Top Speller

Behind the banquet table in St. Louis' Sheraton Hotel one night last week, a round-faced man sat beaming at the dozens of guests who had come to honor him. He was a man that a whole generation of schoolchildren should have known, for Waldo P. Johnson had revolutionized the spelling book.

Before he began his revolution, just 25 years ago, "W.P." was school superintendent of Fornfelt, Mo. (pop. 1,200). Then one day he heard that the school board was considering somebody else for the job. Face to face with politics, Waldo Johnson resigned.

Blackboard Labor. He took a job as traveling salesman for a textbook publishing company, and it was then that he got his big idea. In classroom after classroom, he had seen children laboriously copying off spelling drills from the blackboard. From his own experience, he knew that the teacher had probably spent hours thinking up the exercises. W.P. began to wonder whether there might not be a simpler way to carry on the drill.

Soon, with the help of a friend named Russell Sharp, W.P. had devised a book that seemed to be the answer. Inexpensively bound in brown paper, it was a workbook filled with simple sentences from Dickens and Longfellow as well as phrases about Sharp's pet dog Fogy. "I didn't know anything about copyright in those days," says W.P., "so I just printed in each of the books 'copyright applied for.' " Then, he began selling.

His mail-order business grew so fast that within a few months he had filled his basement with books to be mailed. When his wife protested that she hadn't enough room to do the washing, he moved his Webster Publishing Co. (named after Noah and Daniel) to two rat-infested rooms on the riverfront. Within three years, Webster's sales amounted to $102,000. By 1928, they had doubled. By 1931, W.P. had another idea.

Texas to the Congo. It was as simple as the first: to publish a speller that would include pronunciation, meaning and usage, with exercises to match. The new speller and workbook swept the nation. Over the years, every schoolchild in Texas and Alabama, and half of those in ten other states were learning their spelling and vocabulary simultaneously. The Webster books found their way into such big cities as New York, to the Philippines and Alaska, and via missionaries to China, India, and the Belgian Congo.

Today, after 25 years, W.P.'s Webster Publishing Co. of St. Louis is at the top of the U.S. speller business and his idea has spread. Other publishers have long since begun turning out workbooks like Johnson's. Last week, at W.P.'s silver anniversary banquet, President Robie D. Marriner of the American Textbook Publishers Institute called the Johnson workbook "as significant as any contribution of teacher training itself during the last 25 years." To W.P., it was significant for another reason: it just went to show, he told banqueters, that a man can start with $100 and end up with a million, just by minding his p's and q's.

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