The annual duck celebration in Stuttgart, Ark., was winding down -- the Queen Mallard beauty pageant was over and the world's best duck dog had been determined. Then Daniel Duke stepped onto the Main Street stage.
Duke, a teenage veteran of more than a dozen duck-calling contests, wowed the judges with his renditions of the four required blasts: hail, feed, comeback and mating. Duke, from the nearby town of Brinkley, triumphed -- and bagged one of the nation's more unusual college scholarships.
"I knew I had a shot at it," the 19-year-old said of the $1,500 award, which he hopes to use to attend the University of Arkansas. "And I think it's pretty great you can get a scholarship for calling ducks."
Others might, too.
With the cost of a college education rising relentlessly, students are scrambling for scholarships. Some win awards based on financial need or exceptional smarts. Some are gifted athletes. Others get help from foundations, companies or service clubs.
But some, like Duke, are able to snag scholarships because of less conventional talents, interests or physical attributes.
For certain scholarships, for instance, it might be helpful to be tall or left-handed, short or heavy. Or to be skilled at designing and crafting stylish garments made of wool -- or duct tape. Or to be deeply interested in the study of water bugs or winemaking, funerals or fungus.
Each issue, each interest, it seems, has its own awards.
There are scholarships for welders, fly fishers and pie makers, for golf caddies and skateboarders. There is one for pagans and another for parapsychologists. There is even one sponsored by fans of Klingons, the fictional bumpy-headed aliens of "Star Trek" fame.
One endowment fund is for needy music students who can sing or play the national anthem "with sincerity." Another seeks clean-living young people who do "not participate in strenuous athletic contests." (An occasional Frisbee toss is probably OK, its gatekeepers say.)
"Some of these [scholarships] are so specific, it's like you're going to find one that says the kid has to have one brown eye and one blue eye," said Delisa Falks, associate director of financial aid at Texas A&M University. Even at that, she added, chuckling, "you probably could."
Such offbeat scholarships, privately funded and often from bequests, tend to be small, bringing a recipient anywhere from $500 to a few thousand dollars.
