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<\/p>\nWhen 82-year-old Molly Martin took the podium to spell her final word at the inaugural First Light Books Spelling Bee on Saturday, the audience waited with bated breath. Out of nearly 40 contestants, only Martin and one other competitor remained, still battling wits after hours of spelling in the June heat. It was down to the buzzer.<\/p>\n
\u201cYour word is eudaemonia,\u201d said Sam Ackerman, First Light\u2019s book buyer and the competition\u2019s judge. \u201c[Meaning] happiness, well-being or human flourishing, especially in philosophical contexts.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cEudaemonia,\u201d Martin repeated. \u201cE-U-D-A-E-M-O-N-I-A.\u201d<\/p>\n
The crowd was on their feet \u2014 whooping, cheering, clapping. Even Martin\u2019s remaining competitor, Michael Williams, was applauding, grinning from ear to ear. Martin shook her head in seeming disbelief, surprised to find herself the crowd favorite.<\/p>\n
Williams went on to misspell his own final word \u2014 gobemouche, a gullible person, someone who believes things too easily \u2014 sealing Martin\u2019s victory. Toting a massive trophy, Martin thanked her husband from the podium.<\/p>\n
\u201cI guess we’ll go out and have some dinner and call the children on the East Coast,\u201d she said when asked how she would celebrate. \u201cI hadn’t even thought about it, because I really didn’t think I would win, for sure.\u201d<\/p>\n
The staff of First Light Books, a popular gathering place in Austin\u2019s Hyde Park neighborhood, had toyed around with the idea of hosting an adult spelling bee for years, according to Breezy Mayo, the shop\u2019s general manager. They hoped it would be another opportunity to create a tradition that brings the community together, much like the annual block party First Light hosts \u2014 and a chance to win \u201clocal glory.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cI feel like a lot of people from our team won a spelling bee from their elementary school days,\u201d Mayo said, \u201cso I think it\u2019s a kind of \u2018close-to-our-heart,\u2019 nostalgic childhood event for a lot of us.\u201d<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Olivia Aldridge<\/p>\n
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KUT News<\/p>\n
Contestant Ihor Gowda takes the podium at First Light’s adult spelling bee.<\/p>\n
Indeed, a number of the participants on Saturday self-identified as former spelling bee champs. Among their ranks were also multiple teachers, a dyslexia therapist, a comparative literature expert, and an \u201cundercover agent\u201d from the staff of BookPeople.<\/p>\n
Sitting under a tent in the bookstore\u2019s parking lot, Ackerman hit the ground running in Round 1 with some commonly misspelled words, such as harass, millennium and accommodate.<\/p>\n
\u201cI think actually some of the words in the first round were difficult, and it was because they would have cases where there were double letters,\u201d Martin said after her win. \u201c\u2018Accommodate\u2019 could be considered a difficult word because some people might not know where the double letters were, so that could be considered really a level-two word.\u201d<\/p>\n
First Light\u2019s competition also included a fresh twist: Audience members could pay to assign contestants \u201ccurses\u201d to layer on an extra challenge, with proceeds going to the literacy nonprofit BookSpring. For instance, in Round 2, a contestant received a \u201cbuzzer beater\u201d curse, requiring him to spell pomegranate in just 20 seconds. Others had to spell words backwards. A father-son duo received the \u201cdouble trouble\u201d curse, forcing them to spell two words instead of one.<\/p>\n
![\"People](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/06\/1782253513_379_.jpeg\"\/)
<\/p>\n
Olivia Aldridge<\/p>\n
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KUT News<\/p>\n
Spelling bee attendees could buy “curses” and “blessings” for participants at the so-called “Dept. of Mischief and Spell Checks” tent.<\/p>\n
But \u201cblessings\u201d were also on the menu. Audience members paid to give contestants a correct letter when they were stumped, or a second chance at spelling a tough word. For the lofty price of $250, a player could be resurrected after elimination.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe’re kind of just trying to introduce a little mischief and silliness into the \u2026 kind of classic spelling bee model,\u201d Mayo said. \u201cIt’s just supposed to feel really fun, and it’s supposed to be a little bit silly.\u201d<\/p>\n
But Molly Martin played the game straight, with no cheats. Coupled with her cool confidence at the podium, this won support from the crowd. When given the \u201cblessing\u201d of choosing from two words, Martin said she knew both \u2014 peroration and malapropism \u2014 and went with the first word.<\/p>\n
For Martin, the spelling bee was a return to a tradition she had missed \u2014 the annual adult spelling bee that the Austin Chronicle used to host at Threadgill\u2019s.<\/p>\n
\u201cI always loved to spell,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n
Martin credits her skills to a few factors: early educators who emphasized spelling; a familiarity with multiple languages, including German, Italian, French and Latin; and a long and varied career that exposed her to a rich potpourri of words. Ever the Renaissance woman, she\u2019s been a volunteer teacher in the Peace Corps, a surgical nurse, an inline skating instructor and a staffer in a gallery of African art.<\/p>\n
\u201cI\u2019m in my 80s, so I\u2019ve had a few years to do things,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n
These days, you can catch Martin inline skating at the Veloway in South Austin. She plans to display her trophy in her living room.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"When 82-year-old Molly Martin took the podium to spell her final word at the inaugural First Light Books…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":347883,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[11],"tags":[124168,132,134,133,3104,56349,55513,124166,90272,59455,124167,27],"class_list":["post-347882","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-austin","tag-adult-spelling-bee","tag-austin","tag-austin-headlines","tag-austin-news","tag-books","tag-bookshop","tag-bookstore","tag-first-light","tag-first-light-books","tag-hyde-park","tag-molly-martin","tag-texas"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/347882","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=347882"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/347882\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/347883"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=347882"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=347882"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=347882"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}