Photo by Rafael Fuchs; Model: Gilla Roos Agency
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Word Beaters
By Alanna Nash, May & June 2007
A national spelling contest for adults 50 and older proves age is no barrier to a nerve-racking good time
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"Tryptophan.”
Hartner Wins 2007 Senior Spelling Bee
After intense competition, Susan Hartner, 62, beat 44 spellers from 24 states. The winning word: bharal, a goat-like mammal of the Himalayas. Watch the related video from the Early Show (CBS).
The sound of the word hit Bill Long like a sucker punch. For the third time in the finals of the 2006 National Senior Spelling Bee, a word he didn’t recognize had blind-sided Long, the competition’s odds-on favorite after his second-place finishes in 2004 and 2005.
The contest in Cheyenne, Wyoming, last June—an annual event started in 1996 by a local AARP chapter—was down to Long and two newcomers, Hal Prince and Darrell Noe, who both had on their game faces. Long, sweat glistening on his brow, had already missed two words. One more false step and he’d be gone. The tension in the classroom at Laramie County Community College rivaled the hushed anxiety of a high-stakes chess match.
The 2008 AARP National Senior Spelling Bee is scheduled for June 14 in Cheyenne, Wyo. Find out more by calling 1-866-663-3290 or online at www.seniorspellingbee.com,
where you’ll also find the full rules and regulations, sample word lists, study tips, and links to help you plan a Wyoming trip.
“Tryptophan,” Long said, echoing Dave Lerner, the bee’s “pronouncer.” At this point, Long, a 54-year-old law professor from Salem, Oregon, was supposed to spell the word, then say it again. Instead, he asked for a definition.
“Tryptophan: a crystalline essential amino acid that is widely distributed in proteins,” judge Brian Greene allowed, consulting the only book that matters, Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary, 11th edition.
Long grimaced, licked his lips, fiddled with his glasses, turned his head left, then right, and ran his fingers along his forehead, as if to spring the letters from a recess in his brain.
“When I spell, I see the word… usually,” Long said later. “It flashes in my mind. This time it didn’t happen.”
He tried to buy more time: “May I have the derivation, please?” he asked.
“International scientific derivation.”
No help. Panic rose in his throat. He turned back to the judge. “We can’t go for a root behind that?”
In the end, tryptophan tripped him up. Long finished third, behind Noe, an urban planner from Arlington, Texas, who later muffed scorpaenid (a bony fish), and Prince, a Palo Alto, California, software developer who was perfect in the oral rounds. He had already whipped through such brain twisters as ergotamine (an alkaloid derived from ergot), cheongsam (a long Asian dress), and zygodactylous, a useful word when describing birds’ feet. He then aced piezometer (a pressure gauge) to walk away with the champion’s plaque, the $100 purse, and a lifetime of bragging rights.
The National Senior Spelling Bee has everything the Scripps National Spelling Bee for schoolkids has—except big cash prizes, television exposure, and rigorous trials that winnow the field. A few states with senior champions send them to Cheyenne, but most of the 36 contestants at last June’s event selected themselves. They ranged in age from 52 through 86 and traveled from as far away as Anchorage, Alaska, and Eunice, Louisiana, for the love of language, a competitive thrill, or just to get together with similarly obsessed people.
They Came, They Spelled...
And one conquered.
Hal Prince, 55, was perfect through 20 rounds of the 2006 finals in Cheyenne.
A sampler of other competitors and the words that sealed their fates:
Nancy Leasure, 67, missed
hamantaschen
Scott Firebaugh, 52, missed
phillumenist
Linda Goertz, 59, missed
exsiccate
Bill Long, 54, missed
tryptophan
Reta Lorenz, 86, missed
trichotillomania
“Maybe I’ve drunk the Kool-Aid when it comes to bees,” admits James Maguire, author of
American Bee: The National Spelling Bee and the Culture of Word Nerds (Rodale, 2006), “but there’s so much more to them than just reciting letters. It’s really an entire language arts feast.”
Some participants are veterans of the Scripps bee, the children’s championship begun in 1925. Scott Firebaugh, a high-school math and physics teacher in Kokomo, Indiana, competed in seven bees as a youngster, including the Scripps. “I enjoy discovering new words the way some people enjoy new places,” says Firebaugh, who, at 52, was the youngest contestant in Cheyenne. “Like math, there’s a real beauty to the patterns of language.”
In 1996, when a group of AARP members started the senior bee, the idea was simply to challenge retirees to keep their minds sharp as they aged. The nation wasn’t abuzz about bees—yet. It was only a matter of time. ESPN had begun televising the final rounds of the Scripps bee two years before. With youngsters competing for more than $40,000 in prizes, the yearly contest (now on ABC) amounted to an egghead reality show. Bee fever intensified with the release of such films as Spellbound and Akeelah and the Bee and the opening of The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee, a musical now in its third year on Broadway.
Meanwhile, the senior bee was percolating along. “I used to ask, ‘What makes it national?’ but the Scripps bee started in the same haphazard manner, with whatever schools that wanted to enter,” says AARP Wyoming state director Rita Inoway. Cheyenne’s success has helped inspire bees in Illinois, Oregon, and Pennsylvania, where the state association of senior centers helps sponsor contests by county that lead to a statewide showdown.
While kids’ bees can be all-serious, with a single mistake sinking your chances, contestants in Cheyenne seem to have as much fun, nerve-racking and otherwise, as they can squeeze into a June weekend in Wyoming.
That’s one reason author Maguire thinks the adult bee, too, should be televised. “I think it would be hilarious, actually. We may chuckle a bit at some of the kids’ oddities, but our hearts go out to them as they twist and turn in front of the microphone. With the adults, we’d be freer to laugh and realize this is all in good fun.”
Indeed, M.T. Casey, an accountant in Denver who has competed the past three years, insists she wouldn’t miss it for anything. She even convinced her ex-husband, John Haniszewski, to come down from Alaska for the past two bees. “Well, we’re better friends than spouses,” says Casey, who’s been divorced for more than 20 years. “And John’s not very competitive.”
Moments can be bittersweet. Reta Lorenz, last year’s oldest contestant at 86, breezed through the 100-word written exam that judges use to cut the field, but she came up against words that defeated her by round three of the orals: andouille (a spicy Cajun sausage), xerophthalmia (a drying of the eyeball), and trichotillomania (the compulsion to tear out one’s hair).
“They just gave me the wrong words,” says Lorenz, who hadn’t been in a bee since she was a kid. “I could have spelled for a long time yet.”
Such twists of luck come with the territory. The bee’s Lerner got laughs and sly smiles after defining schadenfreude—enjoyment gained at the expense of others. “There’s a lot of that in the room right now,” he noted.
Fortunately, there’s always next year, unless you win. Champions are barred from competing again.
“I e-mailed Scott Firebaugh about the whole thing after I got home,” recalls Hal Prince, who bought a dictionary with his prize money. “I said, ‘This is why Bill Long keeps losing—he’s a social guy, and he likes being there. He probably has a tub of tryptophan in his garage.’ ”
Alanna Nash lives in the birthplace of the spelling bee, Louisville, Kentucky, where she writes for Reader’s Digest, Wired, and USA Weekend.
Now It’s Your Turn
How do you prepare for your first spelling bee? If you’re software developer Hal Prince, last year’s winner of the National Senior Spelling Bee, you start with all the usual study methods—leafing through the dictionary, compiling a notebook of words you don’t know, paying your 12-year-old to drill you, making tapes of words to review while driving—and then you go full nerd.
“Being a computer guy,” says Prince, a 55-year-old graduate of Harvard and Yale, “I wrote a program that would show me the phonetic spelling of a word and its definition. Then I would think of the spelling, say it to myself, press return, and it would show me the word. If I made an error, I got the word again later. It worked out pretty well.”
And how. As champion, Prince is no longer eligible to compete. But you are. Find more information at the top of this page.—A.N.
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