California’s first spelling bee champion puts her title to work every day in SF

Whenever the calendar flips to May, Dr. Raga Ramachandran knows to expect the phone to ring a little more often than usual. But the calls coming in aren’t related to anything about her work in UC San Francisco’s pathology department, where she primarily studies liver and gastrointestinal diseases.

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No, these are all tied to what Ramachandran did when she was 14 years old: become the first Californian to win the Scripps National Spelling Bee.

Thursday is the championship round for this year’s version of the spelling competition that started in 1925. It’ll be the culmination of millions of spellers who mostly started at their elementary and grade schools, climbing through a variety of smaller tournaments to reach the finals in Washington, D.C.

Over the decades, the spelling bee has grown immensely popular, thanks to national television broadcasts and even feature films on the topic. But one person who won’t be watching on Thursday night is Ramachandran.

“It’s a little nerve-racking when I do watch it live because I know how hard these kids work,” Ramachandran said, adding that it’s easier for her to watch highlights after the competition.

Born in India, Ramachandran’s parents moved their family around in her early childhood but settled in the 1980s in Carmichael, a suburb in Sacramento County to the east of the state’s capital. As an admittedly “pretty bookish” kid, she won her first spelling bee at her school in the fourth grade, then learned about the multilayered competition structure — from schools to district competitions to regional or state level and, finally, the national spelling bee. 

From there, she went to work, wanting to do her best in the competition. She studied old word sheets from prior years’ spelling bees, found books of unique words and even used word-a-day tear-away calendars. It led to a strong performance as a sixth grader in 1986, finishing in 36th place at the national finals. But the next year was a little different.

“Around seventh grade, it got a little out of hand for me,” Ramachandran recalled. “I was looking for difficult words everywhere. We would go out to restaurants, and I’d write down the names of the pastas and the wines because they’d ask those kinds of words.”

That year didn’t go her way, leading her to “lighten up” before her eighth grade year. She trusted her knowledge and studying skills and didn’t want to overdo it. That path got her back to Washington, D.C., for the finals, and after just a handful of successful spells, she was among the final contenders — and then in the final two. 

In the 60 prior iterations of the Spelling Bee, a Californian had never won it. But in 1988, the final two were both from the Golden State: Ramachandran from Northern California and Victor Wang from Camarillo in Southern California. As a wire story at the time broke down, the two had a nearly hourlong final showdown. Organizers gave the duo some unbelievably tough words that both missed: balmacaan (a loose-fitting overcoat) and caoutchouc (a French word for natural rubber). Wang once quipped, “Who makes up these words?” and earned laughs from the crowd.

At the time, a competitor had to spell their opponent’s missed word correctly, then spell a second word correctly to win the crown. Wang missed stertorous — an adjective for a harsh sound, like a snore or gasp — but Ramachandran got it right. Then, she got the word she would remember forever: elegiacal, an adjective for poetry that is mournful or sorrowful. She nailed it for the title, taking home $1,500 and the big trophy.

“It’s one of those special moments that I will never forget,” Ramachandran said. “I realized there are so many great spellers at that level, and a lot of it is luck of the draw. You could know the word that the speller before you got and the word the person after you got, but you could miss your own word. That’s just the nature of the competition.”

There wasn’t the national TV audience of the modern era, but there was still a media circuit for Ramachandran right after the win. She was flown to New York, going on “Good Morning America” with then-host Joan Lunden, a Sacramento-area native herself. She also went on “The Tonight Show,” which her parents loved, on a night when Jay Leno was filling in for Johnny Carson. That love shined brightest once she returned to the West Coast, too.

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“In Sacramento, people were very proud because I was the first person in California to win,” Ramachandran said. “Every once in a while, I would go to the doctor’s office, and a receptionist would recognize my name. That was fun.”

She said the buzz lasted “a few weeks” but faded as the summer got underway, and she began pivoting to her ambitious academic career post-bee. She only needed three years to graduate high school and started at Stanford as a 16-year-old. She got her bachelor’s and master’s degrees on the Farm in four years before going to Philadelphia to get a doctorate and medical degree from the University of Pennsylvania. After completing her studies there, she came back out West to UCSF, where she’s been ever since. All throughout that journey, she made a point to keep the national spelling bee title on her CV and resume.

“Generally, they say not to put anything from that far back [on there], but it’s a very unique accomplishment that I am actually quite proud of,” Ramachandran said. “Everybody remembers the word that they missed in a certain spelling bee. I’ve certainly lost enough spelling bees. I remember those words too. So it’s just a great conversation starter.”

Nowadays, Ramachandran lives in the Haight with her husband and daughter, who is graduating high school this year, and she does what she calls “behind the scenes” work at UCSF. As a surgical pathologist, she is trained to evaluate tissues that get removed in surgeries — typically smaller ones like a mole or a colon polyp, but there can also be larger ones — and study them on a microscopic level to look for diseases. She happily reports that most findings are “healthy and normal.” But in the event that there is something concerning, she writes reports on the next steps and, in her eyes, keeps putting her spelling bee skills to use.

“You have to be a good writer because you have to write reports that are clear and concise and to the point,” Ramachandran said. “So I think just the practice with language and words has certainly helped me in the writing aspect of my work. I don’t have to use those kinds of big words, necessarily, but it’s made me think about how to communicate clearly.”

It also helps her teach the next generation, as she is UCSF’s director of medical education. Some students end up finding out about her past achievements, but she doesn’t have any photos or relics in her office — the trophy is back at her father’s house in Sacramento. And while she is happy to talk about her own accomplishment when asked, she also brought up unprompted that her younger sister Sohini also made it to the national spelling bee, too. (Sohini is now a professor of biology and computer science at Brown University, with one very proud older sister.)

She also didn’t tell her own daughter about it — until a trip back to Washington, D.C., revealed it on accident. In 2014, the family took a trip to the nation’s capital and visited a Smithsonian museum that had an exhibit on the Indian diaspora. Unbeknownst to Ramachandran, a portion of that exhibit was focused on Indian American spellers and featured a photo of her win from back in 1988.

“She was little, and she saw my picture and said, ‘Mom, that’s you. What happened?’” Ramachandran said with a laugh. “She found out totally accidentally, and she thought it was great.” 

Mom and daughter stopped to pose together for a photo with the old photo then, making one moment that has lasted a lifetime for Ramachandran into two.