The First National Spelling Champion Preferred the Bicycle

An hour a night, every night, to avoid the first round. That is the most realistic parenting goal ever recorded. I have used it for piano.

He won the county bee. Then the Kentucky state bee. Then, in June 1925, the first national spelling bee, against eight other contestants, with the word gladiolus, a flower he had grown for years as a boy.

The prize was $500, in twenty-dollar gold pieces, and a gold medal. When he got home to Louisville, his high school put on a parade. And then, he said, "They gave me a bicycle, which was probably worth more to me then than the $500."

Somewhere an economist is weeping, and an eleven-year-old is nodding. Gold coins sit in a drawer. A bicycle goes to the park.

His father, he remembered, told him that people would always remember him because he won the first one. His father was right. Neuhauser and his wife were invited to the bee's milestone anniversaries and later to every year's finals. Children competing would run up to him during commercial breaks for his autograph. "It gives them a supercharge," his wife said.

In 2002, at eighty-eight, he sat in on the final rounds. That year's champion, a thirteen-year-old from Colorado Springs, won on the word prospicience and took home $12,000, an engraved loving cup, a set of the Encyclopaedia Britannica, a set of the Great Books of the Western World, a Britannica CD, a $1,000 savings bond and a reference library from Merriam-Webster. Every speller received a commemorative watch.

Seventy-seven years of progress: from a bicycle to the Great Books of the Western World. I am not sure which an eleven-year-old would choose. I am sure which one gets ridden.

Asked about his win decades later, Neuhauser didn't dwell on the gold. He remembered the parade, and the bicycle, and his father, at night, with the word list.

The middle one has a spelling bee in November. I quiz him for an hour a night so he won't go out in the first round. He asked what he gets if he wins. I said glory. He asked whether glory had wheels.