William Figueroa, the sixth-grader who outspelled Dan Quayle, helped David Letterman make the vice president look like a potato head.
The 12-year-old got $200 to appear on Wednesday night's show and tell a gleeful Letterman about the day Quayle visited a Trenton, N.J., school and had the boy add an "e" to "potato" after Figueroa spelled it correctly."I knew he was wrong," the boy said. "Since he's the vice president, I went and put the `e' on and he said, `That's right, now go sit down.' "
"Afterwards I went to the dictionary and there was potato like I spelled it. I showed the reporters the book and they were all laughing about what a fool he was."
Letterman asked Figueroa if he thought Quayle could spell "re-elected." The boy looked uncomfortable and didn't answer. He had a "no comment" when asked by Letterman who he would vote for - if he were old enough to vote.
Quayle, in an interview Wednesday with KRON-TV of San Francisco, said, "I should have caught the mistake on that spelling bee card. But as Mark Twain once said, `You should never trust a man who has only one way to spell a word.' "
The Associated Press located a reference to the quotation in a 1990 book by humor consultant Malcolm Kushner after two Twain experts said they could not locate it. Quayle assistant David Beckwith said he saw a citation in the Dictionary of Humorous Quotations, edited by Evan Esar. The reference book does not say where or when Twain made the quip, Quayle's office said.
Quayle had visited the Luis Munoz Rivera School in Trenton on Monday to promote the Weed and Seed program, which uses federal and state money to take back neighborhoods from drug dealers.
Trenton Mayor Douglas Palmer said that the flashcard had been written by an adult involved in the after-school program, not a teacher.