Celebrate Every Day

Celebrate Every Day


April 13, 2021 – National Thomas Jefferson Day | National Scrabble Day

April 12, 2021

Did You Know That Thomas Jefferson Was Quite The Inventor?

Welcome to April 13, 2021 on the National Day Calendar. Today we celebrate a jack of trades and nerdy word play. 

If you’re a regular listener, you know that one of our favorite presidents is Thomas Jefferson. In addition to all his contributions to America’s democracy, he was also something of an inventor. He was an avid reader, sometimes reading many books at once. He got tired of setting each book down on a table and marking the page as he moved on to the next one. So he invented a revolving book stand, which was essentially a lazy susan with four tabletop lecterns——with an additional one on top for the book he was currently reading. It allowed each book to stay open to the page on which he’d stopped. Oh, and it all folded up for easy transport. Take that, IKEA. On National Thomas Jefferson Day, celebrate a man who shaped the future and at times seemed to be living in it.

The game of Scrabble was invented during the Great Depression by an out of work architect.  For anyone who grew up on Mars, Scrabble is played with two to four players who score points by forming words from individual lettered tiles on a game board marked with a 15 by 15 grid. Since its humble beginnings, Scrabble is now played in 121 countries in 29 different languages!  It was also featured as a television game show in the 1980s.  The highest scoring word ever recorded in a Scrabble tournament earned a whopping 392 points.  The word was spelled C A Z I Q U E S, pronounced caziques, which is a type of oriole. On National Scrabble Day, challenge someone you know to the classic board game or play online to bring out your inner word nerdiness. 

I’m Anna Devere and I’m Marlo Anderson.  Thanks for joining us as we Celebrate Every Day.