The Saline Reporter
A Heritage Newspaper
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Kantner competes in spelling bee
Grossman wins AARP national title
By Brian Cox, Staff Writer
PUBLISHED: July 3, 2008
It may have been the spellers as much as the spelling that drew Denise Kantner back to Cheyenne, Wyo., last month for her second appearance in the American Association of Retired People's annual national spelling bee.
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"Most of the people are delightful," she said of the experience. "They make it a lot of fun. They want everyone to enjoy themselves."
When Kantner and her husband, Perry, attended the spelling bee for the first time on a whim last year, along with interesting and odd words, Kantner encountered intriguing people.
There were doctors, lawyers, computer programmers -- a goat herder -- reading word lists or thumbing through a dictionary.
Kantner had thought she was an avid speller, but she was struck by how seriously -- even obsessively -- some of the competitors took the event.
"I was a mad-dog speller as a student," Kantner said. "I like to do it and I like to do it correctly, but I don't study the dictionary the way some of them do."
Unlike Kantner, many of the competitors, all of whom must be 50 or older, tend to be veteran spelling bee participants. Last year was Kantner's first exposure to the world of competitive spelling, but she came away feeling she had held her own, falling just five words short of making the cut for the oral round.
She returned this year hoping to advance to the platform where the orals are held.
She and the other 50 contestants underwent four rounds of a written two-hour exam and had to correctly spell a minimum of 78 out 100 words to place among the group of 15 top spellers in the oral round.
Among the words to be hammered out using a No. 2 pencil were ukase, olefin, recce, and crwth.
Kantner again came up just five words short of making the orals.
"I did exactly the same as last year," she said, "but what do you expect when you don't crack a dictionary in a year. All I could do was my best."
Her favorite word was presented last year: steatopygia.
"I had no idea what it meant, but I spelled it correctly," said Kantner, who later learned the definition is "extreme accumulation of fat on and about the buttocks."
The Saline resident attributes her proclivity for spelling to reading and finding pleasure in words. It might also help that she grew up in a household where German was spoken and that she studied French from the fourth grade through high school.
"Knowing other languages can help," she said. "They draw a lot of words from the medical and science fields. They are not common words, let me tell you."
The spelling bee was covered by national media and Kantner was interviewed for CBS Evening News and Christian Science Monitor.
In the end, the 13th annual AARP National Spelling Bee was won by Larry Grossman, 56, of Northwood, N.D., who correctly spelled "debouch." A word of French origin. And Kantner knows she would have gotten that right.
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