Retro Baltimore: 1953 champion speller still letter-perfect seven decades later
Asked to name the love of her life, Mary Kaye Bates doesn’t mince words. English is her passion; spelling, her old flame.
At 13, Bates, of Pikesville, won the first Baltimore-area spelling bee, sponsored by The Sunpapers, to reach the nationals in Washington, D.C. That was in 1953. Seven decades later, her word skills still keep her spry. At 84, Bates runs a one-woman secretarial service in Florida where, in their later years, she typed manuscripts for Tennessee Williams, the Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright, and personal correspondence for both Williams and John Hersey, the Pulitzer-winning novelist.
Call her Mary Dictionary; her talent showed early on.
“I’ve always been in love with language; as a child, my grandfather fostered that in me, and I just took to it,” Bates said from her home in West Palm Beach, Florida. “He taught me exotic words like ‘syzygy’ and ‘perspicacity.’ I was like a sponge. My mother, a teacher, taught me to spell phonetically and encouraged me no end.”
At 5, she read fluently enough to skip first grade. At 13, as an eighth grader at Milford Mill Junior-Senior High, she entered the first metro-wide competition of the National Spelling Bee for students ages 11 to 14. Early rounds winnowed the field of 10,000 to 36 finalists, who then squared off at Eastern High School.
“I’m sure I was nervous as heck,” said Bates who, nonetheless, outspelled them all. The word “crochet” clinched victory and earned her a trip to the nationals against 52 others in the District of Columbia.
The Sun paid her expenses and assigned a reporter to shadow her effort. Readers learned everything about the big day, from what time Bates arose (7 a.m.) to her breakfast fare (dry cereal, three bites of bacon and part of a bun). Then, in the auditorium of the U.S. Department of Commerce, before microphones, flashbulbs and TV cameras, she took the stage and began ticking off the judges’ words: effluvious, effrontery and esoteric … fenestrate, flagellate and hegemony … legerdemain, coalesce and peccadillo. Bates nailed them all.
“I was terrified,” she recalled. “It was intimidating, but I thought, ‘I’ve got to make good and make my family proud of me.’ ”
She made the final eight before missing the word “anodyne,” spelling it with an “i”.
“I was crushed,” she said. “I cried, but not onstage. I do have a competitive nature.”
While in the nation’s capital, Bates and her rivals received a tour of the city, including the FBI office, where she shook hands with director J. Edgar Hoover. But what sticks with her most was a meeting with then-Vice President Richard Nixon, at the Capitol.
“He [Nixon] was my hero,” she said. “I wanted to meet him so badly that we talked a security guard into letting me have a few minutes with him. I was so in awe, I was almost tongue-tied. He let me sit in his chair and play with the fountain pen in his office in the Senate. I remember learning afterward that he was late opening the Senate that day, because he was talking to me.”
Her return to school was “bittersweet,” Bates said:
“Besides the perfunctory congratulations, some kids were jealous; having done something I was proud of caused animosity between me and my peer group, and humbleness wasn’t one of my strong suits.”
Her vocabulary skills shared the stage with her voice. Bates attended the Peabody Conservatory of Music (now Peabody Institute) on scholarship with hopes of becoming an opera singer — she once performed with the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra — but sinus problems and chronic laryngitis ended her musical career. Instead, Bates became a wordsmith, taking jobs as a legal secretary and court transcriptionist before opening a business service of her own.
Nowadays, virtually no one remembers her time as The Sun’s first spelling champion, but she’s OK with that.
“It’s not something they’d build a statue to you for,” she said. So Bates keeps working, honing her clients’ grammar while pondering the fate of the English language.
“People can’t seem to distinguish between the use of [the words] ‘less’ and ‘few,’ she said. “And when I hear TV newscasters say ‘liberry’ [instead of library], I want to scream.”
Better, she said, that she continue to police both the written and spoken word.
“I’m still learning new words,” she said. “If I sit idle, I feel like a lump. Besides, what I do keeps me from losing my marbles.”