Volume 27 Issue 11
Inside:
Check Out The Hummingbird Jerk House!
May 17, 2019
See Neighborhood Magazine!
Now Celebrating 25 Years As New Tampa & Wesley Chapel’s Primary News Source!
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The Direct-Mail News Magazines Serving New Tampa & Wesley Chapel Since 1993! For the complete list of the neighborhoods that receive this publication by direct mail in New Tampa (zip code 33647), see page 46!
Tampa Palms teen Drew Falkowitz is the youngest graduate in USF history...
...while Nupur Lala reflects on her National Spelling Bee win 20 years ago.
First Look Inside:
STORIES BY JOHN C. COTEY
Lagoon Opens To All!
Epperson’s Crystal Lagoons® amenity is finally open to the public — for a price — and only for a limited time.
Page 8
H
E PRETENDED to be typing on a laptop for the television cameras. He stood in the middle of the University of South Florida’s Marshall Center, a bright ray of sunshine cutting through his green graduation robe as an array of cameras click-click-clickclicked. When he was asked to walk from one end to the other, he did, as more cameras followed him, photographing and filming his every move. “It’s kind of hard to look natural doing this,” Drew Falkowitz said, sheepishly smiling. On this day, though, it was the price of celebrity. In the center of campus, while his classmates studied while sipping from Starbucks cups, Drew was famous for a few hours — as he became the youngest graduate in the 63-year history of USF — and the story everyone wanted to tell. The 16-year-old Tampa Palms resident, who graduated on May 3 with a Bachelor of Science (B.S.) degree in Cellular & Molecular Biology — and still doesn’t have his driver’s license — found the whole experience even stranger than he had anticipated. “I figured, eventually, there would be press that would be generated around this,” said Drew, adding, “I’m not a very public person. I like staying low and not being in the spotlight all the time and having my three years of college and no one’s even talked to me until now has definitely been a breath of fresh air.” See “Drew” on page 5.
T
HE WORD was “logorrhea.” Nupur Lala bought some time by asking for it to be used in a sentence. A hint of a smile crossed her bespectacled face. Inside, she was bursting. Meena Lala watched her 14-year-old daughter intently. There had been one scare during the Scripps National Spelling Bee, but that was a few rounds back, on the word “poimenics,” maybe the only time she had gotten nervous. But not now. Not on this word. “L-O-G…” Odalys Pritchard remembers the moment like it was yesterday. She was on the edge of her seat, watching her Benito Middle School eighth grader on ESPN trying to spell her way into history. “I remember seeing the smile and the confidence when they gave her the word,” Pritchard says. “I knew she knew it.” “…O-R-R…” Right before she was given the final word, Nupur caught a glimpse of the event organizers preparing the trophy for the winner. “It felt like a dream,” she says, and she wasted no time, quickly spelling the winning word. “…H-E-A!” See “Nupur” on page 4.
Check Our Sports Page
Local high schools find success as the 2018-19 school year winds down.
Page 30
25-Year Retrospective
To celebrate publisher Gary Nager's 25 years of Neighborhood News, we threw a party and took a look back at some of the most notable front pages from years past.
Pages 33-36