Among those whom the scandal would eventually envelop was the Reverend Charles (“Stoney“) Jackson of Tullahoma, Tennessee, who was desperately trying to get on “The $64,000 Question,” to repay debts incurred while working with youths, and become what he called the “protestant Father Flanagan.” Another aspirant was young Eddie Hugemeier, Jr., part-time actor, part-time comic, part-time butler, who wangled his way onto so many quiz shows in this age of quiz mania that contestanthood was his chief source of income. ![]() But in the autumn of 1956 this charming, gifted young man was merely one of numberless would-be contestants gravitating toward midtown Manhattan, the quiz-show capital of a quiz-crazed country. It would come to seem the symptom of a deep moral rot in the nation largely because of Van Doren himself. From this innocuous impulse flowed a complex moral tale.īy 1959 a boiling scandal would rage with terrifying fury around the tall, lanky figure of Charles Lincoln Van Doren. ![]() So why not try to get on one of those new television quiz shows? If he happened to get lucky, he might win a few thousand dollars. ![]() He could use some extra money Columbia University paid him meagerly enough to teach English alongside his famous father, the Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Mark Van Doren. In October 1956 the twenty-nine-year-old scion of an illustrious American literary family took up a suggestion that countless Americans were then making to their more erudite friends and relations.
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