Fame is fickle. But while it lasts, it sure can be fun. That\u2019s one lesson members of UConn\u2019s 1961 and 1970 \u201cGE College Bowl\u201d teams say they learned. These fearsome intellectual foursomes appeared on TV\u2019s original \u201cCollege Bowl,\u201d which aired weekend afternoons from 1959 to 1970, first on CBS and then on NBC. (Peyton Manning now hosts a revival.)<\/p>\n
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. \u201cIt was a process of endless, endless stagings of matches\u201d broadcast over Storrs\u2019 closed-circuit TV system, recalls Cris Birch \u201971 (CLAS), a retired IT executive. \u201cWe were quick on the trigger when we knew the answer and smart enough not to bang the buzzer if we didn\u2019t.\u201d<\/p>\n
The all-male 1970 team and the 1961 team, which included Gail Waugh Hanna \u201961 (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\u2019s \u201cPrelude in C-Sharp Minor\u201d and identify the key in which it was written. (No one got that right.) But the Huskies aced queries like \u201cWhat is a Dewar flask?\u201d \u201cWho did Hamlet meet on the battlements of Elsinore?\u201d and \u201cWhat five-minute barrier was broken in 1956?\u201d (a thermos, his father\u2019s ghost, and the four-minute mile).<\/p>\n