The Home Front
BOHN, WILLIAM E.
THE HOME FRONT By William E. Bohn Second Thoughts About the Quizzes From die start, I have harbored a prejudice against TV quiz programs. It seemed to me that they gave money and fame lo people...
...This display of little snippets and leavings of knowledge took me back to a dramatic feature of education as I knew it years ago...
...Fortunately, no one asked for the definitions of these mysterious words...
...Up to the present moment, the biggest winner has answered questions to the value of $192,000...
...But there is an entirely different class of contestants whose appearance on the national television platform seems to me a wonderfully fine thing...
...There may be some question as to whether the blazing rostrum of television is the best place for the exhibition and development of their talents...
...Those addressed to young Mr...
...I have watched them with admiration as they dived back into their memories and pulled out, with painful effort, long-buried facts...
...It is worth a great deal to see such a demonstration on so conspicuous a stage...
...Here was a successful, handsome, widely-known opera singer pitting himself against a working man with a foreign accent...
...It gave these great rewards for the possession and exhibition of futile bits of fact...
...The cobbler's love of art goes deeper than that of many who consider themselves upper-class...
...In the first place, the persons thrown to the top by the revolving wheels of this great publicity machine are a remarkably talented and attractive lot...
...When he was challenged by Robert Merrill, we were offered a treat of which we all had a right to be proud...
...And the questions which are put to them are far from stupid or trifling...
...They are received and introduced by clever masters of ceremonies...
...So they were heroes and heroines—and the rest of the young people hated them with a deep and deadly hatred...
...And yet, showy and expensive as the whole thing may appear, it seemed to me that, like the old spelling-bee, it was on a false basis...
...These are young people of really high intelligence...
...The audience, most of whom could not have spelled any word more complicated than ";cat" or "bat," looked on in open-mouthed awe as Johnnie or Susie came triumphantly through with "tintinnabulation" or "incomprehensibility...
...I have not changed my mind about the value of the little facts which are juggled about in these shows...
...The boys and girls who were never "spelled down" were usually the stupidest youngsters anywhere about...
...Among those who have reached the heights of fame are such men as Charles Van Doren and Hank Bloom-garden, both of them young men of talent and learning...
...In the case of some young students, the financial rewards of these quizzes may make possible the advanced study required for the development of their talents...
...He even corrected the opera singer as to the date of his own debut at the Metropolitan...
...Strom, for example, often involved advanced problems in physics or chemistry—with now and then an excursion into astronomy...
...They are selected by a dragnet process which must be extraordinarily searching and thorough...
...The spelling-bee gave the rewards to the possessors of the least useful and least significant sort of knowledge...
...I am thinking of people like the old lady who remembered all about baseball records and the good shoemaker who could tell every last thing about all of the operas and their composers...
...They just happened to have the kind of visual memory which enabled them to repeat letters in the conventional order...
...This seems to me a case in which the good, fairly considered, overbalances the bad...
...The glamorous TV quiz programs may seem a far cry from the crude contest of the old-time one-room schools...
...But the best part of this exhibition is that the public had a chance to see that culture is not limited to the learned or the rich or the fashionable...
...But, as far as the viewer can gather from their tone and manner, they stand the strain with remarkable self-control...
...Four telecasts have distributed largess amounting to $3,330,000 and 18 Cadillacs...
...But I must confess that I have changed my mind about the shows themselves...
...I have a special fondness for Mike Delia Rocca, the musical cobbler...
...Who cares through which islands the Equator passes or when and by whom the Great Wall of China was finished...
...It seemed to me that they gave money and fame lo people who had done nothing to deserve them...
...They exhibit not only a wide range of knowledge, but a magnificent control of their psychological resources...
...It reminded me of the old-fashioned spelling-bee...
...The contest was carried on with the gayest of good nature—and the cobbler won...
...And as to the two most distinguished among the juveniles, 11-year-old Leonard Ross and 10-year-old Robert Strom, they are far from being like the nitwits who used to strut their useless mastery of orthography...
...The contestants appear before millions of viewers...
...And, moreover, they accorded a false emphasis to kinds of knowledge which have no value...
Vol. 40 • May 1957 • No. 18
