Photo by Elliot J. Sutherland/The Ottawa Herald

Helen Belt, 87, flips through an old dictionary last week at her home in Lane. Belt, who recently won the first East Central/Southeast Kansas Senior Spelling Bee at Mound City and will compete in the Kansas Senior Spelling Bee Oct. 16 in Salina, said she used the dictionary as long ago as the 1940s. She qualified for the state spelling bee three years in a row when she was a child in the mid-1930s.