Out in Greene County, Iowa

After 40 years of winning the local spelling bee, Jefferson's Rick Morain finally meets his match!

By CHUCK OFFENBURGER
June 16, 2008
JEFFERSON, IOWA

Day after day last week, there were jaw-dropping news stories breaking across Iowa – killer tornadoes, devastating floods, bridges collapsing, corn prices jumping to a record $7 per bushel.

Well, our Greene County seat town of Jefferson had a big news story of its own break Saturday afternoon. Nobody died as a result. What happened actually won’t change life here much. Many people, even local people, are still unaware of it. Nevertheless, it seems like a big one to us.

So, what was it?

Rick Morain, 67, our spelling bee champion who has been undefeated for nearly 40 years, finally got beat.

Rick Morain, Jefferson newspaperman, is a wordsmith who had won the adult division of the local spelling bee every time he entered, for almost 40 years! He never lost -- until Saturday, June 14.

It happened in the annual bee sponsored by the Greene County Historical Society as part of Jefferson’s Bell Tower Festival. It was late afternoon in the hushed Greene County Community Center, where retired school teacher Lois Lawson was calling out the words to be spelled, as she’s done for years. Competition in the adult division, which started with six people, was down to two.

“Adversative,” Lawson said slowly, carefully pronouncing the word for a very focused Morain. It’s an odd word, to be sure, “expressing contrariety, opposition or antithesis,” my dictionary tells me. Morain paused, then began to spell the difficult word, just as he has done in five different decades in this spelling bee, and just as he does so many times in his job as editor and publisher of the Jefferson Bee and Herald newspapers.

“A-d-v-e-r-s-i-t-i-v-e,” he said slowly, cautiously and yet confidently, too.

The four Jefferson-Scranton Schools faculty members who were serving as judges – Dave Heupel, Kirsten Carman, Diane Piepel and Jim North – suddenly looked up from their words lists, glanced nervously at Morain and then gave each other blank stares.

It fell then to chief judge North to shake his head back and forth sideways, indicating “no,” instead of up and down, which would have indicated “yes.” Other than that, no spelling bee official said anything. Kim Braun, another teacher who was coordinating the event, said “it seemed completely quiet, but Barb Gorman, a retired teacher who was the representative from the Historical Society, was sitting there beside me and did kind of react. She snapped her head around to me like she wanted to say, ‘Oh, man!’ ”

Shawn Pavlik, the only other speller still in the field, recalled later that “after Rick misspelled the word, I think I heard a couple of people sitting behind us go, kind of softly, ‘Oooooo!’ But that was the only reaction I noticed.”

The 38-year-old Pavlik, a Jefferson-Scranton High alumnus, was back from Cedar Rapids for his 20-year class reunion held during the festival. When he was growing up here, he entered youth divisions of the spelling bee “and I think I came in first in my age division four or five times, but this year was the first time I’ve entered it since I was in high school.”

He was well aware of Morain’s extraordinary record in the contest. “Rick is sort of the white whale of the spelling bee,” Pavlik said. “He never seemed to get beat. I’ve got old newspaper clippings with photos of the age division winners in different years, and in some of those pictures, Rick and I are standing next to each other.”

Pavlik is a high school math teacher, who has been teaching recently in the Benton Community Schools in Van Horne but is moving this summer to the Des Moines area so for a new teaching position at Saydel High School.

“I guess I became a good speller because my mother, Lou Cory-Myers, who still lives in Jefferson, encouraged me to enter the spelling bee back when I was in fifth grade,” Pavlik said. “I was intimidated as heck that first year, because I was competing with sixth, seventh and eighth graders. But I did all right, and then when I figured out I could do it, I got a lot more comfortable. After that, I think my spelling ability comes from being an avid reader. I read from 30 minutes to two hours per day, and when you do that, you pick up on spelling and vocabulary and grammar.”

So there he was on Saturday afternoon, after about 10 rounds of difficult words had whittled the adult division of the spelling bee to Morain and himself, he realized the championship was his if he could correctly spell the word that “the white whale” had just missed. “I had the good fortune of spelling it after Rick tried,” Pavlik said. “Had I gone before him, I would’ve probably spelled it the same way he did. But when he missed it, I pretty well knew what change to make.”

He spelled it right: “A-d-v-e-r-s-a-t-i-v-e.”

North and the other judges began shaking their heads up and down, “Yes.”

And after a reign covering 40 years, Morain was no longer the spelling bee’s adult division champion!

Lois Lawson, the person pronouncing the words, could barely believe it. “I’d gotten to the point that if I see Rick Morain there, I just figure he’s going to win it,” she said.

Morain took it graciously, of course.

“Afterward, we shook hands and Rick said, ‘Nice job, Shawn, congratulations!’ ” Pavlik said. “He was very pleasant. I told him I’d come back next year and try to defend my title, so he’d get another chance, and he said, ‘Yep! Let’s get it on!’ ”