February 26, 1997
Excogitate before spelling
Librarians, crossword puzzlers triumph
ROBERT MOHL
Herald News Editor
ROANOKE RAPIDS -- I was chewing on a chicken wing when team captain Greg
Jenkins arrived. It was the 7th annual Roanoke Valley Spelling Bee, held Tuesday
at the Kirkwood Adams Community Center.
The event, sponsored by Coastal Lumber, BB&T, Heavenly Ham and the Daily
Herald, raises money for the Roanoke Valley Chamber of Commerce and a scholarship
fund at HCC.
"They call out a word, everybody writes it down, then I write it down and
show it to our judge," says Jenkins, the Herald's sports editor.
He's cool, he's collected. He's been through this before.
Our mission -- to win.
More importantly, we must beat the other Daily Herald team, and vanquish
the evil MainQuad broadcasting empire, the owner of arch-rival TV-20, the winners
of last year's competition.
Our judge is Phil Williamson, the principal of Weldon High School. He's one
of 14 judges from area school systems who'll be checking our spelling.
Organizer Brenda Blackburn is scouring the audience looking for players to
round out teams. You don't see that at the NBA.
Jenkins draws a fearsome face on our balloon in an effort to intimidate our
competition. I draw it to the attention of the contestants at the next table,
presumptuously named the Champion Spellers.
"We're real intimidated," deadpans Mary Lee Ransmeier, the team captain.
Richard Romine, Denise Campbell and Sharon Andrews also show no fear. So much for
intimidation.
The rules are announced. If we miss a word we can contribute $20 and stay in
the contest. If we don't, our helium balloon is taken away and we are out.
Emcee Nancy Walker with the Halifax Paper Board takes the stage. The teams
sound off with varying degrees of enthusiasm. Then the roll call is done, and the
spelling is under way.
Culinary.
A cinch.
Cassette, villain, botcher.
Botcher? What's a botcher? Apparently somebody who botches. We guess right.
Humility, ferociously, hedgehog, equidistant.
The self-congratulatory cheers in the room grow louder with each passing
word. So far nobody near us has missed one.
Memorize, verbatim, subsonic, bungalow.
Now the easy round is over. There's thirty seconds of stretching and then
back to the spelling.
Tureen, demijohn.
Demijohn? We look at each other in confusion. From the sentence it's some
kind of bottle, but how to spell it? Demijon or demijohn?
We go with john and we're correct. There are more groans than cheers in the
room.
Laborious, careen, syllogize, axiom.
"She (Walker) used axiom, loathsome, and Myers-Briggs personality test in the
same sentence," says amazed teammate C.J. Scinta.
Tim Frates, our advertising director, tells us the other Herald team has
bought four words already. We haven't missed one.
Jettison, mausoleum, silhouette.
Scinta, Andy Wentzy and I draw a complete blank. Jenkins saves the day.
"That's a classic spelling bee trick word," he says, writing it down. Our
friends at Champion haven't missed a word yet. Maybe we need a scarier face on
our balloon.
Epicurean, skedaddle, myrrh.
And it's the end of the intermediate round. Teams are starting to drop out
now; their poor spelling has cost them dearly. We still haven't missed one,
neither have the Champion Spellers. Marcheta King with Rufus B. Hux and Son Inc.
admits to buying one for silhouette.
A five-minute break, and back to the spelling. The difficult round.
Vinaigrette, jeroboam
Jera-what? Some kind of wine jug. All four of us have a different guess.
Jenkins mixes and matches and comes up with an answer.
It's wrong. Our first of the evening.
Vignette, speleologist, xerosis
Xerosis? Does she mean psoriasis or cirrhosis? Neither. We get another one
wrong. We stay in, and get skookum wrong. Hartebeest, wrong. Peregrinate, wrong.
I look up and our fearsome balloon face is mocking me. My spellings, once so
sure, are now crossed out with alternatives written underneath.
Amazingly, there are still teams that haven't bought a word.
We limp into the elimination round, bloodied and torn. From now on we can't
buy our way out. If we miss a word it's all over.
Excogitate, aileron.
Aileron has two e's, I insist. I'm overruled and we survive. Eleven teams go
down in our place, including hated rival TV-20. The other Herald team bailed out
long ago. No matter what happens after this, we've achieved our goal.
Apartheid, cabochon.
Cabochon: a highly-polished, convex-cut, unfaceted gem. It might as well be
Waterloo. For us it's the end.
It's down to the final 3: Roanoke Valley Energy Facility, Halifax Community
College, and Halifax County.
Curmudgeon, alcazar.
And it's over. Halifax County is the winner.
It's the second time this team has won, made up of Doris Wilson, Clara
Birdsong, Ginny Orvedahl and newcomer Lynn Walker.
"You have here a group of people," says Birdsong, "who do crossword puzzles,
who work in a library and who used to be teachers."
They missed just one word, vinaigrette. The worst spellers were the Roanoke
Valley Chamber of Commerce Board of Directors who bought 18 words.
Tied for second place are the Roanoke Valley Energy Facility with Quinn
Morrison, Rosemary Morris, Mike Drake and Tim Titus; and the HCC team with Joan
Gilstrap, Evelyn Kientz, Patsy Ferguson and Myra Robertson.
All told 44 teams misspelled 317 words and raised $12,515.
"That's the best we've ever done," says spelling bee organizer Brenda
Blackburn.
Other spelling bee committee members were Susan Woody, Ann Peel, Willa
Dickens, Sherry Young, Tom Chuman, and Quinn Morrison.
A splended -- uh, excuse me, splendid -- time was had by all.
(
geocities.com/rjmohl)