He is remembered for his appearances on the Barry and Enright show Twenty-One. He had an encyclopedic knowledge of many things, but frankly, he wasn't popular. The sponsors were unhappy with him because he was rather blah. It was time for the producers, or, rather, one of the producers, Dan Enright, to do something about it. That was when college instructor Charles Van Doren, he of the noted family of academics, got recruited to knock off Stempel. Of course, on this show, it was basically rigged so that both Stempel and Van Doren were in on it. There were a series of ties between the two to generate suspense and ratings. Stempel, on the episode where he was supposed to lose, was told he needed to give the wrong answer to the Oscar-winning picture of 1955, Marty. Stempel was a big fan of the movie, and he KNEW the correct answer, but he had to take a dive and flub it up saying the winning film was On the Waterfront.
Van Doren, who died April 9, 2019, also at the age of 93, slightly older than Stempel by just a few months, and died almost exactly a year before Stempel, went on to fame and glory, at least for a time. He became a host on The Today Show. Herb, though, had to keep plugging along with public sector jobs and presumably keeping his mouth shut. That is, of course, until the dam burst on the quiz shows.
Stempel started to cry foul after the producers refused to make good on promises made to him in exchange for him "taking a dive" on Twenty-One. At that point, he went public. However, the show that really started it all was an obscure game show by the name of Dotto, which I even remember the daytime version, and I was a mere three years old at the time. Don't ask me how I could possibly remember, but I did. Back to the subject, a standby contestant noticed a little notebook, and in that notebook were the very answers contestant (and later noted author) Marie Winn was answering onstage. He went to the authorities. That did it. The rest, as they say, is history.
The Van Doren-Stempel competition formed the basis of the movie Quiz Show, and PBS also had a program about the scandals, which Stempel appeared on camera. Stempel was quite a character with a good sense of humor.
New York Times:
Mr. Stempel, who became a high school social studies teacher in New York and later worked for the city’s Department of Transportation, died on April 7. He was 93. His death, which was not publicly announced, was confirmed by a former stepdaughter, Bobra Fyne.
The disgraced Mr. Van Doren retreated from public life for decades. Mr. Stempel, in contrast, assisted in the production of Robert Redford’s Oscar-nominated 1994 movie, “Quiz Show,” which starred Ralph Fiennes as Mr. Van Doren and John Turturro as Mr. Stempel, and in a 1992 documentary for the PBS series “American Experience.”
In the documentary, he told how contestants were given answers in advance and coached on how to act and even what to wear. “The reason I had been asked to put on this old, ill-fitting suit and get this Marine-type haircut,” he said, “was to make me appear as what you would call today a nerd, a square.”
Here is the Twenty-One episode, preserved on YouTube:
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