Spelling Champ: `My Heart Was Thumping' -- Seattle Girl Wins Bee By Mastering `Fibranne'

Two years ago Amy Dimak's coach made her a promise: He wouldn't retire until she'd had a chance to be a champion.

The 13-year-old Seattle girl won the National Spelling Bee yesterday in Washington, D.C., and Theodore Glim, her 74-year-old coach, said he's ready to hang up his dictionary.

``She was well-prepared and very poised, and I'm so proud of her,'' Glim said of his latest spelling whiz.

Dimak is Glim's third national champion. In 1957 and 1959, when he was a teacher in Denver, two of his students won the contest.

Since then, Glim, a retired administrator in the Shoreline and Renton school districts, has had several runners-up, but never another bee champion, before Dimak, a student at St. Mark's school north of Seattle.

Dimak won the two-day competition, the 63rd annual National Spelling Bee, against 226 other children between the ages of 10 and 14.

She defeated the runner-up, 13-year-old Eric Enders of El Paso, Texas, by correctly spelling the word ``fibranne,'' which refers to fabric fibers. She didn't know what it meant, she said in an interview later, ``but I knew it was French and I figured it out.''

Dimak got her chance after Enders flubbed the spelling of ``douanier,'' a word of French origin that refers to a customs officer.

``I knew I had won when he missed it, because I knew it,'' Dimak said. ``I was nervous toward the end, but I just took it easy, I guess. My heart was thumping.''

Dimak first spelled douanier correctly, then went on to win by spelling fibranne. Both words played directly into the spelling-bee gameplan developed by Glim as a coach and spelling-bee judge for more than 30 years.

The educator and writer of language books for children has spent his spare time helping good spellers like Dimak become great spellers.

One of his tricks is to take a foreign language, such as French, and to teach the children its patterns so they can spell derivative English words. It paid off when Dimak knew to add the final ``e'' to fibranne.

She knew douanier because Glim had cautioned her before the final competition about the word, which he said often comes up in spelling bees. He was afraid she might get it and confuse it with a similar word.

Dimak trained like an athlete for the contest, studying the strangest words Glim could find in the dictionary. She met with the coach for two hours at a time, three afternoons a week after school. Other children started this year's class, Dimak said, but by March all but Dimak had dropped out of one competition or another.

Dimak began entering spelling bees as a first-grader. She's done well in local contests in other years, but this was her first national competition.

She qualified for the national finals April 7 when she won The Seattle Times Regional Spelling Bee. The winning word that day was ``bocaccio, '' a rockfish found on the Pacific coast from British Columbia to southern California.

Dimak was accompanied to the competition by Glim, her father Brian, an electrical engineer, and mother Mary, a homemaker.

As the top speller, Dimak will take home a $5,000 prize, a trophy and special prizes from Encyclopaedia Britannica. The program sponsors - 200 daily, weekly and Sunday newspapers - awarded a total of $26,550 to the top contestants.

Dimak said her prize will go into a bank account for college. A good student in math as well as spelling, she plans to study to become a teacher or astronaut.

Six young people from Washington competed in the bee. Courtney Mertes, a seventh-grader at Orchard Middle School in Wenatchee, survived three spelling rounds Wednesday to advance to yesterday's finals, but bowed out in the fourth round when she stumbled on the word ``mansuetude,'' which means gentleness.

The other five lost during the second round of spelling Wednesday. They were:

-- J.K. Villich of Kennewick, a seventh-grader at Park Middle School, who lost on the word ``cerography,'' the process of engraving on a wax-covered metal plate used for printing.

-- Bob Cordell of Bremerton, a seventh-grader at Fairview Junior High School, who lost on ``heteroclite,'' meaning abnormal.

-- Kevin Maas of Mount Vernon, an eighth-grader at Mount Vernon Christian School, who lost on ``dolorimetry,'' a method of measuring pain.

-- Lori Elder of Sumner, a sixth-grader at Bonney Lake Elementary School in Pierce County, who lost on ``dolcissimo,'' a soft or sweet sound in music.