Nostalgia

Posted in random thought on March 8th, 2010 by Rick

My daughter tried out for the teen version of Jeopardy last week. The first round is kind of an interesting process–they give a screener quiz to every potential contestant simultaneously, using a Flash application that’s synchronized to network time. I assume this is to prevent anyone from sharing the answers over the intertubes. Seems like a clever solution to a very modern problem.

As she was furiously trying to recall the answers to questions that would have been easy without the time pressure, I flashed back to the mid-70s when I competed on a Philadelphia-local public TV kids’ quiz show called, IIRC, Challenge. (I can’t find reference to it with a Google search, but I suspect it disappeared long before the Web.) The setup was a lot like Jeopardy, with 3 contestants and a moderator asking questions, bonus rounds and a final, high-stakes question. The prizes were small, but made quite an impression.

I won the first episode I played, and the winner’s prize was a $25 bank account. Not a check for $25, but an honest-to-goodness passbook savings account, my first. In this day of online banking, it’s hard to remember those old passbooks, but they were kind of awesome. Mine felt like a US passport. The cover was stiff, with a very light faux-leather grain, and the pages were very heavy stock so the transaction printing machine wouldn’t shred it with every use. I loved looking at the list of deposits, mostly from birthday and holiday gifts at that age. Much more wonderful than an ATM receipt.

On the second day I lost, but the consolation prize was nearly as cool as a bank account. It was a Polaroid zip camera (possibly an electric one, but probably the much cheaper manual version).

Polaroid Electric Zip Camera (blue)

My consolation prize looked like this, only red.

It was a very cheap camera (the manual version had the lowest MSRP of any Polaroid camera ever produced), but I did have a lot of fun with it–when I could afford to buy the super-expensive (for me) film packs. I can still smell the gooey photochemicals squeezed onto the prints by the camera’s rollers. Not Proust’s madeleines, but still. The best part was peeling back the cover sheet after a couple of minutes to see just how bad the picture was (I was, and remain, a mediocre photographer).

I kind of miss that old camera.

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