Spelling and Math

Iowa at the time I was in junior high had a state spelling bee. Participants in the statewide event were the county champions which in turn were selected from the best spellers from the individual schools in the county. I don’t have any recollection of the local spelling bee in seventh grade but I do from eighth grade.

Mrs. Knapp, the principal, was eager for me to participate, and since spelling was one of the subjects I had always done well in throughout the elementary grades I went along with her desires. The whole process was sort of promoted by the Des Moines Register/Tribune newspaper and I recall studying the long array of words they published which I suppose had been used in previous years.

Anyway, came the day when the class bee was held, and somewhere along toward the end I misspelled a word and Mrs. Knapp was shocked at my failure to live up to her expectations. Somehow or other I think the word I missed was a fairly easy one — accommodation — and my error was to leave out one m.

That year the entrant from the Gowrie school was Annabelle Strough, who often sat ahead of or behind me after the seating became determined alphabetically. My main recollection of Annabelle is that she tended fo arrive for the school opening, either in the morning or after the noon hour, one or two minutes before the appointed time, often somewhat breathless. She had an older brother, Carleton, who went by the nickname “Turkey” — an individual with an aura of being a juvenile roughneck. I last saw Annabelle at our 50th class reunion in 1988 — I daresay I hadn’t seen her once since graduation day.

Vivian was more successful than I in the spelling bee. She won locally but I can’t remember how she fared in Fort Dodge at the county bee.

Toward the end of the year, Mrs. Knapp gave me some work in arithmetic which was really a forerunner of what I would encounter the next year in freshman algebra. I was entranced by the new concepts. I still remember where I was sitting when I had this experience — it was in the end seat in the desk row next the windows, not my customary seat.

I would say that if I have one reservation about the education instruction at Gowrie it was that new and interesting concepts weren’t introduced as soon as they might have — that and the lack of science classes such as chemistry and biology. However, expanding the curriculum to include there wasn’t feasible for the size of school Gowrie was.