Consider This from NPR - How A Jeopardy! Champ's Disappearance From The Show Left Fans Mystified For Decades

Episode Date: May 25, 2023

Since its relaunch in the 1980s, Jeopardy! has had thousands of contestants. For some of the its most memorable champions, the gameshow has been a launchpad for wider success. However, the disappearance of one of the earliest champions from the show left fans mystified for decades.NPR's Sacha Pfeiffer talks with Claire McNear, a staff writer with The Ringer, about the 40-year-long mystery behind one of Jeopardy's most enigmatic champions. In participating regions, you'll also hear a local news segment to help you make sense of what's going on in your community.Email us at [e-mail] more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy

Support for NPR comes from NPR member stations and Eric and Wendy Schmidt through the Schmidt Family Foundation, working toward a healthy, resilient, secure world for all. On the web at theschmidt.org. Since its relaunch in the 1980s, Jeopardy! has had thousands of contestants, somewhere in the range of 17,000 by our estimate. Among those, a handful stand out as fan favorites. You might be partial to Ken Jennings. What is an epilogue?

What is my big, fat Greek wedding? Who is Nixon? What is patriotism? What is boilerplate? Boilerplate, yes. He holds the record for longest- running streak the show has ever seen. Whose 74-day cash winnings total $2,520,700. Or maybe you're a fan of Amy Schneider.

Who is Lamarck? Who is the Black Sea? Who is Fanny? What's the usual suspect? What is To Infinity and Beyond? Yes. She holds the title of the highest-winning female contestant, and she's the first and only openly trans contestant

to win Jeopardy's annual tournament of champions. Amy Schneider, you've won our $250,000 grand prize. Or your favorite could be James Holzhauer. What are home runs? What is plain Jane? What is the mashed potato? What is a cocky jockey? What is stand by your man?

You're right. He's the high-rolling professional sports better known for risky wagers that earned him the top 10 largest single-game winnings in the show's history. You have just set a one-day record. Again, $131,127. Besides winning millions of dollars and adoration from fans,

each of those contestants has gone on to achieve further success after appearing on Jeopardy. Ken Jennings currently hosts the show. Amy Schneider has become a prominent LGBTQ advocate. And James Holzhauer had a stint as a cast member on another game show and is still a successful gambler. But what if, instead of fame, success on Jeopardy brought you infamy? Consider this. For contestants like Jennings, Schneider, and Holzhauer, success on Jeopardy became a launchpad for their careers outside the show. Up ahead, we'll hear how one champion's disappearance from the show left Jeopardy! superfans mystified for decades.

From NPR, I'm Sasha Pfeiffer. It's Thursday, May 25th. This message comes from WISE, the app for doing things in other currencies. Send, spend, or receive money internationally, and always get the real-time, mid-market exchange rate with no hidden fees. Download the WISE app today, or visit WISE.com. T's and C's apply. Support for NPR and the following message come from Carnegie Corporation of New York, working to reduce political polarization through philanthropic support for education, democracy, and peace. More information at carnegie.org.

It's Consider This from NPR. In its many decades on air, Jeopardy! has had lots of notable contestants, but one in particular has been the topic of much lore. Presidential trivia for 400. Teddy Roosevelt's wife and mother both had the misfortune of doing this on Valentine's Day in 1884. Barbara? What is dying?

Yes, they both died. Presidential trivia for 600. That's Barbara Lowe Volick competing on the show in 1986. She won five games in a row, which was a rare feat at the time. But despite that success, her appearances seem to have vanished from the Jeopardy! archives and in syndicated reruns. So rumors have swirled for years among Jeopardy! superfans about what happened to Lo Volokh and why. Until now. Journalist Claire McNear recently located and spoke with Lo Volokh. She's written about that conversation in a new piece for The Ringer,

and it fills in some of the details of this game show mystery. Hi, Claire. Hi there. So great to be here. Would you describe what made Barbara Lo Volokh such a mysterious figure? Yeah, it was an interesting sort of saga. I mean, the first thing that happened was she won five games, which at the time was the limit for returning champions, and it qualified players for a berth in the upcoming tournament of champions,

where they have all their best recent players come back and face each other. And she didn't show up in that. And that was a few months after her initial appearance. And then what happened over the course of the 90s in particular is a lot of Jeopardy executives began to sort of speak poorly of her in public. Trebek gave an interview in the 1990s where he said that she'd been on all these other game shows. There was a former Jeopardy! producer who wrote a book and added that Lowe had mocked other contestants in the studios

and that she'd gotten into it with Trebek and was kind of this terrible contestant and had gotten all this hate mail for the show from her appearance. So she sort of became this villain and really kind of Jeopardy's greatest villain, and nobody really knew what had happened. There was a sort of decades-long search for tapes of her games that had gone missing, and they finally found those tapes at the end of last year when a superfan came forward and said they'd taped on their VCR almost every single Jeopardy episode from the 1980s

and just stashed them all in a closet all this time. Really? Someone did that and kept all those tapes? I mean, this was a huge moment of celebration for people in the Jeopardy fandom community when they finally got a hold of these tapes. So I think they're very grateful and hopeful that, you know, more people will find their tape stashes in their own closets. And did the tapes answer any unanswered questions? Yeah. So there are a couple things that show up in the tapes. And the first is that,

essentially, Barbara is not really the person that she was described as. Instead of being this kind of combative, cantankerous person who is, you know, the supposed villain of Jeopardy for all these years, she's super bubbly. She's very emotional. She gets really excited when she gets a really hard clue right. In the first line of the Dean Martin song, that's amore. Barbara. What is when a moon hits your eye like a big pizza pie? Oh, I love a contestant who has a good time in our show. Nice going, Barbara. She's really kind of endearing. And there were a couple of sort of infamous moments where she supposedly really beefed with Trebek, and in reality, they didn't really happen that way at all.

So you talked with Barbara. Did you intentionally decide to track her down and get her version of the story? Yeah, I found Barbara, who had never done an interview about this, and over a period of time convinced her that, you know, I wanted to, you know, talk to her and tell her story for the first time. And essentially, she described a totally different situation from the one that Jeopardy! Brass had described for all these years. What did she say? So she says, essentially, that in the midst of her winning streak, she came down with a stomach bug. And that in the middle of one of her games, she, you know, had that terrible feeling in her stomach and essentially had to dash off stage right in the middle of production, her games, she, you know, had that terrible feeling in her stomach and essentially had to dash off stage right in the middle of production, stop all the cameras and make it to the facilities. And she says that when this happened, Trebek was livid about this delay and that he kind of held that against her from that point on. And I read your article and it

also said they ended up disputing her qualifications. They felt like she broke some rules about who could compete. So did that also get them on their blacklist? Yes. Well, sort of. It is a point of contention between Jeopardy and Barbara. So Jeopardy's central contention was that Barbara had been on more game shows, in fact, a lot more game shows than was allowed at the time. And this is something that to this day, game shows take very seriously and regulate carefully. And that's a vestige of the 1950s quiz show scandal. And what she said to me is that she had been on a few other game shows. She was a big game show fan, but that she had disclosed them all to Jeopardy and that they had knowingly allowed her onto the show. And what I discovered in the course of my reporting is

that she did, in fact, disclose three appearances on other game shows on her application. So those were things that Jeopardy knew about. And the question, of course, is whether there were additional game shows beyond those three. But Jeopardy, at least, has never said any names of specific shows that she was supposedly on. I want to go back to her upset stomach because, you know, unfortunate things happen to people at unfortunate times. Why would that be so upsetting to the show? Yeah, I mean, honestly, that is a good question. And I don't know that there is a very compelling answer to that. I think that part of it was probably Jeopardy at the time was really in its infancy. It was just the second season of the show with Alex Trebek. They were really kind of a

shoestring operation in those days. But there's a second beat to this. So Barbara won just over $35,000. But she says that Jeopardy never sent her her check. She says that she had to hire a lawyer and learned that Jeopardy was claiming that the delay from her stomach bug had cost them thousands of dollars that they were trying to recoup from her prize money. So she says that she ultimately settled for half of her prize instead of going to trial. So she got about $17,500. And after paying her lawyer in taxes, she says that she ended up with just about $5,000 of that initial $35,000. When you spoke with her, was she aware that she's become a mystery in the Jeopardy world? And how does she feel about that if she knew that?

Yeah, well, it's a funny thing where she, because this episode had occurred and had sort of left her with a bad taste in her mouth, she has not watched Jeopardy in many, many years. And she's not very active in that Jeopardy fandom community. So she was, for the most part, not very aware that she had become this sort of infamous figure in the lore of Jeopardy. But that changed a couple years ago when a Jeopardy fan who was trying to find these tapes found her and reached out. And she found the whole thing kind of preposterous. But I also think that she was glad to finally get to tell her side of the story, which had really been a mystery until now. And do you think for people who care about things like this, this puts it to bed for them? Well, yes and no. I mean, I think that this is also partly a story about memory. It's been almost

40 years since this happened. Trebek died in 2020. The producer who wrote the book and talked about Barbara has also since passed away. Modern Jeopardy has declined to sort of comment on this. And I mean, as an example of the memory dynamic, at the very end of Barbara's last game, Trebek is reading out everybody's final Jeopardy answers, and Barbara realizes that she's won. Barbara Lowe has done it. She has become a five-time Undecuted Champion. And she bursts into tears and claps her hands to her face. And Barbara's memory of that moment, she told me, is that Trebek, as he came over to her, ostensibly to congratulate her,

instead snapped at her and told her to put her hands down and that it was this really ugly final exchange on the Jeopardy! stage. But I was able to watch that episode. And what happens is Trebek announces that Barbara's won and she's undefeated as she's crying and he goes through his usual, we'll see you next time, spiel. And then he says, and this is a quote,

I've got to console this woman. He puts his microphone down and just with a huge, huge smile on his face, he goes over to her and just wraps her in a hug. So what does that tell us? Well, I mean, I think you end up in a place where there's still a little bit of ambiguity. I mean, I think that we answered some parts of the mystery. We know some of it definitely was not true. There are other parts that we, you know, still don't know for sure. And we might never definitively know the answer.

And I think what's interesting with this being about the game show Jeopardy is, you know, it is a quiz show that is devoted and has been devoted for almost 40 years to the search for objective truth. And I think what was really frustrating for a lot of Jeopardy fans is, you know, you couldn't really get to the answer. There was no definite answer. And I think that to some degree that is still the case, even though you have more information. But I think that it is at least sort of an interesting look at the way that legends come about. That's The Ringer's Claire McNear. Claire, thank you. Thank you so much. It's Consider This from NPR.

I'm Sasha Pfeiffer. Support for NPR and the following message come from the Kauffman Foundation, providing access to opportunities that help people achieve financial stability, upward mobility, and economic prosperity, regardless of race, gender, or geography. Kauffman.org.