🇺🇸 Robert A. Wake

The winning word

Ratoon comes into English from Spanish and names the new growth that rises from the stump of a harvested cane or similar crop. It is a term of agriculture rather than of general use, and a 13-year-old in Houston had no particular reason to have met it.

Wake said he had not. That puts his win in the same category as several of the bee's most retold finishes: the champion is not the speller who knows every word, but the one who can build a defensible spelling from the sound, the language of origin and the little the judges are permitted to tell them.

The 1966 bee

The St. Petersburg Times reported the result under the line that the speller had shot to victory with ratoon. The Milwaukee Journal's Associated Press story called him a sachem of young spellers, borrowing the word for a chief - the kind of flourish wire desks permitted themselves on the bee each June.

The runner-up was Beth Sherrill of Lucy, Tennessee. The first prize was $1,000, a substantial sum for a school competition in 1966 and roughly the scale the bee had settled on in the post-war decades.

What the competition was then

The bee of the 1960s was assembled by sponsoring newspapers, each sending its regional champion to Washington for a contest run over a day or two in a hotel ballroom. Coverage ran on the wires the following morning and was over by lunchtime.

That is why champions of that era have such thin files. The competition was national news for one cycle a year, and a winner's name appeared in hundreds of papers on one day and in none the day after.

Nor did the format encourage follow-up. A champion collected the cheque, sat for a photograph and went home, and unless a later feature writer went looking, the trail stopped there. For Wake it did. What survives of his bee is the word, the prize, the runner-up and a 13-year-old's remark that he had never met the word before.

Why Rosalie Elliot's year is the one people remember

The 1966 bee also produced a story that outlived its champion's. An 11-year-old from South Carolina, Rosalie Elliot, misspelled avowal in an early round; the judges could not make out what she had said, and she told them she had got it wrong. She was given a standing ovation for it.

That anecdote has been reprinted for decades, usually without the year and almost always without the winner's name. Wake won the bee that both stories belong to, and the honesty story is the one that travelled.

What is documented, and what is not

Documented: the 1966 championship, the winning word ratoon, his age of 13, Houston, the $1,000 prize, the runner-up Beth Sherrill of Lucy, Tennessee, and his own statement that he had never heard the word.

Not documented in the sources used here: his school, his family, the number of rounds, and anything about his life after June 1966. The coverage of this champion is unusually thin even by the standards of the period, and this page does not extend it by guesswork.