Way back in the 1950s, well-connected intellectual Charles Van Doren allowed himself to become involved as a contestant in a rigged television quiz show.
The show was Twenty One, a contest show where two competitors, each in an "isolation booth," tried to be the first to reach 21 points when asked a series of challenging questions. The show was enormously popular, so much so that it appears to have been the first program to top the sitcom I Love Lucy in the ratings for that time slot.
Van Doren's dad was a famous poet and his mother a novelist. In addition, an uncle was a Pulitzer Prize winning biographer. The young professor was, in sum, to the campus born.
The show's producers liked him and decided to feed him answers because of the 30-year-old's upper-crust polish, pleasant manner and general good looks. His biggest rival on the show was a man named Herb Stempel, defeated by Van Doren in 1956--with a little help.
Stempel overheard a conversation about the passing of answers to his rival and alerted the authorities. The viewing public was outraged, and Van Doren no longer was its darling.
In 1958, news about other rigged quiz shows came to light. Congress became involved, and in 1959 Van Doren finally fessed up to the cheating after initially having denied it. He lost his teaching job at Columbia University.
Later Van Doren worked as an editor for Encyclopedia Britannica and authored a number of books. At last report, he was on the faculty of the University of Connecticut at Torrington.
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