🇺🇸 John Paola

Cambist

The winning word means an expert in or dealer in bills of exchange and foreign currencies, a term from banking that has largely fallen out of ordinary use. The Washington Post recorded the finish on 10 June 1977 under the headline "Sesquipedalian Speller Triumphs at Spelling Bee", and the wire services moved their accounts the previous day.

The runner-up, Joan O'Leary, was eliminated on sesquipedalian, which is why the headline wrote itself. The word means characterised by long words, from the Latin for a foot and a half long, and it has been a fixture of spelling bee coverage ever since.

Both words point at the bee's habit of rewarding reading over speech. Neither cambist nor sesquipedalian is likely to have reached a thirteen-year-old in conversation; both are available to one who has worked through a dictionary.

The second attempt

United Press International put the arc in its headline: second time is charm for the national spelling champion. He had been to the finals the year before and placed twenty-second, going out on svengali, a word drawn from the hypnotist in George du Maurier's novel Trilby.

That pattern of return is the norm rather than the exception. The bee rewards accumulated study, and a speller who reaches the national finals young and is eliminated on an unusual word has a year to close exactly that kind of gap.

Sponsored by the Pittsburgh Press

Paola was sent to Washington by the Pittsburgh Press, one of the large metropolitan dailies that ran regional bees and paid for their winners' passage to the national finals. Glenshaw is a community north of Pittsburgh.

The arrangement explains why the competition existed at all. Newspapers organised the bee as a circulation and civic exercise from the 1920s onward, and a champion's home town was defined by the reach of the sponsoring paper rather than by any school district. The Pittsburgh Press itself ceased publication in the 1990s.

Fifty years of the bee

Paola's win came at the fiftieth-anniversary finals, which Frank Neuhauser, the first national champion from 1925, attended.

That continuity is the competition's most unusual feature. The 1925 champion, in his sixties, watching a thirteen-year-old take the same title half a century later is not the kind of scene most contests can arrange, and it is why the bee's record of champions functions as a running document of American childhood across a century.

Neuhauser had taken the first national title as a boy in the 1920s, when the competition was a newspaper promotion with a handful of entrants and no expectation that it would still be running fifty years later.

Where John Paola is now

Not documented in the sources used here. The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette revisited the subject in July 2003 in a feature on past winners and the pain and glory of the bee, which is the most recent source in this record.

His studies, his profession and his life since 1977 are not established here, and this page does not report them. What the record holds is a fourteen-month arc, from twenty-second place to the national title, documented by three contemporary newspaper accounts.

Features of that kind are how most former champions re-enter the public record at all, a decade or three after the week in which they were briefly famous.