Fat Man/Fit Town

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).

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.