Spelling bee buzz is s-t-e-n-t-o-r-i-a-n

USA Today, May 24, 2006
By Maureen Groppe, Gannett News Service

WASHINGTON — American culture seems to have taken an odd turn when nervous youngsters with numbered placards hanging from their necks are more popular than poised, long-legged women in swimsuits.

But consider: ABC booted the Miss America pageant last year, and for the first time, the network will broadcast in prime time the final rounds of the Scripps National Spelling Bee on June 1. And that's not the only indication of the increasing appeal of spelling phenoms:

• Three movies, a Broadway musical and both fiction and non-fiction books have been inspired by the bee in recent years.


• This year's competition, which begins May 31, has a record 275 competitors, youngsters culled from millions of local and regional bee participants.


• Anurag Kashyap, who was 13 when he won the national championship last year for correctly spelling "appoggiatura," received a marriage proposal from a classmate when he returned to his California middle school. Trying to explain the bee's appeal, Anurag says, "It is the quintessence of reality TV."

TV may be the most important word in that sentence.

The national competition primarily has been sponsored by newspapers since it began in 1925, but it didn't take off in popular culture until ESPN began broadcasting it in 1994. Television allowed Americans to watch pint-size spellers toss off such words as "succedaneum" and "vivisepulture." One 2004 speller fainted in front of the microphone before popping up off the floor and correctly spelling "alopecoid."

"Prior to 1994, the bee was something that individuals read about primarily in newspapers, " says bee director Paige Kimble, who was the 1981 national champion. "They may have seen a brief news clip on the nightly news here and there. But it wasn't an event that people saw or could identify with."

The ESPN coverage caught the attention of filmmakers who followed a handful of top spellers in the 2000 contest to make the critically acclaimed documentary Spellbound.

A novel, Bee Season, about a spelling prodigy and her troubled family published in 2000, was turned into a movie released last year. At the same time, the 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee musical captured Tony Awards and audience applause on Broadway. Another spelling bee movie, Akeelah and the Bee, is now in theaters.

American Bee, a book that hit the shelves this month, profiles five top spellers as well as the history and culture of the bee. "It has such a tradition to it that it sort of transcends some of the other purely academic contests," says author James Maguire.

In fact, the last big surge in spelling bee popularity may have been in the 1870s after the publication of the best-selling book The Hoosier Schoolmaster, in which the new teacher in a fictional Indiana town falls in love during a spelling bee.

In recent years, the spelling bee has gotten attention because more champions honed their skills not in schoolhouses, but in their own homes. The trend of home-schoolers doing well has been supplanted by the winning streak of spellers of Indian descent who have won five of the past seven bees.

Their success has been aided by the North South Foundation, a group founded by an Indian immigrant that holds its own spelling competitions for Indian children to help them excel.

Anurag, last year's winner, didn't compete in the North South Foundation bees. But he was part of a group of dedicated spellers of different backgrounds who regularly quizzed each other using the Internet. He attributes his success to plain hard work. "It just shows that if you work hard, then anything can happen. It doesn't say that one race is smarter than the other."

One of the favorites for this year's competition is 12-year-old Samir Patel of Texas, who is both of Indian descent and home-schooled. He tied for second last year, a bump up from tying for third when he was only 9.

Another speller to keep an eye on is Katharine "Kerry" Close of New Jersey, a public school eighth-grader who achieved the rare feat of making it to the nationals five times. She tied for seventh last year, beating 11th-place John Tamplin of Kentucky, the only other competitor to make a fifth appearance.

Close, who is one of the spellers profiled in American Bee, has seen the bee movies and was one of the audience members chosen to participate in the onstage spelling bee the night she saw the 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee. She says she thinks interest in the bee probably has peaked. But author Maguire isn't so sure.
"It's still a little bit of a niche thing. I think the general public has yet to discover it," he says. "When they watch it on ABC prime time they're going to go, 'Wow! This is really a blast.' "

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