In Pursuit of Trivia

I don't know when or from where I got my love of what some people call "useless bits of information" or "trivia". I remember my dad listening to a radio show called Information Please and somewhere in the attic there is a copy of a letter he sent to them about something. (Now that's important but I don't remember what or exactly where it is!)

I have always read a lot. I spent a lot of time alone in my youth and often entertained myself with magazines and books. My grandfather was a teacher and school principal who took us traveling when we were young. He loved to know about everything. If there was a crop he did not recognize growing beside the road, he stopped and asked the farmer about it. I still look at the plantings in every field as I drive by--which is kind of hard going 70+mph. We stopped to read historical markers. We cruised around New York and Washington (many times going the wrong way on one-way streets) looking for landmarks and other "educational opportunities". This was made somewhat more tolerable by Grandpa's getting only about 100 miles to a milkshake.

As most people now know, I appeared on the show Jeopardy! in 1967. I won $1,510 (long spent, of course), a set of encyclopedias (which Cathy lost the G volume of, so I finally threw them away) and a Jeopardy! game which is still in the game closet. I'm looking for a gentleman friend like Alex Trebek, who broke my heart several years ago when he married a much younger woman so he could have children.

Grandson Will is carrying on the family interest in trivia. He likes to play my old Trivial Pursuit game. Most of the questions are about stuff that was relevant in the 1980's but quite outdated now. I pick out questions he should know or guess at--and darned if he doesn't beat me with his strategy! We had a great time playing the old game Go to the Head of the Class with friend Betsy Alden (also a Jeopardy! veteran) and her grandsons.

A number of us with connections to High Point Community Theatre are "trivia buffs" and several of us (Mickey Hyland, Charlie Waller and I) have our own Fun Trivia tournament sites in addition to the one Jennifer Blevins has for HPCT. There are a number of great players on each one of them. The champ is Lee Willard. He's amazing!

The knowledge of trivia also helps doing crossword puzzles (which I also love), since many clues require knowing or being able to figure out obscure references. It doesn't help solving Sudoku puzzles, though, which I am still struggling to master.

I hope the generation coming along will come to treasure trivia as much as I do.