In the spring of 2020, the Covid-19 pandemic came to the United States. And during the second week of March, nearly all colleges and universities, including Williams, suspended in-person activities and declared that the current term would finish online. The rest of the economy followed the same path; anything that was possible to do from home was done from home.
The Ann Arbor based team of Too Early for Flapjacks was scheduled to host the next Trivia contest on May 15th. As stay-at-home orders became widespread and almost all recreational events (concerts, movies, theater) were canceled, the Flapjacks discussed whether to go forward with the contest. On March 31st, I put forward some pros and cons:
For May 15:
Against May 15:
The fact that undergraduates would not be able to play in person was agreed to be the most important point. So, with input from the larger Trivia community, we decided to postpone the next official contest until fall.
On the Trivia mailing list, there was some disappointment from teams who usually play online. They wanted something to happen. Several people, including Arielle Masters, Steve Farley, and PJ Morello, suggested replaying a previous contest, or an abbreviated selection of favorite questions and boni.
On April 8th, I made the following proposal:
Hi All -
Here's a proposal from Too Early For Flapjacks:
1. We delay the next official contest until the fall, when the undergraduates can play. Ben Kitchen's suggestion of October 9th, right before fall break, makes a lot of sense.
2. In May we have an unofficial, self-graded, greatest-hits, K-Tel-would-be-proud contest brought to us by a rotating cast of Trivia all-stars from the past. To wit: up to 8 representatives of teams from the past will each take an hour to ask questions, play songs, and present one hour bonus from their past contest. We have one stream that we hand off between presenters. We have chatrooms so that teams can collaborate, but we don't have hosts in the chatrooms, because there is no grading. When presenters are not presenting, they are free to play with their teams.
Welcome during the broadcast will be stories of what Trivia was like in the past, and your favorite moments. The more eras we can represent, the better. I'll be the first to volunteer to be a host.
So what do you say? Step right up if you'd like to be a host. I think this could be a lot of fun, and the work limited and spread around.
The response was positive, and some buzz was generated. On April 11th, I followed up with:
Hi All -
PJ, Tom Gardner, David Kensinger and I have volunteered so far to be hosts of the all-star contest. We're seeking 4 or so more. We also have a special surprise offer from Des Devlin to make a brand-new bonus in his signature style. That should be enough to get everyone to tune in!
Robert Kent, on behalf of the Python team, asks what is involved in being a host of the all-star contest. An exact answer is pending some software development, but certainly:
How the reading will work needs to be determined. Host teams since 2013 have used some software written by Louis Moga called the "Trivia Dashboard". One loads it with songs and questions beforehand, connects it to the stream, and then it acts as a teleprompter, displaying questions on the screen. After reading there's a button to push that starts the song. It also pipes the question out to the chatrooms, so that everyone can read it.
It's very slick. But I believe at present it only runs on a Mac attached to ITunes. We have a month before May 15th, and it may be possible to get it working on other systems. I need to get with Louis to talk about that. (I also need to get to the end of the semester, so I have some time.)
An alternative might be for one person (the "M.C.", which could be me or someone else) to connect to each host via Zoom or even a phone, and somehow pipe their audio out to the stream. The MC could run the Dashboard and play the songs, and all the host would have to do is read. That would make it simple for the hosts, but possibly tricky for the MC.
Thoughts on the technical methods are very welcome. And please, step right up to be a host! You don't need to have been on a winning team to volunteer.
Several more hosts signed on then, and Tom Gardner pointed out that as president of the Society of Alumni of Williams College, he could include the contest in messages to alumni aiming to keep them connected to Williams during the pandemic. So on April 13th we made the proposal official.
In early May, after the semester at the University of Michigan had ended and I had a little more time, we began having discussions among hosts about the technical aspects of the contest, including time slots, number of questions per host, what software to use, etc. We ended up with 12 hosts divided into 9 teams, each given a 50-minute time slot:
| Start | End | Hosts |
|---|---|---|
| 8:10 | 9:00 | PJ Morello '72 and Rich Levy '74 |
| 9:00 | 9:50 | Andrea Currie '10 and Allie Gardner '10 |
| 9:50 | 10:40 | Robert Kent '84 |
| 10:40 | 11:30 | Tom Gardner '79 |
| 11:30 | 12:20 | Laurie Brink '05 and David Letzler '06 |
| 12:20 | 1:10 | David Kensinger '93 |
| 1:10 | 2:00 | Steve Farley '85 |
| 2:00 | 2:50 | Mark Conger '89 |
| 2:50 | 3:40 | Ben Kitchen '21 |
Each host picked about 10 questions from past contests, as well as an hour bonus and an action trivia. I was surprised and delighted that a number of hosts decided to contribute brand-new or updated boni:
We used a streaming service called radiojar.com, because they supported multiple DJs in multiple locations. It worked out OK; their web-based studio software was a little clunky and behaved somewhat erratically when several people were using it at once, but it requred no installation and the controls were simple. In the week before the contest I met with all the hosts over Zoom and trained on the software. I did have to step in a couple of times during the contest when a host's microphone didn't immediately activate. But compared to many contests of the past, the stream worked very well.
Everyone seemed to have a good time. Tim Fieldes created a spreadsheet for teams to self-score if they wanted to. Arielle Masters organized a post-contest "Breakfast" meeting on Google Meet, a traditon we may keep in the future. At one point we had 180 listeners from 8 countries.
All in all, I'm calling it a big success. We had questions from 7 different decades. I was delighted to hear what Trivia was like in so many different eras, and hear from the giants of Trivia on whose shoulders we have all been standing.
The most poignant moment for me might have been hearing Steve Farley tell how playing in the Trivia contest was the first time he really felt like he belonged with a group of friends at Williams. Something like that happened to me too; during my sophomore year I fell in with a group of people including Allison Brucker '87, Joe Francis '87, and Maggie Heaman '88. We ate dinner every night in Driscoll dining hall and talked about the Trivia contest all year long. That only accelerated after we won the contest as We Begin Bombing in Five Minutes and began planning the next one. Trivia was no small part of my finding a group of friends. Perhaps that's why I'm still playing 34 years later. :)
In the 70's the biggest part of the contest were the on-air questions and songs. Boni were smaller point values than today's contests.
Songs were usually taken from a "catalogue " of early rock 'n roll and doo-wop circa 1956 -1963 many of which were "one-hit-wonders"
To add to the degree of difficulty certain novelty songs were also a staple, e.g.
Adding to the fun was the time limit to answer the question/song. It was critical to recognize the song ASAP, so that you could have multiple chances to get through to Trivia Central (lines were always busy)
Phone dialers would cue up the first digits of the contest phone number and dial the last digit immediately after the question was asked.
It became a "Name That Tune" contest as well as a trivia contest (I can guess that oldie in three notes!)
This was a great project and a fine representation of the Williams College Trivia Contest.
As we old timers would say...It was a hoot and a half !
That was a lot of fun to help do. Thanks a ton to Mark for shepherding this. I think I speak for a bunch of us in saying that being That Person who is finally responsible for making all the machinery work is a huge undertaking, and it would've been very understandable if no one wanted to do that this time around. Still, having played almost every Trivia for the past twenty years, it would've been sad for it not to exist this semester, so I'm glad you did.
Also, thanks, Tom, for your kind introduction to me. I do want to note, by the way, that while I have done the lion's share of emailing to the list over the years on behalf of the teams I've run with, I did want to make it clear that for almost all of those contests, Laurie and I have more or less split team management tasks and wrote similar amounts of questions. She's a bit shy about writing to the group, but that doesn't mean that she isn't also a Trivia legend in her own right.
Anyway, I hope that what Mark and the rest of us assembled was fun for the rest of you. Even for those of you who didn't play or didn't stay up all the way, I hope you enjoy looking at the contest material, especially the new stuff. I think that both Des and Laurie's new audios are really high-quality, as are David K and Ben's videos. (The latter really cracked us up at 4 in the morning.)
One thing we discussed in the breakfast video chat (which is something we could try to make a regular thing!), and I hope doesn't get lost, is the sentiment that distributing the work among a bunch of motivated people was considerably easier than the typical system of having different teams put everything together. Obviously, Mark and co. have the freedom to do as they please for October, but given what an undertaking Trivia has become, I wouldn't be averse to a discussion about whether there might not be some permanent or rotating folks who contribute on a semiannual basis.
Thanks a bunch again, and see you in October.