Happy Birthday to the Jeopardy!
Well, friends of game shows, today is the day. Fifty-eight years ago on this date, America’s Favorite Quiz Program made its debut. Now in its seventh decade, it remains an incomparable slice of Americana. Many happy returns on this JeoparDAY!
Thank goodness for this show. Started watching it back in the early 1970s before we could even understand it. The parental unit was big on it, and kids generally like doing and imitating what their parents do. This led to a fascination with the show (the board game version, the theme music, etc.) and with other game shows.
Soon we were watching the old It’s Academic’ scholastic quiz on WNBC-TV Ch. 4 out of New York City. Dad was impressed with the boys from Delbarton, those Benedictine-schooled lads out of Morristown, one town over from our town, Mendham, famous for later being one of the models for the fictitious Old Rimrock, N.J., created by Philip Roth. Yeah. So of course we ended up going to Delbarton for a couple of years until its residential program ended.
Before that, though, we were still living at home, hooked on Concentration, Beat the Clock, The Joker’s Wild, Tic-Tac-Dough, plus another scholastic quiz show on public television in New Jersey, another one from out of Philly, you name it — if they asked questions on TV, we were there to answer them. It was like slumming if you missed even one correct response on the easy programs.
We always were watching Jeopardy!, though, especially after Trebek took over. Our viewing companions shifted, from our parents and siblings to our dorm-mates, fraternity brothers, etc. You know you are a total nerd when the highlight of one of your freshman-year days is not bragging about some social or drinking achievement but instead getting a ‘What is the Treaty of Guadalupe-Hidalgo?’ Triple Stumper. Nerd!
The game never left us, and then we moved out here, and it became real and proximate to actually try out for the thing. When we first arrived in La-La Land in 1991 and had a nice one-one-one lunch with the late great Mistah Richard Mitchell at Musso & Frank, a day on which both Don Adams and Jonathan Winters were holding forth in roomy red-leather booths, Mitchell asked us, ‘So, what’s your big goal?’ and of course it was to get on Jeopardy!
And so we tried and tried year after year, starting in 1991, going to various studio lots and hotels across Southern California. The written test was child’s play, never failed it. But our mock-game rehearsals probably weren’t up to snuff, and year after year no call came.
But there were other game shows in the meantime. Real airtime, real cash & prizes. Win Ben Stein’s Money, Greed, Smush. All quite fun, different experiences to savor in the moment and beyond, but they were not Jeopardy!
Tests and mock-games to get on Jeopardy! continued. We actually were called to appear way back in 2001, but because it was so close to our having appeared on Greed, we had to decline them, owing to Standards & Practices! We actually had to turn down an appearance on Jeopardy! We’d probably gone and done it, then, completely sealed our doom and our fate. Who turns down an appearance to get on Jeopardy! and somehow lives to get a second bite of the cherry? No one!
Yet the gods of television had other ideas. Another batch of tests and auditions every year, and then in 2006, something was different. A different look, having lost weight, plus having forgotten regular eyeglasses and going through the audition wearing Ray-Ban Wayfarers. In haste running out of the house to get to the audition, we forgot the regular spex.
But the contestant coordinator that day, the immortal Maggie Speak, must have seen something she liked, because she pulled us aside after the mock game and said, You wear regular glasses, right? You don’t wear sunglasses all the time?’
We reassured her we did not, and then some six months later, the call came, and this time we did not say no.
Yet when we got to the set, we were informed that we were the day’s alternate contestant, and so we had to sit through a whole day’s taping without playing.
Then a month later, the real deal happened, and the rest is history. It truly was meant to be.
So, Jeopardy!, Happy Birthday to you on this big day. Thanks for letting us be part of you.
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