David Larson sat in what he calls “the solarium” in his 1919 home in downtown Conway. Most people would call it a sunroom, but not the Faulkner County Spelling Bee guru.
“It’s such a nice room; we wanted a distinctive title for it,” he said.
Larson, a retired Hendrix College history professor, was the pronouncer Saturday — if all went as planned — for the 32nd time for the Faulkner County Spelling Bee.
It still annoys him that when he grew up in the small town of Park River, North Dakota, only the kids in the rural, one-room schoolhouses got to participate in spelling bees, not the “city kids” like him, he said. He recalled that he took part in impromptu spelling bees in his class, and he remembers missing the word vacuum — but so did all his classmates.
Larson’s love of language, and perhaps a little bit of stubbornness, led him to pick out the “most exotic” language he could find in the Northwestern University catalog — Russian — after his adviser suggested French.
“I loved it,” he said. “It was like entering a new world.”
Larson majored in Russian studies because, when he was forced to pick a major his sophomore year, that was about all he could choose with the courses he’d taken and still graduate on time.
“It was so cool when you finally find your heart’s desire,” he said.
After graduate school at Indiana University in Bloomington, he taught history at an Ohio college that went broke and closed. He went back to Indiana to the graduate-school office and jokingly asked the department secretary, “I don’t guess there are any openings for a Russian historian that have come across your desk?”
She reached into a drawer and plucked out one — it was at Hendrix College in Conway. Although he’d taught one semester in Fayetteville just before then, Larson said he probably made an unhappy face about the prospect of moving to Arkansas.
“Her back straightened up. She said, ‘I’ll have you know, Dr. Larson, my sister and brother-in-law graduated from this school, and if you don’t apply, you’re a fool,’” he said.
Larson took her advice and was “extremely pleasantly surprised” when he got on campus. He got the job and started in 1975.
“The job description was enough to kill most people, I think,” Larson said.
It consisted of teaching Russian history, Chinese history, European history, historiography, communism, fascism and democracy, and international relations. He was married to his wife, Marilyn, and their daughter, Liz, was about 9 at the time.
“I’m one of those few people who was lucky enough to fall into a profession he just loved,” he said. “Students at Hendrix — some of them were a bit of a challenge, but they were bright and caught on quickly. It was fun teaching them.”
Larson has been retired for almost 10 years. During his 31-year career at the college, Larson worked under four Hendrix presidents: Roy Shilling Jr., Joe Hatcher, Ann Die and Tim Cloyd. When faculty members at conferences would complain about their administrators, Larson said he would tell them, “Here at Hendrix, we sort of like the president; the dean is a pretty good chap.”
At Hendrix, it was, “We hired you to do a job — now go do it,” he said.
Since his retirement, he and his wife of 52 years as of Feb. 14 have traveled a bit, and he works in their yard, evidenced by the scratches up and down his forearms from the morning’s weed-pulling. He also volunteers as a teacher through LifeQuest of Arkansas, a nonprofit organization. One day last week, he was teaching Chinese history in Little Rock to a group of adults.
His longtime love affair with spelling bees started as a favor to his wife.
Marilyn started teaching at an elementary school about a year after the family moved to Conway and was charged with putting together the Faulkner County Spelling Bee. She asked him to volunteer to be the pronouncer.
“Every year after the spelling bee, she’d take me over to Stoby’s, and we’d have breakfast,” he said.
The Faulkner County Spelling Bee is sponsored by the Conway School District and coordinated by Charlotte Green, supervisor of gifted-and-talented and Advanced Placement classes.
Green said she was almost at a loss for words to describe what Larson meant to the event.
“Oh, my goodness, where to begin? He started just to help out his wife. … I think it says a lot about him. Not only is he willing to help family; he’s willing to help the community. I think that describes David Larson,” Green said.
“He’s willing to pour into other people; he’s very talented. Many people are talented, but they don’t take the time to pour into other people. He explained things to me to make sure it was successful, and that speaks to him. He takes the time, and he gives of himself.”
And, Green added, “he’s got the perfect voice for it.”
Larson, who said he speaks Midwestern English, tells the children to listen closely to the words and ask for definitions if they need them.
“I have to warn them at times, ‘I pronounce these words a lot more clearly than you’re used to hearing them,’” he said.
The younger children, third-graders especially, “are just terrified” during the competition, he said. Larson said his goal is to make sure he and the judges are “kind to the spellers.”
He said he felt heartbroken for one child, who had studied the provided list of words with his mother. The child got down to the final rounds of the competition and misspelled “awry.” Larson said he thinks it is because the mother mispronounced it when they studied. “He deserved to win,” Larson said.
This will be the third year that Larson has served as the pronouncer for the Arkansas State Spelling Bee sponsored by the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette.
In a world of spell-check software and Google, why have a spelling bee?
“Two things: One, you prepare for a spelling bee; you learn how to do things right, and you focus on doing things right,” Larson said. “I’m old-fashioned enough that I still believe in doing things the right way.”
Second, Larson said, a spelling bee “recognizes the good kids instead of the bad kids, and I think that’s real important.”
At the time of the interview, Larson said he had received from Green the “super secret list of words” for the spelling bee.
Larson found a word he has — gasp! —
mispronounced his entire life. The word “gibbous,” as in “a gibbous moon,” is pronounced with a J sound, not a hard G, he said.
“It’s never been on the list,” he said. Even the spelling-bee guru can learn something after all these years.
On the rare occasion that Larson comes across a word he doesn’t know, he goes upstairs, past the books shoved into every space between the banisters of the stairs and more shelves of books, to the Webster’s Third International massive dictionary that is
displayed on a stand.
“I’ve got a fascination with words,” he said.
Senior writer Tammy Keith can be reached at (501) 327-0370 or tkeith@arkansasonline.com.