MISQUAH — Sixty-one children in grades three through six will sit down in the Lakeside gym Friday at 6:30 for the first Doris Knutson Spelldown, forty minutes after a homecoming coronation clears out of the same room and thirty minutes before a football game starts eighty feet away.

The words come from six manila folders of Friday spelling lists that Doris Knutson gave her fourth graders from 1974 until she retired in 2011, retrieved from a district office filing cabinet in August. The committee has drawn the competition list from them and has kept her practice of seeding each round with one word that has no business being there.

The format is hers as well. Spellers who miss sit down but stay on the floor, in chairs facing the stage, rather than returning to the audience — a thing she did for thirty-seven years and explained exactly once, to a colleague, as “so the last one standing is looking at her friends and not at a room of strangers.”

Phil Brekke pronounces. He was given copies on September 4 and has been, by his wife’s account, in the den saying words at a wall ever since. He has declined to be interviewed on the subject of his preparation four times and said Monday, when asked a fifth, that a pronouncer says the word, uses it in a sentence, says it again, and stops, and that the stopping is what takes practice.

Certificates are in green ink. The gym doors will be closed during rounds. Parking for the Spelldown is on the south side.

Mrs. Knutson died in March 2024. Her sister-in-law Dorothy, who has been the Mud Lake Association’s president through a membership of two and a summer of unexpected fame, will present the certificates.

The impossible words are already a subject. The committee has confirmed that the competition list includes at least four words drawn from the ones Doris Knutson used to salt her Friday lists with — quarantine, millinery, onomatopoeia and one the committee will not name — and that a fourth-grader who gets one of them is expected to miss it and is expected to be told, out loud, that it was one of hers.

Teachers who had her report that she never graded those words and kept a private list of which children attempted them. That list has not been found and the committee has stopped looking for it.

Sixty-one entrants is more than the gym committee planned around and roughly a fifth of the eligible grades. Twelve are third-graders. Doors open at 6:15 and the first round begins at 6:30.