Read Online Steal the Menu by Raymond Sokolov - Free Book Online Page B
Authors: Raymond Sokolov
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to me like somebody’s parents. They called out words and I spelled them.
So at six I tasted fame, and liked it. Word of my skill got around. My classmates joined the rest of the school in regarding me as a little resident genius. Neither they nor I would learn the phrase “idiot savant” until years later. So from then on, in my little world at the Hampton School in affluent northwest Detroit, I was the smartest kid.
There was some truth to my reputation for intelligence. I had unconsciously analyzed the English language’s multifarious orthography, without having any sense of how all those vestiges of Latin, French and German—languages with more orderly but dissimilar spelling systems—had left their mark on the way our words looked. So I was intelligent when judged by real criteria, but in first grade I was rewarded for being able to perform a stunt. That was just the beginning.
In fifth grade, ever more adept at spelling ever more difficult words, I moved up from being a local prodigy to the higher and far more confusing status of national celebrity.
Every spring, all students in the five counties of the Detroit area who were enrolled in grades five through eight competed in a spelling bee sponsored by the
Detroit News
. First there was a competition for each grade, then for the entire school, then for a group of schools in the same district. District winners competed for the Detroit title. And the Detroit winner went to Washington, D.C., for the National Spelling Bee.
I was ten. I won my grade. I won my school bee and the district bee, and then the city bee. As I moved up the ladder, I got progressively more attention in the
News
, which paid for the whole circus as a promotional effort to attract readers.
After I was city champion, I came to know the Boys and Girls page editor of the
News
, a lively, smart, single, behatted, old-fashioned newshen named Virginia Schnell. Her most important assignment every year was the spelling bee, a sweet sinecure involving a week in Washington on the
News
’s tab, but the downside was spinning out usable copy about that year’s city champion speller again and again, which meant spending many days with the moppet and his parents. But with me, Schnell hit the jackpot: I was quotable and often got her on the front page of the News. It got me fatally interested in journalism.
In Washington, I did better still for her. In 1952, at ten, I was the youngest contestant in the history of the bee. So I was mentioned in all the stories written by dozens of reporters for papers from coast to coast, and they were careful to say that I was representing the
Detroit News
. That was the protocol, since the reporters all understood that the real point of the exercise was to sell newspapers. They therefore attached each speller’s newspaper sponsor to his name like some Homeric epithet: Minnie Mintz (
Akron Beacon Journal
), Billy Batson (
New York World-Telegram and Sun
).
Not only was I the youngest, I was also up to the competition. I finished twenty-second, and would have gone further if the pronouncer (the man who spoke each word we had to spell) hadn’t mispronounced the word I missed. He looked at “assonance,” a word he confessed he didn’t know, and then said “A-sonance.” He was quickly corrected but I, never having seen the word either, thought he’d unwittingly given me a clue. If it had two
s
’s, then any fool would have pronounced its first syllable to rhyme with “lass.” But the pronouncer’s first impulse had been to give it a long
a
, something normally possible only if there were only a single
s
following the
a
. Or so I reasoned before I went down misspelling “assonance” a-s-o-n-a-n-c-e.
This was not the end of it. In 1953, I returned to Washington as the Detroit champion and finished second, once again a casualty of official mispronunciation. That year the word was “spermaceti,” pronounced by the very same official pronouncer as if it were a
So at six I tasted fame, and liked it. Word of my skill got around. My classmates joined the rest of the school in regarding me as a little resident genius. Neither they nor I would learn the phrase “idiot savant” until years later. So from then on, in my little world at the Hampton School in affluent northwest Detroit, I was the smartest kid.
There was some truth to my reputation for intelligence. I had unconsciously analyzed the English language’s multifarious orthography, without having any sense of how all those vestiges of Latin, French and German—languages with more orderly but dissimilar spelling systems—had left their mark on the way our words looked. So I was intelligent when judged by real criteria, but in first grade I was rewarded for being able to perform a stunt. That was just the beginning.
In fifth grade, ever more adept at spelling ever more difficult words, I moved up from being a local prodigy to the higher and far more confusing status of national celebrity.
Every spring, all students in the five counties of the Detroit area who were enrolled in grades five through eight competed in a spelling bee sponsored by the
Detroit News
. First there was a competition for each grade, then for the entire school, then for a group of schools in the same district. District winners competed for the Detroit title. And the Detroit winner went to Washington, D.C., for the National Spelling Bee.
I was ten. I won my grade. I won my school bee and the district bee, and then the city bee. As I moved up the ladder, I got progressively more attention in the
News
, which paid for the whole circus as a promotional effort to attract readers.
After I was city champion, I came to know the Boys and Girls page editor of the
News
, a lively, smart, single, behatted, old-fashioned newshen named Virginia Schnell. Her most important assignment every year was the spelling bee, a sweet sinecure involving a week in Washington on the
News
’s tab, but the downside was spinning out usable copy about that year’s city champion speller again and again, which meant spending many days with the moppet and his parents. But with me, Schnell hit the jackpot: I was quotable and often got her on the front page of the News. It got me fatally interested in journalism.
In Washington, I did better still for her. In 1952, at ten, I was the youngest contestant in the history of the bee. So I was mentioned in all the stories written by dozens of reporters for papers from coast to coast, and they were careful to say that I was representing the
Detroit News
. That was the protocol, since the reporters all understood that the real point of the exercise was to sell newspapers. They therefore attached each speller’s newspaper sponsor to his name like some Homeric epithet: Minnie Mintz (
Akron Beacon Journal
), Billy Batson (
New York World-Telegram and Sun
).
Not only was I the youngest, I was also up to the competition. I finished twenty-second, and would have gone further if the pronouncer (the man who spoke each word we had to spell) hadn’t mispronounced the word I missed. He looked at “assonance,” a word he confessed he didn’t know, and then said “A-sonance.” He was quickly corrected but I, never having seen the word either, thought he’d unwittingly given me a clue. If it had two
s
’s, then any fool would have pronounced its first syllable to rhyme with “lass.” But the pronouncer’s first impulse had been to give it a long
a
, something normally possible only if there were only a single
s
following the
a
. Or so I reasoned before I went down misspelling “assonance” a-s-o-n-a-n-c-e.
This was not the end of it. In 1953, I returned to Washington as the Detroit champion and finished second, once again a casualty of official mispronunciation. That year the word was “spermaceti,” pronounced by the very same official pronouncer as if it were a
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