From the Improvement Era, April 1957 –

My Pal Joey

By Harold Heifer

Joey said he didn’t want me to say anything about it, what really happened, but I can’t let everybody go on thinking what they do, so I have decided to tell everything. After all, he is my best friend and, well, I just can’t let Joey go through life and have people think what they do about him. Maybe Joey wasn’t such a hot speller, but still he never was the other thing they thought.

To tell the truth about it, Joey was a pretty awful speller. He was good about a lot of things, playing third base, collecting frogs, walking across Mrs. Foster’s fence, and so forth, but he just didn’t seem to have much of a knack for spelling, only he probably would have spelled it nack or even nak. One time he spelled pneumonia newmoanyeah and Eskimo askamoe.

Still, he was my friend and I always stuck by him. And I must say he did improve after Jenny Winters came to the classroom.

It didn’t come natural, you understand. His brow would get all furrowed up and something like a pain would come into his eyes. Sometimes when he went into one of these trances, I’d get the curious feeling that some of the atoms in Joey’s scalp, under all that pressure and concentration, would suddenly go up in little mushroom puffs. But the interesting thing was that he was beginning to spell more and more of the words right.

Of course, what he did was study real hard at home. I’d come by his house sometimes, and he’d be sitting in the crotch of the elm tree in his front yard, nibbling away on a pear or a banana or an apple, which he once spelled appull, and frowning away at a spelling book.

I really don’t know what Joey saw in this Jenny Winters. She was just a girl. Her freckles weren’t even on straight. They were every which way.

Still, I guess that’s the way things go. Joey combed his hair practically every day, and he generally wore clean shirts, and even if he had only three or four patches in his trousers, he’d want to wear another pair.

But the most amazing thing of all, of course, was the way he began to spell pretty good. It reminded me sometimes of a bear I saw at a carnival on roller skates. You could hardly believe it, and you were sure he’d fall smackdab on what bears fall down on any second, but still, there Joey was getting away with it anyway. He seemed to be dying a thousand deaths, but somehow he did manage to spell quite a few words right, and those he missed he didn’t miss by the big country mile and then some, that he used to miss ’em by.

Of course, the whole thing was that this Jenny Winters was quite a spelling whiz. In fact, at the spelling bee we had every Friday she nearly always won and usually without too much p-e-r-s-p-i-r-a-t-i-o-n.

I suppose this was sort of unusual, someone being so good all the time with spelling. She didn’t wear glasses either or have braces on her teeth, like most girls who are pretty smart. In fact, she swung a bat pretty good, considering she was a girl, and she had pretty good lizard collection, so maybe it was sort of understandable, Joey feeling a little fuzzy-wuzzy about her. Anyhow, you had to say it could be worse.

It was clear, of course, that Joey was just trying to impress Jenny by showing her what a good speller he was. I’ll never forget the day he spelled a-n-t-h-r-a-c-i-t-e, just like that, practically without a bobble. Miss Lashley, our teacher, just stared at him as if her mouth had become unhinged and she’d never be quite all right again. Somehow it was kind of touching.

Quite a few of us just couldn’t get over it, but Joey even reached the point where he’d stay up in the Friday spelling bees right up to the last four or five remaining ones. And when the announcement was made about the big city-wide spelling bee coming up, Joey studied his spelling books more than ever. I’d not only see him with them in the crotch of the elm tree, but I once even saw him hanging from the rail of his veranda by his feet, like a bat, with a spelling book open beneath him for him to look at — right while he was dangling.

Still, nobody figured he had a chance to get anywhere in this spelling bee. The best spellers in all the schools of the city entered it, and everybody always did his very best because there were big prizes for the winner, such as a free season’s movie pass and going to camp and all that, and you got your picture in the paper, too, with a great big smile on your face.

Joey still spelled as if he were being tortured to bring the right letters of the alphabet out of him, and his face would get awfully red and sometimes it looked like he was getting apoplexy, which he once spelled applelaxy, but somehow he managed to blurt out the right letters.

It was really kind of fascinating; I don’t know why but it made me think of a bull suddenly taking charge of things at a bull ring and waving a red flag at the toreador, and toying with him instead of vice versa. Anyway, the bull sure seemed to be a surprise dark horse, if you know what I mean. He seemed to lose some teeth every time he did it, but he kept getting the right letters of the alphabet out somehow or other.

Anyway, speller after speller went down from one school after another but Joey kept hanging on. You could tell it just meant everything to him, his heart and soul and the rest of his anatomy, which I hate to tell you how he once spelled, was in it. And, believe it or not and strange as it seems and lo and behold, there he was up there right up to the last, in the finals!

Being as the other one left was Jenny Winters, our school couldn’t lose, but somehow it was very dramatic anyway. I guess I’ll never forget it. Joey standing up there on the platform so stiff and straight and red-faced and Jenny so relaxed with a little smile almost half-hidden among all those freckles of hers. And then the moderator called out the word “conscientious.” Joey gulped so many times that it looked like he was going to have an applelaxy as well as an apoplexy, but he finally got it out, c-o-n-s-c-i-e-n-t-i-o-u-s. And since Jenny had already spelled it c-o-n- s-c-i-e-n-t-o-u-s and Joey’s way turned out to be right, he was the city-wide spelling champ!

As soon as the judge announced he was the winner, tears burst into his eyes and, of all the luck, the newspaper photographers happened to catch him just then, and his picture came out that way in all the papers with stories telling about the tears of joy in the new spelling champion’s eyes at his happiness of winning.

This may sound all right when you read it, even sort of poetic like maybe, but in the set that Joey and I belong to only losers, if anybody, are supposed to cry, not winners. Why, you’d have to be practically a sissy to cry when you won something. To tell the truth, I found myself looking somewhat doubtfully at my old buddy.

The odd thing was, though, that Joey seemed to look kind of miserable even two or three days after. And that was really carrying things too far. In fact, I told Joey so.

“You dumb cluck!” he cried. “I didn’t want to win. I tried to lose. I wanted her to win. I thought I was spelling that word wrong.”

I just stared at Joey for a moment and then I said, “Real quick, Joey, spell cluck.”

“K-l-u-k,” he said.

I realized there and then it was the same old Joey. My heart went out to him. I don’t know how I could have ever doubted him.