In 1965, the Beatles were still releasing albums, the U.S. was in Vietnam and Michael Kerpan Jr., then 12, won the Scripps National Spelling Bee.
A couple things have changed since then. He last attended the Bee in 1971, when his sister Dori competed.
“It was a very different era. The Bee has a lot more visibility than it did at that time,” Kerpan said. “I’m shocked. It’s four times as many spellers — huge!”
Today, Kerpan, 62, is a social security attorney in Boston. He's attending the Bee for the first time in four decades.
“It’s very fancy with commercials. We didn’t have any of that stuff," he said. "It was just all spelling so it moved faster.”
There was also no social media. Do newspaper clips count?
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Posted by 1965 National Spelling Bee Competitors on Monday, May 11, 2015
“When people misspelled words, they disappeared,” he said. “It was a very different feeling.”
For winning the 1965 Spelling Bee, Kerpan’s school in Tulsa got a brand new set of Encyclopedias. He was excused from spelling class for a year with an "A."
The cash prize back then was $1,000, Kerpan said. That’s about $7,500 in 2015 dollars — a far cry from today’s combined $38,600 in prizes.
“I saved it until graduate school and then it was all gone,” he said.
Like most Bee competitors, Kerpan had a bright future after the Bee. He judged at local Tulsa Bee competitions, went to college at Harvard and then University of Chicago for law school.
Kerpan is conflicted over the new vocabulary test requirement, introduced in 2013. Though it wasn’t required 40 years ago, Kerpan said he knew the definitions to most of his words anyway. It helped him to remember them.
“I knew the meaning to most of the words. Most of the people did not,” Kerpan said.
But today, he admits the words are much harder.
“One-third of them, I wouldn’t even be able to guess,” Kerpan said.
Gavin Stern is a national digital producer for the Scripps National Desk
