Brainiac by Jennings Ken

Author:Jennings, Ken [Jennings, Ken]
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
ISBN: 1588365522
Publisher: Villard
Published: 2006-09-12T04:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 9

What is TRANSITION?

Bechuanaland became Botswana. Bob Dylan went electric. Cape Canaveral became Cape Kennedy (and then, quickly, Cape Canaveral again). A young María Martinez Molina Baeza became “Charo.” Dick Sargent replaced Dick York on Bewitched. Yes, the 1960s were a portentous time of upheaval and change. And trivia was in for a sea change as well.

The idea that general-knowledge questions and answers could be fun had been around for forty years, but there still was no trivia phenomenon as such—in fact, the word “trivia” to describe recreational quizzing didn’t even exist yet. A “question-and-answer game” was a book you read, or something that Ivy Leaguers in horn-rimmed glasses did on TV quiz shows. Trivia still wasn’t something America played.

That all changed in 1965. Dan Carlinsky and Ed Goodgold met during freshman week when both were entering Columbia University in the fall of 1962. By junior year, they were collaborating on humor pieces for the student paper, the Spectator, where Ed was the features editor.

Ed grew up in Brooklyn, but his parents had moved to the United States from Tel Aviv when he was six years old. An outsider at first, he learned to speak English by listening to radio and television: the Shadow, Captain Video, and Hopalong Cassidy were his tutors. “I’m a total product of American culture,” Ed tells me. I’ve tracked him down forty-odd years later; he’s now a dean’s assistant at the NYU School of Education.

The formative American pop culture of his early years stuck with Ed. When he and his friends were back at home from school, they’d spend summer nights sitting out on the stoops of their buildings reminiscing about the radio, TV, movie, comic, and sports heroes of their childhood. Remember the Hardy Boys and Buster Brown and Green Hornet? Remember Davy Crockett? Remember Haystacks Calhoun? Over time, the boys developed a kind of question-answering parlor game based on their childhood nostalgia. “What was the name of the eccentric Duckburg inventor in Uncle Scrooge comics?”1 “Oh, yeah? Where did Paladin live on Have Gun—Will Travel?”2

Ed’s friend Dan Carlinsky, now an author, agent, and freelance journalist living in Connecticut, remembers that this game continued at Columbia. Students would gather in the Gehrig Room, a common room in the dorms, under a large portrait of the “Iron Horse” himself (Gehrig was a Columbia alum) and lob nostalgia questions back and forth. The game was such a hit that, in February 1965, Ed Goodgold wrote about “trivia,” as he had taken to calling it, in his Spectator column, and proposed that Columbia should hold a trivia contest. The reaction was enthusiastic and immediate. “It was clear that this wasn’t just my experience,” Ed realized. “It was a phenomenon shared by many people growing up. That’s why it took off so quickly, because it wasn’t anything you had to teach people. They were already doing it! They just didn’t codify it.”

There was no shortage of applicants for the trivia contest that Dan and Ed threw together in the spring of 1965.

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