I Was a Spelling Wanna-Bee. Could I Be a Champ?

I have vivid memories of my elementary-school spelling bees, where I misspelled quotient, and, in one low moment after I didn’t listen to the word’s definition, pour.

Fortunately for me, University Park’s inaugural adult spelling bee wasn’t a high-stakes spelling showdown, but a fun social event where the topic of conversation happened to be obscure words and the letters in them.

“It’s like trivia night,” Highland Park adult services librarian and spelling bee emcee Pamela Skjolsvik said. “Except we don’t have margaritas.”

Skjolsvik organized the Highland Park and University Park Public Library’s adult bees after having success with the event in Fort Worth. When I heard about the spell-off, I recruited fellow dog walker Donna Regenbaum to join my quest for spelling redemption as my teammate on Auto-Correct This!

We only had one competitor in the race for spelling champ, but it was a formidable opponent. The Queen Bees was composed of four avid readers from the Friends of the University Park Public Library. And, like me, several Queen Bees were spelling veterans.

Kathy Cosgrove and Renne Lokey both remember the words they missed to lose their elementary-school bees. Cosgrove would have competed on the radio if she hadn’t misspelled the word grateful. Member Tracy Wallingford also narrowly lost her school spelling bee as a fifth grader.

The final Queen Bee, Jackie Johnson, said she’s a horrible speller. “I’m an attorney and just like to compete,” she explained.

The bee began with an introductory round where a correct word was worth 5 points. If a team incorrectly spelled a word, it missed out on points but wasn’t eliminated from the competition. This was fortunate for us members of Auto-Correct This!, since we quickly misspelled supersede, which it turns out doesn’t contain a C, and maudlin, which I thought had an E in the middle. At the end of round one, The Queen Bees were ahead 45 points to 30.

“We’re getting toasted here!” my dog-walking buddy remarked. 

The points per word went up as the rounds went on. But despite performing better in the lightning round and my teammate’s success in the best speller competition, we were still behind 250 points to 295 going into the bee’s final words.

With each correct spelling now worth 20 points, we somehow made a miraculous comeback. Our total points rose to 330, just five fewer than The Queen Bees.

It all came down to the final word: bouillabaisse, a French stew made of several kinds of fish, shellfish, tomatoes, olive oil, and saffron. Since I took six years of French in junior high and high school, my teammate turned to me for advice. 

That was a bad idea. I thought that bouillabaisse was spelled with a J.

Though my career as a speller seems to have topped-out at runner-up, I will never again misspell bouillabaisse and now know that spelling competitions aren’t just for kids.

The Queen Bees went on to represent University Park against Highland Park’s spelling champ, The Dewey Decimators. And after this year’s success, Queen Bee members said they have high hopes for the competition’s future.

“This was a great time. We’re going to make it bigger and bigger every year,” Lokey said. “And we’re still going to win.”