My Favorite Years QUESTION

Note that we DIDN’T pick 2004, the year Lydia was born.


Possibly around the time I was writing about nostalgia, the Wife and I were talking about the favorite years in our lives.

I picked 1969, the year I turned 16, and my parents let me have a huge party. I had a girlfriend, I got elected president of the student government, which made me an irritant to the new principal, and I was figuring out who I was politically, especially compared to the transitional 1968. Music was great that year, too.

Then there was 1978, the year I worked at the Schenectady Arts Council, got a girlfriend, and finally stopped my nomadic existence.

1984 was the year after Mitch Cohn was fired from FantaCo and Raoul Vezina died. This made Tom Skulan more dependent on me to deal with the day-to-day stuff, while he worked on publications and the “big picture” stuff. Yes, affairs of the heart played here too.

Carol and I both picked 1998, the year before we got married, for different reasons. Her reasons are her own (she can start her own blog – unlikely). For me, it was going to Detroit (visit friend, Motown museum, Ford museums, Tigers game), Cleveland (Rock and Roll Hall of Fame), Washington, DC (visit friend, take JEOPARDY! test), and Boston (appear on JEOPARDY!) Interesting that neither of us picked 1999, the year we actually GOT married because that first year in that half a house she owned was tricky; buying OUR house in 2000 was definitely a vast improvement.

And we both picked 2003, which was the year Lydia was finally conceived. Carol and I went to Poland Spring, Maine after that. Note that we DIDN’T pick 2004, the year Lydia was born; that took some getting used to.

So what are some of your favorite years, and why?
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My Favorite Year with Peter O’Toole – Final scenes

30 Day Challenge: Day 26-A Picture From One Of The Greatest Days Of Your Life

I wrote about my JEOPARDY! experience extensively, starting my first month of blogging; in fact, writing about the daughter and writing about JEOPARDY! were the only purported reasons I even started the blog.


Hey, nothing in the instructions said it had to be a picture of me!

Above is a picture of Alex Trebek, host of a game show called High Rollers, which I would occasionally watch 30+ years ago. But more to the point, he has been the host of the game show JEOPARDY! since 1984.

To be honest, I’m not sure if that picture of him is from the day I was on JEOPARDY! But it WAS from one of the programs that was filmed in Boston, and the two weeks of programming in Boston was filmed over a two-day period, five shows per day, so I have a 50% chance of it being from the day I was taping, though not necessarily the episodes.

It’s not the suit he wore on the first episode I was on – I don’t remember what he wore the second show – and it’s not what he wore on this 1998 Teen Tournament reunion episode, either.

As I have noted, there was a big story in the local (Boston) paper the day after I taped my episodes, seven weeks before they aired.

Chance at fame for $100, Alex
Boston Globe – Boston, Mass.
Author: M. R. Montgomery, Globe Staff
Date: Sep 19, 1998
Start Page: C.1
Section: LIVING
Text Word Count: 827

Abstract (Document Summary)
“It’s the show, not the host,” he demurred. And it may not be false modesty: The 3,200 citizens roared for the new “Jeopardy!” set, for the assistant producer who warmed up the crowd with some practice contests, for the show announcer, and even for a camera shot of themselves. Alex Trebek got the same wild applause as “Boston, a great city,” and “Meet our contestants.”

Yesterday’s first taped show will air Nov. 9, and 15 million Americans will get to see Amy Roeder of Merrimack, N.H., match wits and unadulterated trivia with defending champion Tom Schellhammer of New York City, and Roger Green of Albany. The results are technically a secret (does anyone bet on “Jeopardy!” broadcasts?). With the whole 1950s game show scandal business hanging over their heads, the “Jeopardy!” staff takes serious measures. Contestants for a taping are selected at random from the pool of entrants just before each game. The winner, who will return, is, as they said, “sequestered.” Asked why, a representative of the show said they don’t want to let anyone aid, abet, help, or otherwise enhance the winner’s chances for the next game.

I’d LOVE to get copies of those two pages from the Boston Globe, each with a picture of Amy and me; the third person in the first shot is Tom, and in the second, a JEOPARDY! producer. Anyone in Boston with access to the Globe microfilm? Short of that, I could just buy a couple of pages – they run from $74.95 (unframed 11×17) to $169.95 (framed 18×24) each.

I wrote about my JEOPARDY! experience extensively, starting my first month of blogging; in fact, writing about the daughter and writing about JEOPARDY! were the only purported reasons I even started the blog.
Part 1
Part 2

Part 3
Part 4
Part 5
Part 6
Part 7
Part 8
Part 9
Part 10
Part 11
Epilogue, when I write about discovering myself on J-ARCHIVE – hey, there’s a picture of me! -and realized I had misremembered certain events from less than seven years earlier.

Ramblin' with Roger
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