Fame is fickle. But while it lasts, it sure can be fun. That’s one lesson members of UConn’s 1961 and 1970 “GE College Bowl” teams say they learned. These fearsome intellectual foursomes appeared on TV’s original “College Bowl,” which aired weekend afternoons from 1959 to 1970, first on CBS and then on NBC. (Peyton Manning now hosts a revival.)
Before millions of viewers, schools battled each other for scholarship money. To win the honor of sweating under the bright lights, players had to survive round after winnowing round of on-campus competitions. “It was a process of endless, endless stagings of matches” broadcast over Storrs’ closed-circuit TV system, recalls Cris Birch ’71 (CLAS), a retired IT executive. “We were quick on the trigger when we knew the answer and smart enough not to bang the buzzer if we didn’t.”
The all-male 1970 team and the 1961 team, which included Gail Waugh Hanna ’61 (CLAS), crammed their craniums with obscure facts. Or at least they tried to. The show was not for intellectual lightweights. The 1970 team had to listen to a snippet of Rachmaninoff’s “Prelude in C-Sharp Minor” and identify the key in which it was written. (No one got that right.) But the Huskies aced queries like “What is a Dewar flask?” “Who did Hamlet meet on the battlements of Elsinore?” and “What five-minute barrier was broken in 1956?” (a thermos, his father’s ghost, and the four-minute mile).
