always encouraged members to join NASPA, which is required for participating in tournaments, but we’ve never charged anything for the club itself.) We started meeting there at the beginning of 2005.

When one by one, our members gave up their JCC memberships, thus losing the free room, we were in need of new space one more time. I suggested that the Time To Eat Diner might be able to accommodate us. Scott contacted them, and they were amenable to having a few tables’ worth of regular customers they could count on from week to week. After three years at the JCC we started meeting at the diner at the beginning of 2008. We have been meeting there for fifteen years (!), and we continue to have a very mutually beneficial relationship with them, even through ownership changes and the Covid pandemic.