Ramblin' with Roger

JEOPARDY!, Part 11 (and last)

Some people from my church, with assistance from folks at work, were planning a JEOPARDY! watching party for Monday, November 9. I could have refused, but it seemed ungracious. For some reason, I am almost as nervous about this as I was as I was being on the show; totally irrational, I know.

Unfortunately, two of my co-workers were laid off on the Friday before, and they were understandably not that interested in the party. Luckily for me and three of my colleagues, our jobs were saved. (Two others had already found new jobs.)

Sunday morning, the day before the show aired, I called Amy Roeder in Merrimack, NH. She was very helpful in putting things into perspective. Her friends who had been at the taping gave her a hard time about giving Saigon rather than Hanoi as the Final response, but I thought it was impressive that all three of us got the right country. I told her she was a great opponent, and that if she weren’t so close in score to me, I wouldn’t have bet so much, and therefore wouldn’t have won so much.

We also talked about the consolation prizes. Tom had ended up in second place and won a trip to a resort in New Jersey. (No commentary needed.) Amy, in third, got a credit card with $2500 on it. She and I agreed that she got the better deal.

The day of the show, I went to work for a half-day, then went over to the Channel 10 studios to watch the feed for the show that comes in about 1:30. I had arranged this beforehand, but no one seemed to know I was coming, though they eventually did let me in. I was SO glad to have seen the show before the party.

At the church, there were about 35 people. I was seated in the front, just to the left of the set. At the first commercial break, I made a point to go to the bathroom and not make it back until after my gaffe in OT Women.

After it was revealed that I won, I could answer all of those questions people had wanted to ask, many of which I’ve addressed, but also questions I thought were odd, such as:
“Did you know the categories beforehand?” “No.”

By the time I got home, I had over a dozen messages. My sister Leslie in California must have sent a huge e-mail distribution telling people that I was going to be on (and apparently suggesting that I lost, from my non-committal response to how well I did.), for she forwarded congratulations from people I did not know.

The next day total strangers talked with me on the street about my JEOPARDY! win. And this went on for the next 35 days.

That second night I was on my mother called me at 7:30, letting me know that she was sorry that I lost. The shows aired at 7 pm in Charlotte. The show aired at 7:30 in Albany. I never saw the second show until several days later.

Even after that 36th day, when no one commented, I got lots of comments, especially at a January 1 wedding I DJed and a Midwinter’s party I attended.

Almost immediately after the show aired, I received letters, at least six, wanting me to buy their 45s and LPs; I must admit that I never wrote back. One guy, though, wanted me to identify some half-remembered songs from his childhood. I didn’t know most of them, but I did give him a lead to the song with the lyrics “Open up your heart and let the sunshine in.”

Oh, I can’t forget the parting gifts I received, over a two-month period: a case (12 large cans) of sweet potatoes (they were quite good, actually), OTC vitamins and other products including Centrum, a rather lovely lap blanket, a US Search coupon to try to find anyone in the United States, Pop Secret popcorn, and TWO hair curlers (!), which I didn’t need and gave away. I also got a home version of Wheel of Fortune, not JEOPARDY!

In January 1999, I got engaged to Carol. On St. Patrick’s Day, I received a check (FINALLY!) for $17,600.

A couple of days after we got married on May 15, Carol and I flew to Barbados via New York City. I never realized how far south Barbados was. We spent money to park the car at the airport, spent money on the speeding (Are we gonna die?) cab ride from the airport in Barbados to the resort, and we spent $26 to get out of the country (some sort of fee.) Everything else we needed to do was paid for: the hotel, the food, the drinks, the ride back to the airport; all courtesy of my second-place finish on JEOPARDY! For some reason, we even got bumped to first class on the return flight.

Since that time, JEOPARDY! has abandoned the prizes in favor of $2000 to the second-place contestant and $1000 for third place, I believe because of the logistics involved with the prizes; I had to call a few times before our trip was booked.

For a time, I made a point to call Albany-area winners. I talked to one guy named Greg who had won $3400, and he was disappointed; he thought he’d do better. I said, “You won, and that counts!” But I stopped when I called another guy and I got the sense that he thought I was a stalker.

I was amazed that people continued to recognize me, no more so than in October 1999, 11 months after the show aired, and I was at a conference in Florida when some folks I had never met from the Department of Labor in DC recognized me.

My pal Dave, used to head the Albany YMCA before he got kicked upstairs to the administrative side, went to a comedy club in Boston in 1999 or 2000, and in the entryway was a picture of three people, one of whom was me. It turned out that the performer was Amy Roeder, my worthy opponent on the show.

Winning on JEOPARDY! is a peculiar phenomenon. It’s epitomized in this story:
I was at a party talking about my work as a librarian. I had recently done a question about alpacas and I noted that they are much nicer in temperament than llamas. However, a woman I knew said: “You Don’t Know What You’re Talking About!”
I believe she thought I was suffering from Male Answer Syndrome, where a guy will ALWAYS have an answer to every question, no matter how little he actually knows, often stating opinion as fact. Then wife Carol let it be known that I was on JEOPARDY! “Well, maybe you DO know what you’re talking about!” Answering a question as a librarian, someone with a Masters degree in Library Science didn’t cut it, but an appearance or two on a game show did.

There are people to this day who expect that I know stuff, even if I don’t, which is definitely a double-edged process. All in all, though, it’s good to be able to put on the resume: “JEOPARDY! champion.”

Hope you enjoyed this little trip down Memory Lane. Now when people find out that I was a JEOPARDY! champion, as they did at a reunion last month, I can tell ’em, “Just go check out my blog!”

Mushroom cloud

I had this great teacher in sixth grade named Paul Peca. Among other things, he had us write in our journals about our thoughts. We also discussed the issues of the day, such as the 1964 general election between Lyndon Johnson (the peace candidate, in retrospect, ironically) and Barry Goldwater (who was depicted in one very effective commercial which ran but one time as the guy who would lead the world to a nuclear holocaust.) We held a mock election in which LBJ beat AuH2O 13-3. It was clear that Mr. Peca preferred Goldwater.

We had this great debate about the dropping of the atomic bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. His position was that the dropping of those bombs (and the threat to drop others, even though we didn’t HAVE any more) ended the war sooner than continuing to fight a conventional war. He also noted that there were greater deaths in battles such as Dresden, Germany (130,000) than in either of the Japanese cities (120,000), which was the conventional wisdom of the time. (Dresden’s deaths in February 1945 are now estimated to have been 25,000 to 60,000.)

What we argued was that the effect of the atomic bombs was not just limited to its immediate destructive force but the anguish that was suffered by future generations. How well that was understood at the time the bomb was dropped versus what was learned subsequently about the devastating effects of nuclear radiation was also discussed.

I don’t remember if we talked about the fact that the only uses of of the atomic bomb were on people of color, or whether that was a conversation of a later class.

There is a movie called Atomic Cafe, which I saw when it came out about 25 years ago. It was a history of the A-bomb from the 1940s to the early 1960s, told in clips (“duck and cover”, Prersidential announcements) and song (“Jesus Hits Like an Atomic Bomb”, “Atomic Cocktail”). It was funny (in parts), but also quite sobering. I used to play the LP every year so that I would never forget the insanity of nuclear war. (I’ve never seen the soundtrack listed, though several of the songs appear here, an inferior product, so I’ve read.}

As we mark the 60th anniversary of the dropping of the atomic bomb this week, I note that we’ve never used it again on people. This suggests (perhaps foolishly) that we’ve learned from our history.

Haven’t we?

Haven’t we?

Spring 1975

I’m having an Alice’s Restaurant moment.

By that, I mean that I want to tell you a story. But first, I need to tell you ANOTHER story. In the Arlo Guthrie song, he talks about 7 minutes about, well, Alice’s Restaurant, and garbage. But then he says: “That’s not what I came to tell you about. Came to talk about the draft.” Now, my second story, I’ll write about eventually, but probably not for this week.

At the end of the fall 1974 semester at the State University College at New Paltz (NY), I broke up with the person who would soon be my ex-wife Nona. She moved to Philadelphia for reasons that were unclear to me then, and certainly no clearer 30 years later. The primary relationship issues were religion and money.

I drifted to Binghamton, my hometown. In January 1975, my sister Leslie and I kidnapped my 75-year old grandmother and took her by train to Charlotte, NC, where her daughter (my mother) had moved the year before. Gram was getting lame. She had a coal stove and it would have been dangerous to get up and down the stairs to get it. Nor could she walk up the steep street on which she lived.

13 Maple Street

When we came back a couple of weeks later, I didn’t have any idea what to do next. So I ended up living in my grandmother’s home. Funny thing, though; as often as I had seen her tend to the coal fire in my childhood, I could not keep it going at all. I suffocated it, essentially. Even got help from a friend; no success.

Eventually, the pipes froze. It was an old wood house with old wiring, so I could either run the refrigerator or run the space heater. Given the cold of the house, I opted for the latter.

In February 1975, I spent virtually the whole month in bed watching television. My grandmother’s TV only got one station, the VHF station Channel 12. So I watched the soaps, Hee Haw, and whatever was on CBS that month. It was undoubtedly the deepest state of melancholy I’d ever been in.

The space heater was on the ground and, of course, I had every cover I could find. One night, a blanket, handmade by Nona, fell off the bed in front of the space heater. Fortunately, the acrid smell woke me up and I was OK. My sister Leslie told me later that my mother (in NC) THAT NIGHT woke up from a dream in which I was surrounded by fire, and stayed awake for a time. Perhaps my mother woke me up, six states away. I don’t dismiss that out of hand.

Occasionally, I’d go to the library to listen to music on the record player and headphones there. I remember once listening to the Beatles’ Abbey Road. The song that ended the first side was “I Want You (She’s So Heavy)”. During the dirgelike instrumental ending, I cranked it up louder and louder. So when the instruments suddenly stopped, I really thought for a half-second that I had died.

Now and then, I’d visit my friend Carol, which is where I got cleaned up.

The janitor gig

I didn’t have a phone, so I missed at least a couple of opportunities to get a job. Eventually, though, I got a position as a janitor in Binghamton City Hall. There were 4 or 5 of us covering the building. I used to empty the wastebaskets from the desks of the police officers and also clean the holding cells, as well as wash windows, buff the floors of the common areas, and other tasks. Two of the guys started calling me Flash because I would get my work done by the end of the sixth hour of my eight-hour day, at which point I’d hide in the bathroom or a storage room and read. It wasn’t that I was so fast, it was that they were very slow.

I really liked the police captain, and we would occasionally have erudite conversations about issues of the day or my future (which seemed bleak to me, but I’m sure I didn’t say that.) The police officers, however, were a more hostile lot in general, and I often felt that they would intentionally make a mess so that I would have to pick it up.

Now there were folks who ABSOLUTELY were making a mess that I had to clean up, and they were the prisoners. These were holding cells they were in, and the detainees were usually there only one night before being arraigned in the morning. So they thought nothing of taking a lighted match and melting the paint from the walls. More than once, they would take their own bodily wastes and smear that on the walls. Perhaps they thought that they were getting back at “the system,” but all they were doing was making more work for a college dropout.

As the weather warmed, my spirits brightened somewhat. I started going out with this woman named Margaret, but it was a classic rebound situation, and that lasted about a month. At the same time, I ended up doing a play. And in the fall, I successfully returned to school at New Paltz.

It was one of the more difficult periods of my life, and I figured that if I could survive that, I could survive just about anything.

But that’s not what I really wanted to write about. I wanted to write about homeownership…

Blog Mixed Bag CD Review-Ian

NAME: Ian Brill
BLOG NAME: Brill Building
NAME OF CD: Mix Your Mind Up
NUMBER OF CUTS: 21
RUNNING TIME: 74:43
COVER ART: No
SONG LIST: His posts of June 8 & June 12
ALREADY REVIEWED BY: Chris “Lefty” Brown on June 20
GENERAL THOUGHTS: There are CDs from the bloggers that I could say quite specific things, based on the fact that they are of a theme, or what not. This is not one of them. I found Ian’s album to be just a bunch of good eclectic cuts without any discernable concept, except the first cut from the Brill Building, which was just fine. Probably more hip hop than any of the other CDs to date, and I found I enjoyed that.
THINGS I PARTICULARLY LOVED: Actually quite a bit: Dr. Octogon, the Magnetic Fields, Sonic’s Rendezvous, even the ABBA cut, which was totally unknown to me.
ON THE OTHER HAND: What’s with the numbering? 01-09, 12-14, 14b, 14c, 15, 17-22 – ah mess my mind up with “Mix Your Mind Up.”
ONLY VAGUELY RELATED: The Brill Building, for those of you who didn’t know, is a place in NYC where songwriters such as Neil Sedaka and Carole King worked in the 1950s and early 1960s.

Star librarians

As I’ve said somewhere, I am a librarian. I’ve been working at the same job for over 12 years, the second longest-tenured person in my organization (but #1 has me beat by about eight years.)

Last week, I went to a morning training session about the Economic Census. I thought it was interesting. Anyway, one of my former colleagues, Sheldon, with whom I worked for over five years, was there, as was one of our former interns, Fran, who was here for several months. Our current intern, Frank, also attended, but I knew HE’D be there.

Then I get to work and get an e-mail from my former colleague of nearly four years, Anne, asking me about a reference source. She only writes a couple of times a year.

Also, I get an e-mail from my library boss for my first two years here, Michele. She’s living in Bermuda, but she’ll be in upstate New York for a little while and wants to get together.

Obviously, I had hit on a former SBDC librarian constellation that day. It was quite wonderful to reconnect with people with whom I’ve had a fruitful shared experience.