Spelldown

Ever since she was "in the primer," honey-blonde Mattie Lou Pollard, 14, has gone to the same one-room schoolhouse near Thomaston, Ga. Her teacher at Sunnyside School had work on her hands, taking care of 34 boys & girls, eight grades and all subjects. But somehow the teacher, Mrs. George Phillips, had time to do right by Mattie Lou. Last week at the National Press Club in Washington, with mother and teacher looking on, Mattie Lou won the Scripps-Howard 20th National Spelling Bee, a $500 prize and a trip to New York. Said pleased-as-punch Schoolmarm Phillips: "It just makes me sick to think how many words we must have studied."

To win, Mattie Lou spelled down 34 other contestants, fittest survivors of 6,000,000 U.S. youngsters. Only nine of the finalists were boys, and not one finished in the money.

Ecstasy, Fuchsia. First to falter was West Virginia's Mary Conley, 12, who wanted to win so desperately that she muffed an easy word: desperately. (She made it "desparately.") The official pronouncer tried to soothe jangled nerves: "Relax, don't get excited. Have some fun." After that, things calmed down a bit, as contestants tripped on the tricky and the tough ones: remuneration, victuals, catarrh, integrity, censure, subtle, vaudeville, ukulele, bilious, ecstasy, granary, paraphernalia, hybrid, corollary, auricle, pugnacity, awry, diocese, quay, colossal, tutelage, idiosyncrasy, fuchsia, corroboration, rhinoceros, dysentery, desiccate, scintillate, proselyting, bellicose, knave, sarsaparilla.

After three hours, only Mattie Lou and husky, intense Sonya Rodolfo, 14, of Chicago, were left. The crowd rooted impartially for both. They liked Mattie Lou's "gittar" twang and the lickety-split way she bobbed up, spelled a word. Sonya, entering the contest for the first time, is a native of the Philippines.

Aileron, Maggoty. In the finals, Sonya spelled baccalaureate, saleratus and aileron correctly, drew a smile by asking whether the pronouncer meant an "ape or an underground worker" when he asked for guerrilla. Finally, she put two t's in maggoty, and was spelled down. When Mattie Lou got it right, and zipped off chlorophyll to clinch the championship, tears came to Sonya's eyes. Schoolmarm Phillips told her: "Sugar, don't you shed a tear, because you did so sweet." Champion Mattie Lou was crying a little, too. Said she to Sonya: "I wish you had won instead of me."

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