Evans “Buddy” King
I am writing this column on Abraham Lincoln’s birthday. Or is it George Washington’s?
Therein lies the rub as Shakespeare said, or at least this story.
Several lifetimes ago, my senior year at Christiansburg High School, I am pretty certain I appeared, along with a couple of my schoolmates, on a local television show known as “Klassroom Kwiz.”
The show aired out of Roanoke. This was pre-cable and pre-satellite and pre-Internet TV days, so pretty much everything we watched aired out of Roanoke.
We got two Roanoke channels—Channel 7 WDBJ, a CBS affiliate and Channel 10 WSLS, an NBC affiliate.
If my father climbed up on the roof and turned the antenna the right way, we got a blurry Channel 6 WHIS out of Bluefield or an even blurrier Channel 13 out of Lynchburg.
This risky maneuver (my mother would do the Protestant version of Hail Mary’s while he was up there) allowed us to get ABC’s college football games on our black and white set. When I was very young I wondered why games from Southern California were always played during blizzards.
Klassroom Kwiz was a “knock off,” a local high school version of the nationally aired College Bowl, a program that featured very bright students from prestigious universities hitting buzzers and answering difficult questions.
Our program was more orderly and watered down, three rounds of questions, mainly softballs lobbed at the contestants by Ted Powers, one of Channel 7’s icons, with the score being kept by Artie Levin, the Channel 7 fitness expert who was otherwise seen on air early in the morning doing push-ups and exhorting others to do so, another Channel 7 icon. Hey, it was the relatively early days of television and they were all icons.
Somehow I was selected as one of CHS’s contestants. It was an ill-fated choice in hindsight, as you will learn.
I was an excellent student to be immodest, but not particularly prepared for the pressure of the moment.
When this tendency to choke was combined with a 17-year-old’s desire to be beyond cool, and an innate shyness that I was a good 10 years away from growing out of, the result was not good, ugly in fact.
So I was not particularly impressed with myself for making the team or thrilled with being in front of what might as well have been a national television audience in my mind.
My parents, on the other hand, were thrilled. My teammates were Russell Board and Bruce Showalter, both significantly smarter than me and I think a little more interested in being on the program.
While a good student with wonderful schoolteacher parents, I did not want to present a scholarly or academic image. In my mind, I was a jock, a future college football player, a 160-pound linebacker who was going to get a scholarship offer from Alabama or Texas any day.
Or at least Tech or UVA. Factor in that I thought that the girl of my dreams at the time would be more impressed with “Buddy the Jock” than “Buddy the Nerd.”
So I approached the quiz show with a practiced indifference, plus a high degree of trepidation.
I vaguely remember that my mother picked my clothes for these appearances, with some dubious choices by me mixed in. She selected a double-breasted lime green sport coat, with a patterned tie that was wide enough that she used it as a tablecloth at Thanksgiving.
While I don’t recall the specifics, I suspect I wore dark green bell bottom pants of some sort, completing my Bozo the Clown jungle camo outfit. Stunning look, but not atypical for the era (one never to be repeated I hope).
Our team did okay on our first several appearances on the show, which aired on Monday nights at 7 p.m. and was probably watched only by friends and family.
We won our first two or three contests, avoiding a loss to the Floyd County High team, losing to whom would have been ignominy that the town of Christiansburg might not have survived.
One of my future dorm mates at UVA was on the Floyd team, wearing a lovely pink sports coat, which put my lime green one to shame.
All of this brings me to the moment. The winner each week was allowed to return the next and if you won seven weeks in a row you were “retired as a champ”. Having won two or three in a row, expectations were mounting. Usually only the “big schools in Roanoke” had long winning streaks. We were on a roll.
This particular week (I do not remember who our opponent was) we went into an extra round because we were tied.
I was the last of our team to answer in this round, with the contest on the line, answer right and go on to another round, answer wrong and go home and don’t come back.
Our host Ted turned to me, with his fake television smile, and said, “Buddy, which United States President was born on February 12?”
Please note that my normal facial expression when “on camera” was what eventually became known as the “deer in the headlights look.”
At this instant, however, my look would have been more like a “deer in the headlights of an 80 mile per hour tractor trailer.”
Keep in mind that my parents, aunts, cousins, etc. were all teachers. It was the family business. I had been taught my multiplication tables before I started school.
I knew all of the presidents; I knew all of the state capitals. I knew the answer to this question when I was in the first grade.
But not at this point in time. Not at this crucial at-bat. I smiled weakly at Mr. Powers and blurted out “George Washington, George Washington was born on February 12.”
The air was sucked out of the room. The group of 40 or 50 CHS students who had made the trip down the mountain on the school bus to support us gasped. My teammates looked away.
The girl of my dreams disavowed (even beyond her norm) that she knew me. Mr. Powers smiled sadly and said, “oh I am so sorry, that is incorrect Buddy, the correct answer is Abraham Lincoln.”
I slumped in my chair as the show left the air. My mother told me that my dad, watching from our den at home, uttered one of the special profanities that he saved for private moments.
I am not sure my father ever got over this defeat. It was the type of thing you didn’t do if your parents were teachers. Personally, after the battlefield trauma wore off, I was sort of glad that we didn’t have to go back for another week.
The pain did not stick with me like the missed tackle at Radford my junior year, which cost us the game.
I had achieved my goal of not being a nerdy scholar. Hey, he doesn’t even know who was born on February 12!
And I have been grateful ever since that the powers that be came up with Presidents Day. Which one was born on which day no longer matters.
Evans “Buddy” King grew up in Christiansburg and graduated from CHS in 1971. He lives in Clarksburg, West Virginia, where he practices law with the firm of Steptoe and Johnson PLLC. He can be reached at Evans.King@steptoe-johnson.com.
