06/04/26
6/4/2026This is a trivial column.
I turned 85 last Monday. Family saluted me with a birthday dinner, thoughtful gifts, and lots of well wishes. Many friends congratulated me as well. It all warmed my cockles.
I’ve always considered 85 to be the starting line for the “really elderly.” And now I am there.
But I had also always thought that having been born before the Pearl Harbor attack, I had amassed a huge storehouse of useful knowledge. And an equally large one of the useless kind.
Armed by all that stuff, I thought I would be a valuable addition to a team at any trivia contest. Lucky’s, the restaurant at Wild Rose Casino here in Jefferson, holds just such an event every Thursday evening, with at least half a dozen teams competing. A few months ago I approached the leaders of one of the teams and asked if they had space for another member.
They immediately welcomed me into their group, and I anticipated providing highly valuable, and correct, answers to the questions.
Wrong.
The weekly jousts consist of several sets of five questions, each question in a different category. Each question must be worth a different number of points to the team, with its members deciding how many points to assign to a particular question. The maximum possible number of points for the team’s evening (I think) is 150.
It soon became evident to me that the master of the contest—the one who selects and calls out the questions—chooses categories that wander far from my store of factual knowledge.
I’m generally OK on U.S. Presidents, historical events, geography, classical literature—the stuff of the liberal arts courses I took in college.
But fashion? Current pop music? Stars of recent movies? Math and science? Even the champion teams of various sports in recent years? Uh-uh. I find myself sitting there stone-faced while the much younger team members knock out all that data, sometimes even before the questioner has finished asking the question.
What’s more, some in the team’s membership of maybe seven or eight are teachers or former teachers. They know most of the stuff I know, and can recall it much quicker than my 85-year-old brain can dredge it up.
On the infrequent occasions when the team turns to me for a particular answer that I should know, I’m often wrong. I’m surprised they still ask me each week if I can be there on the coming Thursday night. They may be hoping I say no.
My attendance has been spotty of late, but the team places at or near the top of the contest each week whether I’m there or not. That says it all.
My trivia experience brings me to a startling and disquieting revelation: I probably know more about the 85 years that preceded my birth in 1941 than the 85 years since.
The United States, and much of the rest of the world, underwent enormous change from the mid-1800s to the mid-1900s. Most Americans born in the mid-1700s, for instance, and in much of the rest of the world as well, experienced pretty much their same kind of life for the rest of their existence, unless they pulled up stakes and moved westward. But even then, their livelihood wasn’t all that different.
But someone who was born in 1855 and died in 1940—an 85-year span—lived through unbelievable changes, in transportation, communication, household maintenance, and on and on. And American government, business, commerce, workers’ rights, education, and other crucial sectors changed dramatically as well.
That’s the span of years I feel competent to discuss in trivia contests, because I’ve studied them all my life. The years since the end of World War Two? Not so much, even though I’ve lived through all of them.
When I attended college, the Recent American History course usually ended around 1950 or so. That sounds comical today.
I have no clue about modern culture, anything even remotely related to technology, fashion fads, in fact fads of all kinds.
I identify closely with the hero of Robert Heinlein’s 1961 science fiction novel, Stranger in a Strange Land. My inner world recedes continually in my rear view mirror, to the time when students and writers took notes on paper, relied on typewriters, searched card catalogs for books in libraries, and—believe it or not—did research in actual books and documents instead of on line.
I miss it.
I started losing ground decades ago. At the Jefferson Bee and Herald newspapers, everyone else had already converted to computers while I continued to output my stories on my trusty Royal Standard cloth ribbon manual typewriter (may it rest in peace).
I slipped up, and went out of town to a conference. When I returned, my typewriter had been filched. In its place on my desk, staring at me defiantly, rested an Apple IIE with a note: “If you’re going to work here, you’re going to use this computer.” (I owned the place.) The note included an appendix with operating instructions. The first one: “Turn on.”
I asked the staff the obvious question: “How do I do that?” It’s been like that ever since.
I’ve mentioned the towering changes that occurred from mid-19th to mid-20th Century. My life experiences also tell me that today’s America is tremendously different from the one into which I was born, starting in 1941.
My humbling trivia Thursday nights tell me the same thing. ♦
