Transcript of “The First National Spelling Bee”
One more story that I want to share from the book Enough is Enough by Gabe Henry about English and spelling. And it has to do with the first national spelling bee, which was held in 1908 in Cleveland, Ohio.
And the competition was a little bit different from the way it is today because the students competed as teams. There were eighth graders representing four different cities, Cleveland, New Orleans, Pittsburgh, and Erie, Pennsylvania. And the Spelling Bee was held at a conference of the National Education Association in Cleveland. So that meant that they had 6,000 spectators watching this competition.
And one of the best spellers was on the Cleveland team, and that was 13-year-old Marie Bolden. Now, Marie was the daughter of a postal worker, and she had learned to spell by studying the local newspaper every day. Now, Marie was black, and in the days leading up to this contest, the New Orleans team threatened to boycott it because, as the Cincinnati paper reported, several of the New Orleans children balked at the idea of spelling against a Negro girl.
But eventually, after a lot of controversy, the team relented and they came to Cleveland. And this competition included both oral and written portions, hundreds and hundreds of words. And as it turned out, the Cleveland team won, and the best score of all the members of that team belonged to Marie Bolden.
So Marie Bolden was the first national spelling bee champion. And I looked this up in a newspaper database. The next day, the Cleveland Plain Dealer, this paper that Marie had studied so assiduously every single day, ran a big article about that competition, listing every single one of the hundreds of words that were in that contest.
And above all those words was a big picture of Marie under the headline, best speller of all. Is that a lovely story or what? Oh, yay. Of course, you deserve it. If you’ve worked that hard and beat so many people at a national level, you deserve your accolades.
Well, that’s a lovely story. And we’ll link to that book, Enough is Enough, about the spelling in the English language on our website at waywordradio.org.
