The room started off sounding pretty rowdy. Many of the regulars had arrived – including Team SMRT, the 74s, Upper Mondolia, the Whatevers and Jan’s Clan – and they’d all begun settling in for Tuesday night’s festivities. A voice on the microphone welcomed everybody to the weekly gathering. And the room went quiet, everybody listening to what the MC was about to say. She paused and read:
“Question No. 1,” she announced. “What fictional doctor lives in Puddleby-on-the-Marsh?”
Several years ago, when Joanne Richter and her husband Rob Garrard opened The Second Wedge Brewing Co. in Uxbridge, they not only offered craft beer refreshment as an attraction, but also events that might draw patrons on an otherwise nondescript night of the week.
They inaugurated “Pubstumpers’ Trivia” each Tuesday from 7 to 9 p.m. Folks of all ages came out, assembled in teams of a half-dozen players or so, and took up the challenge of answering several rounds of trivia questions – much like the game Trivial Pursuit – about mostly useless but wonderfully entertaining facts.
Then, the pandemic hit in 2020 and after it, in May 2022, the derecho (tornado) which forced the Wedge into a rebuild program (with plans to reopen this June). Having attracted so many regulars on Tuesdays each fall and winter, however, Joanne and Rob didn’t want to lose the momentum.
So, with RCL Branch 170 available, Trivia Tuesdays moved downstairs to the bar at the Legion. Several weeks ago, Jayne and I accepted an invitation from our neighbours Jan and Dave Sterritt, to join Jan’s Clan in the competition.
My wife and I have always had a fascination for unique and little-known stories and factoids, so we discovered that getting together with like-minded friends on Tuesdays fit our personalities and schedule perfectly.
Given how trivia has emerged as nearly a global phenomenon, it’d be logical to think that it originated over several mugs of suds in a beer garden or a Legion hall. But no. On a night in December 1979, Chris Haney (then photo editor at the Montreal Gazette) and Scott Abbott (sports journalist with Canadian Press) got tired of playing Scrabble and considered inventing their own game.
Within minutes they’d come up with a game that tests players’ grasp of wickedly inconsequential trivia, and had invented the the board, the wedges and the basic categories – geography, entertainment, history, art and leisure, science and nature and sports and leisure. By 1981, they’d raised $40,000 from 32 investors and had patented Trivial Pursuit in Canada. In one year – 1984 – their invention racked up $800 million in sales.
In 2008, corporate game giant Hasbro purchased the intellectual rights to Trivial Pursuit for $80 million. By then, their game was outselling Monopoly.
Who’d have thought a question and answer like: “What’s the largest diamond in the world? A baseball diamond.” – could outstrip the attraction of building hotels on Boardwalk and Park Place?
At first, their innovation became a hit with baby boomers. Then, Haney and Abbott left their jobs in journalism to create spinoffs such as Junior Edition, Silver Screen, All-Star Sports, Baby Boomer edition, All About the 80s, 1990s and even a Harry Potter edition.
Maclean’s magazine once asked Chris Haney, in light of the game’s incredible success, how he thought of himself. “It’s like we became rock stars,” he said. When Chris Haney died prematurely in 2010, Trivial Pursuit had sold more than 100 million copies in 26 countries, in 17 languages. Sales were estimated at well over $1 billion.
Now about quizmaster Joanne Richter’s trivia question regarding the doctor from Puddleby-on-the-Marsh … it’s fascinating to consider how a brain processes trivia. With half a dozen of us in Jan’s Clan around the table last Tuesday night, the potential answer went in several different directions.
We all figured the doctor had to be British. And because the character was fiction, one came up with Dr. Jekyll (from Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde). Another suggested Dr. Watson (Sherlock Holmes’ “elementary” sidekick). All those potential answers seemed sound, but ultimately we agreed on the first name that came to all of us.
“Puddleby sounds too silly to be real,” one of us said. “My gut feeling is it’s Dr. Doolittle, the guy who talked to the animals.”
And that’s one truism about trivia competition – going with the first thing that comes to mind generally pays off. Second guessing is the wrong way to think, or as a Trivial Pursuit friend of ours once said, “If you hear hooves, think horses, not zebras.”
We went with Dr. Doolittle. And we were right. Jan’s Clan didn’t win overall that night. But thanks to The Second Wedge and the Legion, there’s always another Trivia Tuesday.
