Deceased--Abraham Nathanson

Abraham Nathanson
November 26th, 1929 to June 6th, 2010

"Abraham Nathanson, Bananagrams Inventor, Dies at 80"

by

William Grimes

June 9th, 2010

The New York Times

Abraham Nathanson, who at the age of 76 invented Bananagrams, a fast-moving letters-and-words game that became a runaway hit, died on Sunday at his summer house in Narragansett, R.I. He was 80 and lived in Cranston.

The cause was cancer, his daughter Rena said.

Mr. Nathanson hit on the idea for Bananagrams while playing Scrabble with his grandson and chafing at the slow pace of the game. “We need an anagrams game so fast, it’ll drive you bananas,” he recalled saying in an interview with The Boston Globe last year.

He came up with a game that combined the word-building aspect of Scrabble (but without the scoring or the board) and a beat-the-clock urgency.

In Bananagrams, players draw letters from 144 plastic tiles in a banana pouch and form words, crossword puzzle style, in a race to exhaust their tiles before their competitors can. The first player to use up his or her tiles and shout “Bananas!” wins. The average game lasts 10 to 15 minutes.

The game was a hit from the moment it made its debut at the London Toy Fair in 2006. It was named game of the year by the Toy Industry Association in 2009. More than three million Bananagrams games were sold last year.

Abraham Nathanson was born on Nov. 26, 1929, in Pawtucket, R.I., where his father sold fruit. After serving in the Army, he studied graphic and industrial design at Pratt Institute in Brooklyn for about a year before returning to Pawtucket, where he and his brother Morris founded a commercial design studio.

Mr. Nathanson left the company to become a jewelry designer and bought a historic mill in Centerdale, where he established George Nathan Design. The company made graphics for bars, gift items and Executoys, a line of wooden gewgaws for the office desk.

Mr. Nathanson was divorced from his wife, Sandra, the designer of the Bananagrams banana pouch. In addition to his daughter Rena Nathanson of London, he is survived by two other daughters, Brenda Moore of Devon, Pa., and Dana Nathanson of East Providence, R.I.; two brothers, Morris, of Providence, and Nathan, of Pawtucket; a sister, Rachel Shuchman of Warwick, R.I.; and four grandchildren.

Bananagrams has spawned applications for iPhone and Facebook, a series of books published by Workman and two spinoff games: Appletters, a cross between dominoes and Bananagrams, and Pairs in Pears, a spelling game for children.

Bananagrams [Wikipedia]