Obituary: Charles Van Doren

One-time academic and later encyclopedia editor and author Charles Van Doren, 93, has died from natural causes.    Despite his achievements and his blueblood background, he is best known as the leading figure of the game show scandals of the 1950s.  He made piles of money on the NBC quiz show, Twenty-One.  He became a national hero and a much-needed alternative to the despised Elvis Presley.  How did he do this?  He did it the old-fashioned way: by cheating or allowing himself to be talked into cheating.

Van Doren in 1957 was a college instructor at Columbia University making a modest income.  He was an intelligent man, but he wasn't so smart he could memorize everything there was to know about everything.  Still, he was smart enough to qualify on one of the leading big money game shows, Twenty-One.  His brain wasn't the only thing he had going for him.  He was young, he was articulate, and  he was photogenic.  He was also lucky that his opponent was one Herbert Stempel, who was at least as smart he was, but he didn't have the looks.  According the producers of the game show and I would imagine the sponsors, Stempel just didn't have what it took, plus he tended to be a little full of himself.  It was time to knock him off. Van Doren did want to go on there honestly, but one of the people in the making of the program, Al Freedman,  said he had to do what he was asked, and he was fed answers plus had to do all of the stage directions like mopping his brow and so forth.  Producer Dan Enright had talked Stempel into throwing the game by giving the incorrect answer to the 1955 Oscar for Best Picture, which was Marty.  It all worked beautifully, and Stempel went back into obscurity--seemingly--going to college and working in the public sector.  Van Doren, though, got a lucrative job on The Today Show, got married to his girlfriend, Geraldine Bernstein, who later on also taught college, and seemed to have his whole life mapped out for him.

Except, as we know, it didn't.  Stempel immediately cried foul when Enright refused to honor his promises to Stempel in exchange for losing and tried to take his case to the public, but it was the Dotto scandal later on that brought down the whole house of cards that was the quiz show scandals.  Congress got involved, many contestants, including Van Doren, had lied under oath, and Van Doren's life went into seeming free fall for a time.  He left Columbia, got sacked from The Today Show, and forevermore lived in obscurity.  An excellent documentary aired on PBS in the 1990s, and a popular movie, the Robert Redford-directed Quiz Show, kept him remembered by the public. Van Doren, did, however, bounce back working for the Encyclopedia Britannica, becoming a disciple of sorts for the irritating Mortimer Adler, and writing a number of books over the years.  He and his wife taught on the side.

So just how did Dotto bring down the big money quiz shows?  I can remember as an itty-bitty girl in 1958, just three years of age, actually watching that show, which consisted of contestants trying to connect the dots to an image of a celebrity.  On one of the broadcasts, one of the few  still existing of this show, a young woman by the name of Marie Winn was on the air answering questions.  A standby contestant saw a notebook she had left behind. The standby opened the notebook, and lo and behold, there were the answers to the very questions Winn was answering on the air. Edward Hilgemeier, Jr., the standby contestant, immediately went to the authorities, and that, as they say, was that.  Dotto, Twenty-One, and the rest of the shows were immediately pulled off the air.  Congress made it a crime to rig a game show.  The big money game shows disappeared for well over a decade, not surfacing again until many years later.  People involved in  the shows that were implicated in the rigging,  like Twenty-One producers Dan Enright and Jack Barry (Barry was the host of the show and was not involved in the rigging but he was tarnished just the same), were blacklisted for many years from the television industry (though they eventually made a comeback in the 1970s).

New York Times:

Charles Lincoln Van Doren was born in Manhattan on Feb. 12, 1926. He and his younger brother, John, were raised in a milieu of literary figures: Franklin P. Adams, Joseph Wood Krutch, Sinclair Lewis and others.

Charles attended the City and Country School and graduated from the High School of Music and Art in Manhattan. After serving with the Army Air Forces in 1944 and 1945, Mr. Van Doren graduated with honors from St. John’s College at Annapolis, Md., in 1947, and earned a master’s degree in mathematics from Columbia in 1949.

After studies at Cambridge University in England and the Sorbonne in Paris, he returned to New York and in 1955 began teaching at Columbia. He earned a doctorate in literature there in 1959.

A month after his appearances on “Twenty-One” ended in 1957, he married Geraldine Ann Bernstein, whom he had met a year earlier. The couple had two children.

The Times notes his brother, John, died in January.

You can read Van Doren's New Yorker piece here:

Later, I asked my friend to tell me more about Freedman, and she said that he was a producer for Jack Barry and Dan Enright, who created shows like “Tic Tac Dough.” Freedman called me a few days later. When I learned what he wanted, I telephoned Gerry—Geraldine Bernstein, the young woman I had been dating and whom I married six months later.

I told her that Al had persuaded me to take a test and that, depending on how I did, they might want me for a new show called “Twenty-One,” which was structured like blackjack. “The winner gets quite a bit,” I said. “The guy who’s on the show now has already won something like twenty-five thousand dollars.”

“Promise me you won’t agree to do this without talking to me first,” I remember her saying.

“O.K., I promise. They probably won’t ask me.”

They did—at least, Al Freedman did. He called me and told me that his job was on the line. A man named Herb Stempel was winning week after week, but he wasn’t popular and the ratings were suffering.

For the record, here is the Twenty-One episode in question:



And the Dotto episode with Marie Winn.  She later became a writer of note:




Herb Stempel gave his take on Charles Van Doren.  I hope this video stays up:

Probably Time to Ditch Beauty Pageants as Relics of the Past

I had an inservice to attend yesterday, so I got lazy and didn't put anything on the blog.  These days if I don't find anything worth sharing, why bother to blog?  Years ago I used to spend hours and hours a day on this blog, but now I have cut it down to size.  Blogging is a major time suck if one isn't careful.  Besides, I have other things I have been doing.

Anyway, there is a good article in Feminist Current which asks why the Miss America pageant isn't being eliminated although it has been recently embroiled in an email scandal.  People have asked that question for many years about beauty pageants in general and the moth-eaten Miss America pageant in particular.  The meat market atmosphere of the contest, which, despite claims of it being a scholarship competition, sends the wrong message that women need to trade on their looks to get anywhere in our society.

Probably not a great thing to be pushing in the 21st century.

Speaking of which, I did have a lot of fun watching this very old broadcast of the Miss America pageant which aired in 1958, and crowned Mary Ann Mobley of Mississippi as the winner.  She did have a lot of charm on display, so it wasn't hard to understand why she won the title.  Of course, Mobley, who passed away in 2014, had a long career in acting and was married to actor and talk show host Gary Collins.  I had forgotten that singer Anita Bryant was a finalist in the same pageant.  She was second runner up.  She went on to fame as a singer, and then infamy in around 1977 with her campaign against LGB (no "T" then of consequence) rights ordinances in Dade County, Florida.  Her political activity pretty much killed her career.  She ditched her husband, Bob Green, who she said was the one who put her up to the crusade and later married somebody else, but  her career never fully recovered.

It was also fun to watch a seasoned newscaster, Douglas Edwards, as the anchor or whatever.  He was assisted by Miss America of 1955 Lee Meriwether, who also became famous as an actress.  She is around 83 (!) years old now.  For quite a few years she was married to Frank Aletter, who I mentioned on this blog a couple of times, first when he died in 2009, and then recently when I discussed the DVD release of the hideous 1960s sitcom It's About Time.  As an aside, it really gets me that the title of the show often omits the apostrophe in almost all the episodes.  The word "it's" instead gets "its," and it's the shits when the wrong spelling of the contraction of "it" is used.  No matter if it's "it's" or "its" or even the nonword "its'," it's still a shitty show.

I mostly looked at the old Miss America broadcast because I was interested in watching Bert Parks.  The show was never as charmingly tacky ever again after he was fired in 1979.  The organization wanted a younger look, and old Bert, who had started hosting the festivities in 1955, simply couldn't make the grade anymore.  Johnny Carson spearheaded a protest more or less tongue-in-cheek over the firing, but Parks never was reinstated.  He died in 1992, but he is still remembered as being practically synonymous with the pageant.

It and other pageants are relics of a time long past, but they will probably stick around for the foreseeable future.

"Bad Teachers" Bit the Dust

Thanks to pressure from teachers and others from around the country, Investigation Discovery immediately canceled the lurid Bad Teachers from its lineup of shows.

It shows that sometimes public pressure can bring about change for the better.

It's bad enough when there are perverted teachers or those without ethics, but it's even worse to sensationalize this (fortunately rare) occurrence.

Nothing But a Fake

Until this latest dust up, I had never heard of Phil Robertson, and when I found out his background was a little bit more "elite" than his Beverly Hillbillies-type persona, I feel he and his show aren't worth crossing the street to watch.

Robertson holds a master's degree in education and was actually a teacher for a time. He even had the potential of being a top NFL player, but he preferred hanging out with the ducks instead of football and eventually went into business for himself.

In any case, he's just an actor, a big fake, and this whole controversy isn't even worth spit. His remarks to GQ are kind of dumb, especially those about those "happy blacks" pre-civil rights era, but he's not worth a cause celebre.

Sentimentality

Movies and television shows that have sad themes, especially those that are animal-related, always bring the tears to my eyes. They have since I was a young girl, and they continue to do so today.

Last night I was continuing to watch the fourth and final season of the classic television series, Route 66. While this season was somewhat weaker than the previous three seasons, mostly because of the awful two-part final episode where Tod (Martin Milner) gets married in a lame spy spoof, there still were some very good episodes. The one I watched last night had to do with poverty and domestic issues. The father of the household, played by Albert Salmi, never seemed to hold down a job because he thought he was better than the jobs he did, but he couldn't or wouldn't do anything to apply himself to make his life better for himself and his family. The family lived in a mobile home, which in those days really WAS a mobile home. The manufactured homes had wheels on them, so conceivably you could just have large trucks move them to another location (I am not talking about travel trailers or fifth wheels that you see today where one or two people might live in them). However, the home was crowded because there was the married couple and three kids, including an infant. The couple had an argument over the baby crying, so the older kids got the brilliant idea they were going to give their baby brother away so he would have a better life than what they had. However, they weren't very successful at this and had their brother stay at this empty house located in the Niagara Falls area.

Well, as you can expect, there was panic with the parents about what happened to their baby. The brother and sister continued to care for the baby over a period of a few days. Of course, Linc (Glenn Corbett) had to stick his nose into the situation, and he decided to follow the kids one morning to the house. He then tipped off the dad and brought him to the house, and what they overheard about made my eyes cry out. It was stinking sad. Of course it all ended well, and I probably shouldn't give the ending away, but I did, but I was bawling by the end of the episode.

Route 66 was a great series, one of the best ever.

Sadly, Albert Salmi didn't fare so well. His first wife was child actress Peggy Ann Garner, with whom he had a daughter, but the two split up. At around the time he made this episode, he married his second wife, Roberta Pollock Taper. He had two more daughters with her.

However, by 1990 he and his family had relocated to Washington state. He and his wife separated. Salmi's life apparently went into a tailspin, as he suffered from depression. Tragically he and his estranged wife were found dead on April 22, 1990, in a murder-suicide. He was 62, Roberta was 55.

My Mother The Car: Doesn't Deserve Its Bad Reputation

I just finished watching my DVD set of the "infamous" 1960s sitcom My Mother The Car (no comma after the word "Mother" and "the" is capitalized in the credits and although the title is incorrectly spelled and punctuated, I will simply go along with it*). Here is what I wrote over at Amazon.com:

This 1960s "gimmick" show has a reputation as being one of the worst shows ever made, mostly by those who never saw it. The premise IS absurd: The central character, David Crabtree, has a 1928 Porter who happens to be his mother (reinCARnated, as people repeatedly note). The car, like Mr. Ed and Francis the Talking Mule, will talk only to one person, leading to amusing situations. The plots in MMTC revolve around the car, with many of the episodes centering on the unsuccessful attempts by a rich collector, played by Avery Schreiber, to own it.

The comedy is broad, the scripts are not that great while few are outright bad, and let's face it: This show's target audience was children. It was not meant to be sophisticated comedy, unlike star Jerry Van Dyke's brother's show. I remember watching it on delayed broadcast when it first ran, and I enjoyed it. Watching the episodes on DVD nearly fifty years later, I can say the show does not deserve the bum rap it has received by reviewers like TV Guide. I would honestly rank it as a three-star program, better than some comedies of the era, and not as good as others.

The DVD package I rank higher than the series. The prints are crisp and sharp; it has never looked better. Some quibble with the packaging, but I don't find the box objectionable (by the way, that is actor Sonny Tufts pictured with Jerry Van Dyke on the box and DVDs and also appeared in an episode of the show). Some reviewers note the lack of a laugh track on most of the episodes; that isn't a negative in my book.

I found the show highly watchable if a bit corny overall. People who remember the series will enjoy owning this set.
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It was a long time before Jerry Van Dyke hit pay dirt on television. He did in the late 1980s with the sitcom Coach and garnered four Emmy nominations. I believe he is mostly retired now and lives in Arkansas with his second wife. He is 82 years old.

Co-stars Ann Sothern (voice of the car), Avery Schreiber, and Maggie Pierce have passed away. Sothern died in 2001, Schreiber in 2002, and Pierce in 2010.


*--The first episode also had the words during the opening credits to sing along with, but "alligator" was misspelled with just one "l." It was corrected afterwards.

Etc.

I think it is safe to say I am in the ranks of the "underemployed." In Oregon, the unemployment rate would be 17 percent if people like me were included.
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Here's another garbage article about parents from a wealthier school wanting to try and improve the "rankings" of the lowest-ranking school.

It won't work, of course, because poverty and transience are national issues. Both of those have a giant effect on "test scores," which don't measure anything anyway. The schools have nothing to do with it and cannot do anything about it.
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The situation for education in Tennessee is a mess and an outrage.

Michelle Rhee's ex-husband is up to his eyeballs there.

Speaking of Rhee, she "suffered" a legal setback on a wrongful termination lawsuit:

However, in what may be a turning of that tide, US District Court Judge Rudolph Contreras has denied Rhee’s motion to dismiss claims by a music teacher that his firing was concocted by using a misapplied or non-existent job title to enable his poor evaluation and subsequent firing.

The suit involves Willie J. Brewer Jr., a 53-year-old teacher who worked for DCPS for 28 years before being terminated in October of 2009 due to “budgetary constraints” under a RIF (Reduction in Force). Under this circumstance, the pecking order of teachers to be terminated as determined by Rhee, were first those with poor performance evaluations. However, Brewer claims he was an instrumental music teacher and that his RIF competitive standing was erroneously governed by the standards for a vocal music teacher, a position that required a skill set different from his own. As a result, Brewer claims he scored a poor evaluation and was terminated.

Brewer has set out to prove that his circumstance was not the result of mere error but an illegal systematic effort by Rhee to replace teachers en masse- perhaps supported by Rhee’s own public statements regarding her ideology to aggressively fire, en masse, teachers she deems as failing.

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When it comes to ed "reform," just follow the money.
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I have been getting some visits from Reno readers who have been looking under the name "Karrasch," but I couldn't figure out why since former governor Jim Gibbons has been out of office for a few years. Apparently a daughter of one of Gibbons's friends noted on this site is becoming a big star on reality television, and I believe she even posted here one time in defense of her mother, so I thought I'd go ahead and make note of it.
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I missed this obituary from last summer of the great equine photographer Tony Leonard. I have a number of his lithographs of famous thoroughbreds:

Leonard spent 50 years taking pictures of racing's greatest stars and developed an outstanding reputation. His photos graced many magazine covers; his style one that many protégés sought to master.

"Tony set the standard that all equine photographers strive to achieve," photographer Matt Goins remarked. "Knowing and working around him was one of the great pleasures of my life."

Leonard was also known for developing the conformation shot, now widely used within the industry.

"My goal in taking a conformation pose is to present each stallion exactly alike," he said of his groundbreaking concept. "That way, breeders could see exactly what they were looking for physically-strong shoulder, correct legs, hind quarters, pastern length, a compact or lengthy body-qualities that would match well with their mare."