By Christine M. Quirk — Christine@concordbridge.org
Do you remember Taylor Swift’s first job? The opening line of “The Godfather”?
If so, you’d be right at home at Tom Rutledge’s Wednesday Trivia Nights at the Colonial Inn on Monument Square.
As a teen in Columbus, Ohio, Rutledge competed in a local quiz bowl, and then in college bowls. He was a frequent pub trivia player — oh, and a former “Jeopardy!” champ — but never a host until he set up a Zoom trivia game during the pandemic.
“A couple of years after that, I was on vacation in Vermont, and I played pub trivia,” he said. “At the end of the night, they said they wanted to play the next week, but there was no host. So I thought I’d give it a shot.”
Rutledge said inventing questions and categories isn’t as challenging as you might think.
“There is this little thing called the Internet, and it’s very useful,” he said.
Added his wife, Mimi, “He really loves crafting these interesting, different questions, so it’s not like a canned trivia thing.”
‘So much fun’
Amy Gleason and her team, A-Breasted Development, showed up one night late last month for their second trivia session.
“I was nervous coming in, but it was so much fun,” she said. “Last time I brought some younger family members with me, and that helped a little bit. This time, we’re all kind of the same (age).”
The teams were from Concord and from further afield.
Mark and Vanessa Bilbe, playing with A-Breasted Development, live in Sudbury, but are originally from Cape Town, South Africa.
The Schillingers — Joe, Lisa, and Joey — are from Arizona, visiting their Concord relatives, Linda and Sarah Annunziata. Their team, The Nunzis, were the defending champions.
The game is played in the Liberty Restaurant. There’s no cover charge; attendees can order from the menu if they wish. Winners score Colonial Inn gift certificates.
Five teams competed that late July evening, including staff members of this newspaper as “The Bridge Babes.”
The challenge(s)
Rutledge runs four rounds of play, with five questions each, plus special halftime and final rounds. Teams write their answers on slips of paper and give them to the quizmaster for tabulation. Players score one point per correct answer in the regular rounds, with a few exceptions.
Last week’s categories: First Lines, Thumbs, Midsummer, Celebrities’ First Jobs, and Teams and Bands.
The last category challenged players to think of sports teams whose names overlap with a musical band. The first question tied the Philadelphia Eagles to the Don Henley/Glenn Frey band.
“I like categories where they touch on a couple of different areas of information,” Rutledge said.
The halftime and final round challenges are toughest.
For last week’s halftime question, Rutledge told the players that since the modern Olympic Games began in 1896, 6,620 medals have been awarded worldwide. He asked how many had been awarded to each region: Europe, the Americas, Asia, Oceania, and Africa.
Each team started with 20 points — and lost a point for each hundred medals they were off.
After some clarifying questions (“Does the former Soviet Union count as Europe or Asia?“), players turned in their estimates. Every team summarily blew it — except for A-Breasted Development.
In the final category, “Napkin Drawings,” teams scrambled to identify jotted notes that turned out to be early ideas for things like the internet, the telephone, and Pixar.
And the winner is…
In the end, Abreasted Development — despite leaving their younger relatives at home — prevailed. The Nunzis came in second.
The trivia match lasted a little over an hour. Rutledge kept the game flowing, playing music between rounds, cracking jokes, and circling the room to collect answers and clarify clues.
“I’ve always felt when I go to events, having a good host or emcee is the glue that holds the events together,” Rutledge said.
“I believe in having fun, keeping focus, and making sure everyone has fun.”
And in case you’re wondering, Swift’s first job was picking praying mantis pods off Christmas trees and the first line of “The Godfather” is “I believe in America.”
If you knew, you’d have earned the points your local journalists lost.
Who is… Tom Rutledge?
“This Concordian has been a journalist, an auctioneer, and an independent investment banker, and is a Jeopardy! champion.”
The correct response is: Who is … Tom Rutledge?
Rutledge, who now hosts trivia nights at the Colonial Inn, first competed in a contest of minutiae in a local teen quiz bowl in Columbus, Ohio.
“That kind of started it,” he said. “I liked the energy and the competition. A room full of people trying to throw out answers to crazy questions is a fun room.”
During the summer of 1986, Rutledge was on vacation in Los Angeles and saw an ad in the paper for “Jeopardy!” auditions. “I did a live test in the studio,” he said, “and I made the first cut.”
He and other contestants played practice rounds before being sent home. “Jeopardy!” staffers said they’d be called in six months or so.
Rutledge was back the next day.
“I got a call that night because they had a cancellation,” he said. “I had tickets to see ‘The Merv Griffin Show,’ but it was definitely worth it [to skip it].”
Griffin, coincidentally, was the man who created “Jeopardy!” in 1964.
Rutledge taped two shows on August 18, 1986 which aired at the end of September. In the first, he earned $5,201 as named Jeopardy! champion. Back then, dollar values for the clues were lower — Double Jeopardy! answers were worth $200 to $1,000; today, they’re twice that.
Though he was leading at the end of the game, he clinched his win with the correct response in Final Jeopardy!
“The ‘gin’ in Eli Whitney’s cotton gin is a variant of this common English word.”
“What is engine?”
“The first game, I won. I got Final Jeopardy! right,” he said. “Then the second, I was the returning champion and had a feel of how the game worked. I had a killer Jeopardy round.”
Rutledge ended that round with $3,600, well ahead of his co-contestants, but his streak was not to last.
“The guy next to me, Jonathan [Oren], was a cab driver from Honolulu,” Rutledge said. “He got the buzzer timing down, and it turns out he knew a lot of stuff.”
That buzzer, Rutledge noted, is a big part of tackling the game show. “It’s a little bit of an art,” he said. “You can’t buzz in until the host is done reading, and you have to get a feel for that.”
When the game ended, Rutledge had $2,800; Oren, $9,613. The third contestant, Jim Flowers, had zero.
Rutledge, remembering the feel of being on the show’s set and “doing something I’d seen people do for years,” says he has no regrets.
“Overall, the experience was amazing,” he said.
— Christine M. Quirk
