In the early years of Jeopardy!, in order to help grow the show’s audience I did PR trips around the country. Pat Sajak, Vanna White, and I would go out on the road together because we were pitching Wheel and Jeopardy! as a package deal. Mostly we’d visit local morning shows. I didn’t mind it. I’m gregarious enough that I could roll with the punches with the local anchors. I remember going on Oprah’s show in Chicago back when it was on in the morning. (Before long, King World would sign her to a syndication deal too.) One time, the three of us were guests on Sally Jesse Raphael’s show in St. Louis. She asked us who our showbiz heroes were. Pat said somebody like Walter Cronkite.
“What about you, Alex?” Sally asked.
“Arnold Stang,” I said. Stang was a comic actor who was popular in the forties and fifties. The audience was totally clueless and utterly silent. But Pat laughed. He was probably the only one in the room who knew who Arnold Stang was. Now, take a break from this book and go look him up.
Another thing I did to help build the show’s popularity was go on the road for our very first contestant searches. We still do them to this day. The contestant department travels from city to city. They bring a group of hopefuls into a conference room and give them a fifty-question test. Then they pick up those tests and go grade them. During that time, the applicants don’t have much to do but wait. So in those early years, I would occasionally come along and surprise the groups and take questions.
One time in New York, I did that. A few minutes into the question-and-answer period, a guy at the back of the room raised his hand.
“Yes, sir?” I asked.
“Who are you?” he said.
“I beg your pardon?”
“Who are you?” he asked.
All of the people around him kind of gave him a strange look.
“I don’t understand,” I said.
“Well,” he explained, “I was just walking by outside the hotel, and I saw this sign that said ‘Jeopardy! Testing.’ So I thought I’d come in. I have never heard of the show, and I don’t know who you are.” Then he started apologizing.
“Don’t apologize,” I told him. “You don’t have to apologize. There are a lot of people out there who don’t watch television. And I don’t take it personally that they are not familiar with the show. I hope that they will look in and discover us, but it’s okay. You don’t have to say, ‘I’m sorry’ for not knowing who I am.”
It was another lesson in humility, just in case I hadn’t been sufficiently humbled by my encounter all those years before with Her Majesty the Queen. I still don’t know if the guy passed the test.