The World’s Hardest Trivia Contest
There was a time before the Internet when you could do something like this; it would be impossible today.
Freshman year, Brown, 1981. Coming home from a party late one night, I stumbled onto a hallway where something strange was happening. There were two dozen students scattered down the hall floor, books stacked among them in various configurations, and radiating from a single closet were a dozen telephone lines terminating in a dozen telephones, each held by a student.
They’d get quiet and, huddled around a radio in the middle, they’d hear something, a question, and then they’d explode into activity, and then a few minutes later quiet down again. Over and over. I was gripped, and sat down to get a closer look.
The radio voice went like this: “Okay kids, it’s hour three, and this is question 5… the Smooth Move of the Year Memorial Question… ready: Who was Max Kiss? That’s it. Who was Max Kiss?” A song starts playing and the hall started buzzing. There is no Internet. People are racking their brains. They are flipping through books and arguing with each other. A subset of the group is listening intently to the radio and shouting things at the people on the phones. There’s a lot of excited shouting.
This is what I learned. It was a trivia contest. A question is asked, and a song is played, and you have the duration of the song to call the radio station and give the title of the song, the artist performing the song, and the answer to the question. A team gets one point for the question, and one point for the title and artist. And importantly, there is something that relates the song to the question, but it could be tenuous. The “memorial” description of the question is also sometimes a clue, but not always.
“Smooth move of the year” what does that mean? The subgroup working on the song recognize it immediately as “Go Now!” by the Moody Blues (1965). Wow, those guys are good. Smooth move, go now… Max Kiss, of course, is the Hungarian pharmacist who invented the chocolate flavored laxative ExLax.
“Hour three? How many hours is this?”
“It goes all night.”
