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I’ve always felt it was a shame that the “trivia” moniker stuck to trivia so firmly. Referring to your hobby with a word that quite literally means “petty” or “insignificant” doesn’t strike me as the best way to popularize it.
Starting school was traumatic for me—not because I missed my mommy or couldn’t remember which coat hook was mine, but because I knew I’d miss my beloved morning game shows. I spent my elementary school years perpetually pining for summer vacation, when I could catch up once again on Wheel of Fortune, The $20,000 Pyramid, and Family Feud. I was overjoyed in 1979 when my sister Gwyn was born: we were now a family of five—the exact perfect size for a Family Feud team!
by the time America entered World War II, a quarter of all radio programs were game shows.
On July 1, 1941, the same day that the FCC granted the nation’s first commercial broadcasting licenses, NBC aired special TV versions of its popular radio hits Uncle Jim’s Question Bee and Truth or Consequences. CBS followed a night later with its own television quiz, cleverly titled CBS Television Quiz.
In April 1954, just a month before it struck down school segregation in the landmark case of Brown v. Board of Education, the Supreme Court was asked to consider, of all things, the constitutionality of game shows. The justices ruled 8–0 that the FCC regulations that had hamstrung quiz shows’ big-money prizes for years were illegal.
Sure, the encyclopedia can tell you that playwright George Bernard Shaw won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1925. Movie reference books will tell you that Shaw won an Academy Award in 1938 for helping adapt his own play Pygmalion to the screen. But only a trivia buff will pore through pages of lists of Oscar winners and Nobel laureates and confirm for you that, yes, Shaw is indeed the only one ever to receive both a Nobel Prize and an Oscar. A trivia fact is born.
the most famous “bad buzz” in quiz bowl history was probably one by none other than Matt Bruce himself, who once confidently answered, “Crack cocaine!” to a tournament question for which the answer turned out to be “Pecan pie.”
