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“It was more like a spelling bee,” said Anne Solley, a Maury classmate. Solley was on the show, too, along with 10 other kids from Alexandria, Va., who were memorialized in a black-and-white photo taken that day.
“I was wearing a plaid check skirt and a brown sweater, my bangs cut way too short,” Solley said.
I wrote last week about TV’s “It’s Academic” and what it’s been through in recent years, but it’s worth remembering that children’s quiz shows have long been popular.
“It was a big deal for us,” said Shine, who still lives in Alexandria. It turned out that her services weren’t needed at the microphone that day. Solley — then known as Anne Flynt — did compete.
“You can’t really study for such a thing at that age,” said Solley, who lives in Maine now. “I don’t remember the words I spelled right. I was in several rounds. I do remember that I finally misspelled a word. The word was ‘occurred.’ I hope I can spell it now.”
She thought for a moment, then said, “It has two Cs and two Rs. I spelled it with one R.”
Their Maury classmate John Roberts remembered the name of the show: “Quizdown,” broadcast Saturday mornings on WTOP. He also recalled that the questions weren’t only about spelling. He was asked two questions. Like Solley, he only remembers the one he didn’t answer correctly: Who searched for the Fountain of Youth?
“The emcee asked the audience what was the answer and they all screamed ‘Ponce de León!’” said Roberts, 84, and living in Irvington, Va.
Even so, the team from Maury won. The school was awarded a set of encyclopedias. Each student got a ballpoint pen.
Said Roberts: “The ballpoint pen did as all ballpoint pens did in those days: It wrote in Morse code.” In other words, it skipped.
Both women remember their mothers fussing over their outfits and hair — ironic, given that they were going to be on the radio, not television. And they never got to hear the show. It went out over the airwaves live. They do remember that Maury was a good school. (It was also a segregated one. Named for a Confederate naval officer, Maury was renamed last year in honor of Naomi L. Brooks, a former teacher in Alexandria.)
Americans love quiz shows. And we love kid quiz shows.
“I think people like to test themselves and see how they can do,” said Susan Altman, producer of “It’s Academic.”
Altman said the questions are ones that a high school student should be able to answer.
“That’s something your viewers can all relate to and can test themselves against,” she said.
Altman said the format of some “It’s Academic” questions is arranged with viewers in mind. They know people will be playing along at home so sometimes the show includes visual clues to make it more engaging for them.
“It’s Academic” is for high school students. Oakton, Va., reader Carolin Ringwall remembers a similar show from the 1970s that her daughter, Karin, was on. Called “It’s Elementary,” it was for elementary-age kids and was hosted by former Washington wide receiver Roy Jefferson.
It, too, was produced by the “It’s Academic” folks.
“It was a kind of thing where a school would send down its entire fourth- or fifth-grade and we would pull kids out for various games,” Altman said.
Altman and her team felt the “It’s Academic” format was too competitive for the younger students. Instead, games included the “Intergalactic Spelling Patrol,” where misspelled words were zapped, and a “Concentration”-style game where correct answers unveiled sections of an image that had to be identified.
“It was on for about seven years, then we replaced it with ‘Pick Up the Beat,’” Altman said.
That show — hosted by Erik King and, later, Chuck Jeffreys — wasn’t a quiz show at all. It used music videos produced by local teens to explore issues such as friendship, dating woes, drunken driving and teen pregnancy.
In other words, a far cry from the spelling words those Maury 10-year-olds faced in 1948.
In Tuesday’s column, I got a bit of 1970s D.C. band drama wrong. The band that Tommy Keene left in 1978 to join the Razz was the Rage, not the Pop.
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