What A Link!

The name in the obituary hit me right between the eyes. Elfrida von Nardroff has passed away at 96. She would have been just a fairly obscure person who has passed away in their 90s if it hadn't been for her part in the great game show scandals of the 1950s on the show Twenty-One.

Anyone who grew up in that era of early television would remember those weekly episodes of Twenty-One where contestants were isolated in soundproof booths with bulky headsets and answered what seemed to be questions from the MC Jack Berry that only a genius could answer. Game shows were hugely popular, and the Robert Redford 1994 movie 'Quiz Show' captures the era perfectly. 

I had forgotten there were two notable contestants who were fed questions and answers before the show would air, herself, and Charles Van Doren, who proceeded her.

The lid was blown off the deceit when Herb Stempel, as Queens postal worker, started to blab that he had been fed questions and answers and that he took a dive that allowed Charles Van Doren to win what then was a record $129,000. 

(See http://onofframp.blogspot.com/2018/08/twenty-one;

http://onofframp.blogspot.com/2019/04/charles-van-doren.html)

Mark Van Doren had a polished resumé and pedigree. His 2019 NYT obituary written by Robert McFadden wrote of him:

"His father was Mark Van Doren, a Pulitzer Prize-winning poet, literary critic and professor of English at Columba. His mother, Dorothy Van Doren, was a novelist and editor. And his uncle, Carl Van Doren, had been a professor of literature and a Pulitzer Prize-winning biographer. Charles himself had a bachelor's and master's degree, a $4,400-a-year position at Columbia and an honest look about him." Looks proved deceiving.

Elfrida's father was a physics professor at Columbia, Robert von Nardroff. His father, Dr. Ernest von Nardroff, was my father's principal at Stuyvesant High School in the 1930s. When the scandal broke and Van and von were front page news, I remember my father talking about the science experiments that Dr. Ernest von Nardroff performed at the high school during the assemblies. They were hugely popular. When I attended the same high school in the 1960s, the principal, Dr. Leonard Fleidner at the time demonstrated chemistry experiments at assemblies.

Elfrida's winning streak at Twenty-One ran in 1958 and gained her $220,500, which Richard Sandomir points out in her NYT obituary would be $2.1 million today, which ranks up there with top Jeopardy winners, a show of course free of scandal.

I remember Mark Van Doren in the isolation booth, but was probably not watching the show when Elfrida was running up her streak. The teeth gnashing and sweating in the booth was it turned out staged, as the contestants sweated out their answers. I remember one answer, given I think by Van Doren about an obscure Pacific Island that my father had a trouble believing he could possibly know anything about. My father was in Guam during WW II.

One of the game shows' contestants that wasn't tainted was Dr. Joyce Brothers, who won on The $64,000 Question. Dr. Brothers was the nation's TV psychologist long before Dr. Phil and other self-promoted television gurus, earning her doctorate from Columbia University, proving that all contestants with Columbia backgrounds weren't deceitful.

The late '50s saw game shows pulled down in disgrace, and then the record rankings were smudged with the 1960s Payola scandal that saw American Bandstand's DJ Dick Clark get nailed for accepting money to play certain records to get them to achieve popularity via "air time."

And hardly for the last time, Americans were beginning to realize they could be lied to and manipulated.

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