When 82-year-old Molly Martin took the podium to spell her final word at the inaugural First Light Books Spelling Bee on Saturday, the audience waited with bated breath. Out of nearly 40 contestants, only Martin and one other competitor remained, still battling wits after hours of spelling in the June heat. It was down to the buzzer.
"Your word is eudaemonia," said Sam Ackerman, First Light's book buyer and the competition's judge. "[Meaning] happiness, well-being or human flourishing, especially in philosophical contexts."
"Eudaemonia," Martin repeated. "E-U-D-A-E-M-O-N-I-A."
The crowd was on their feet — whooping, cheering, clapping. Even Martin's remaining competitor, Michael Williams, was applauding, grinning from ear to ear. Martin shook her head in seeming disbelief, surprised to find herself the crowd favorite.
Williams went on to misspell his own final word — gobemouche, a gullible person, someone who believes things too easily — sealing Martin's victory. Toting a massive trophy, Martin thanked her husband from the podium.
"I guess we'll go out and have some dinner and call the children on the East Coast," she said when asked how she would celebrate. "I hadn't even thought about it, because I really didn't think I would win, for sure."
The staff of First Light Books, a popular gathering place in Austin's Hyde Park neighborhood, had toyed around with the idea of hosting an adult spelling bee for years, according to Breezy Mayo, the shop's general manager. They hoped it would be another opportunity to create a tradition that brings the community together, much like the annual block party First Light hosts — and a chance to win "local glory."
"I feel like a lot of people from our team won a spelling bee from their elementary school days," Mayo said, "so I think it's a kind of 'close-to-our-heart,' nostalgic childhood event for a lot of us."
Indeed, a number of the participants on Saturday self-identified as former spelling bee champs. Among their ranks were also multiple teachers, a dyslexia therapist, a comparative literature expert, and an "undercover agent" from the staff of BookPeople.
Sitting under a tent in the bookstore's parking lot, Ackerman hit the ground running in Round 1 with some commonly misspelled words, such as harass, millennium and accommodate.
"I think actually some of the words in the first round were difficult, and it was because they would have cases where there were double letters," Martin said after her win. "'Accommodate' could be considered a difficult word because some people might not know where the double letters were, so that could be considered really a level-two word."
First Light's competition also included a fresh twist: Audience members could pay to assign contestants "curses" to layer on an extra challenge, with proceeds going to the literacy nonprofit BookSpring. For instance, in Round 2, a contestant received a "buzzer beater" curse, requiring him to spell pomegranate in just 20 seconds. Others had to spell words backwards. A father-son duo received the "double trouble" curse, forcing them to spell two words instead of one.
But "blessings" were also on the menu. Audience members paid to give contestants a correct letter when they were stumped, or a second chance at spelling a tough word. For the lofty price of $250, a player could be resurrected after elimination.
"We're kind of just trying to introduce a little mischief and silliness into the … kind of classic spelling bee model," Mayo said. "It's just supposed to feel really fun, and it's supposed to be a little bit silly."
But Molly Martin played the game straight, with no cheats. Coupled with her cool confidence at the podium, this won support from the crowd. When given the "blessing" of choosing from two words, Martin said she knew both — peroration and malapropism — and went with the first word.
For Martin, the spelling bee was a return to a tradition she had missed — the annual adult spelling bee that the Austin Chronicle used to host at Threadgill's.
"I always loved to spell," she said.
Martin credits her skills to a few factors: early educators who emphasized spelling; a familiarity with multiple languages, including German, Italian, French and Latin; and a long and varied career that exposed her to a rich potpourri of words. Ever the Renaissance woman, she's been a volunteer teacher in the Peace Corps, a surgical nurse, an inline skating instructor and a staffer in a gallery of African art.
"I'm in my 80s, so I've had a few years to do things," she said.
These days, you can catch Martin inline skating at the Veloway in South Austin. She plans to display her trophy in her living room.
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