By PAUL LORENZ
paul.lorenz@mcleansborotimesleader.com
McLEANSBORO — Indeed, the fourth time was a charm.
Eighth-grader Andrew Wellen, representing Hamilton County Unit 10 School District for the fourth straight year, broke through to qualify Saturday for the 2010 Scripps National Spelling Bee in Washington, D.C.
Wellen won the Tri-State Spelling Bee at Harrison High School in Evansville, Ind., to qualify for the national event.
Monday, his victory was announced at school and “quite a few people congratulated me,” Wellen said.
And people in the Hamilton County village of Dahlgren, where Wellen and his family live, are excited for him, too.
“We’ve had a lot of phone calls over the last couple of days from people congratulating him,” Andrew’s mother, Debbie, said Monday.
The Hamilton County Junior High School student’s Tri-State win returns the local school district to the national spelling bee for the first time since 1997. Aaron Karcher — for whom the county’s Aaron Karcher Memorial Spelling Bee is named — qualified for the national event in both 1996 and ’97.
Wellen won the regional spelling bee in the 20th round, correctly spelling the word jitney after runner-up Kate Marburger of Warrick County, Ind., stumbled on her word in Round 19.
“I didn’t know what it meant, but I thought I had seen it before,” Wellen said of the winning word.
Twenty-eight county spelling bee winners from Illinois, Indiana and Kentucky competed in the Tri-State Bee.
Wellen won the county spelling bee as a fifth- and sixth-grader at Dahlgren School, then again as a seventh-grader at the junior high here before making it four wins in a row Feb. 4.
With three years of experience at the Tri-State under his belt, Wellen said that although the words at the regional spelling bee may have been “a little bit harder this year, studying the previous three years made it easier to do the fourth one.”
At the Tri-State, Wellen said, more spellers — including himself — took advantage of the options to ask for a word’s language of origin or definition before trying to spell it.
“I think he’s figured out that certain languages don’t use certain letters, or use some more than others,” his mother said.
Wellen received several prizes after his Tri-State win, including a dictionary, trophy and savings bond.
In addition, the Evansville Courier & Press newspaper, sponsor of the regional event, will cover expenses for Wellen and one adult to accompany him to Washington, D.C., May 30 through June 6. The spelling bee itself is June 2 through 4.
But the Wellens — including Andrew’s father, John, brother Nicholas, 16, and sister Emily, 12 — intend to make a family vacation of it, Debbie Wellen said.
It will be Andrew’s first visit to the nation’s capital.
“I’m excited about it,” he said.
