Spelling bees bite

I can still taste a tiny bit of barf creeping up into my throat after misspelling that stupid word in the Detroit News Spelling Bee at Goodale Elementary’s auditorium in 1971.

Like Ralph and the flat tire scene in “A Christmas Story,” I said the F-word. But not aloud. A good Catholic girl, I was stoic, polite and thoroughly humiliated. 

The word, which will forever give me hives, was blossom. I spelled it with a U instead of the second O. Jesus God.

“B-L-O-S-S-U-M.” WTH? That was it. I was toast. Take your seat, young lady. 

No trip to the 45^th Scripps National Spelling Bee in Washington, for you, sister. As I recall, a girl named Jennifer Heymoss won that day and advanced to the regionals where she lost, bless her heart. A 14-year-old boy from Texas won nationals that year with the word “macerate.”

Chew on that, smartie pants.

According to a 1995 Detroit News article, the newspaper’s Spelling Bee got its start with an argument between the Detroit Schools superintendent and a News editor who said the city’s schoolchildren couldn’t spell. In 1921, the local contest began, with teams from public, private and parochial schools throughout Detroit.

A few years later, the E.W. Scripps Company National Spelling Bee began in 1925 when nine newspapers joined together with an idea to promote literacy. Since then, 11 million students across America have participated in school, local and regional bees with the singular hope of making it to nationals.

Of course, it’s quite a different world from when I was in grammar school. Kids today are so darn smart. You can tell by comparing the winning words from then and now: croissant in 1970, koinonia in 2018. (Look it up.)

Which brings us to the 2019 winners, or “co-winners,” I should say. With an unprecedented eight-way tie, this year’s crop of contestants was so well-prepared that they exhausted the word list. That’s right. The competition ran out of words.

As for me, five years after losing that stupid spelling bee, I entered and won the Detroit News writing contest for an interview with former first lady Rosalynn Carter. I still have it somewhere. And on an old stand in my office, there’s a big red American Heritage Dictionary from 1976. First prize.

Guess misspelling blossom wasn’t that big a deal after all.