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| The 1980s... This is the page where you can read about CNOF’s history and team member recollections ordered by contest year. The teams City News and Occupation: Foole merged for the 1983 contest. CNOF was first used as an abbreviation in the last year of the 80s decade. If you would like to contribute some history to this archive, please drop me a note with the details. |
Select a year to view highlights and lowlights of the contest
| 1980 City News/Occupation: Foole 1981 City News/Occupation: Foole 1982 City News/Occupation: Foole 1983 Some Darkhorse Team 1984 Kory’s 76 1985 Kory’s 76 1986 Village Apartments 1987 Village Apartments 1988 Answer Ward 1989 CNOF: A Kinder & Gentler Trivia Team |
1980 City News/Occupation: Foole
| “The Second Decade.” Occupation: Foole repeats in 2nd place accumulating 5475 points while City News improves to 3rd. City News was again located at the Gorski home. Jack Wimme’s second year writing questions for the contest and The Oz. Foole plays again at Denny and Rita’s and develop the team motto: Have phone, will call. This was the year, in question 7 of hour 42, we were asked “Who is the newly appointed sewer commissioner of Provo, Utah?” The problem was that Robert Redford was the sewer commissioner of Provo Canyon, not Provo. The question is tossed costing Foole the contest. Starting in 1981, all contests have begun with a Robert Redford question in memory of this controversy. Also, this contest begat the “if you can’t answer it, toss it” strategy. |
1981 City News/Occupation: Foole
| “Year 12” is this contest’s creative slogan. Foole finishes a fabulous 1st with 6535 points while playing at Don Lynch’s house. This year Foole is Wimme-less, but Harry C. joins forces with the team. Patrick P. almost gives a neighbor boy cardiac arrest chasing after him for the Dukes of Hazzard question. Pat L. learns not to give someone the one-finger salute while sitting on the roof. 5780 points gets City News a drop to 4th place while playing at the Gorski home again. This was the last year for hearing “Call nooooooowwwwww....” |
1982 City News/Occupation: Foole
| A 3rd place for City News (4450 points) playing at Brad Flatoff’s home. Foole sets up shop again at the Wimme household and plays the 90FM and WAPL trivia contests simultaneously finishing 8th in both. Remember when we used to have a one-hour break at midnight Saturday for the reading of the scores? This tradition ended in later years, but at the time the free hour was used for food runs to Hardee’s, sleeping, and bar runs. This is the first contest where teams are allowed only one call per question. Sometimes that rule doesn’t stop us... Also, the Trivia organizers hire a new advertising agency who comes up with a slogan much improved over the previous year: “The Contest Continues.” Hey, maybe CNOF and Foole should combine! |
| “E.T.: The Extra-Trivial” The year City News and Occupation: Foole combined to play at Dick Novak’s house. A 2nd place finish with 5205 points. We took pride in confusing radio listeners with our tricky name: “And In Second Place, Some Darkhorse Team.” This was the first year we were asked about the signature Louisville Slugger swung by Shelley Duvall in The Shining (Carl Yastrzemski). This was the year that a couple of Three Stooges shorts and a feature were shown as part of Trivia Kickoff. This question became the Oz’s “favorite question.” The contest ending 500 pointer was “On Jack Benny’s radio show in 1952, he purchased a Christmas gift for Don Wilson. What was it?” We didn’t know at the time that the answer was “a gopher trap.” Not only did we miss that big pointer, but we missed most big point (there were very few) questions in 1983. Our scoring sheet shows we answered two 100-point questions, but no questions with a higher value. We received 100 points for answering “Who was Buster Keaton’s godfather?” and 100 points for “What was the vintage of the bottle Kirk gives McCoy in Star Trek II?” The answers: Harry Houdini and 2283 respectively. The real highlight of the year? Dick Novak breaking the sound barrier on Rice Street driving on a running question. |
| The Orwellian “The Year Is Here” highlights this contest. We return to financial sponsorship again, but this time we get cash plus food and beer. As far as I know, we were the first trivia team to shamelessly accept cash for our name. We played at Derek Carlson’s home on the Wisconsin River (one of our more scenic venues). We were asked to identify eight pictures this year which grew into the tradition now known as The New Trivia Times. Question 1 of hour 12 asked us to identify “Picture 1:” a picture of Molly Goldberg. Trivia Kickoff was a showing of the now classic comedy Blazing Saddles (1974). The team finished in 3rd place with 5210 points. |
| Another fine year with sponsorship played at Derek Carlson’s home. Trivia is “Sweet Sixteen” and the team scores 5035 for 3rd place. Trivia Kickoff was a showing of American Graffiti (1973). The contest opened with a typical Redford question: “What celebrity is the co-owner of the Sundance Ski Resort in Utah?” We learned something this year about how to correctly word questions to people on the telephone. Question 4 of hour 22 led to us calling Bud Somerville and asking him if “he was the first American inducted into the Curling Hall of Fame.” He answered “no.” The question ended, the answer was given as “Bud Somerville” and we called Bud back to ask why he said no. He said “I’m not that Bud Somerville.” Thanks Bud. The question with the largest point value that we got correct was “Who was Miss Scrap Iron of 1943?” For 100 stinkin’ trivia points: Rosie the Riveter. The 500-point question was “What movie featured a Photoplay magazine, a song from The Four Tops, and a scene from the game show Let’s Make A Deal?” The answer, which was in Fred Worth’s Super Trivia III, was “The Thing.” Unfortunately, we did not look in Super Trivia III until after the question was over. |
| “Welcome Back Trivia Comet.” No financial sponsorship, but Tom Lewandowski finds us great accommodations and plenty of sleeping space at the Village Apartments. Derek Carlson bolts for Infomaniacs this year. Trivia Kickoff takes place at the Fox Theatre with a showing of The Blob (1958) The event included a cartoon prior to the feature: Dial 'P' for Pink (1965). The Kickoff movie tradition goes on hiatus after this year until Trivia 1992. The phrase “NEVER come up on the Aerobie” enters CNOF pop culture. One memorable moment involved a rather heated argument amongst a couple team members...Going into the last hour, we were in 4th place with the Infomaniacs chasing Network for 1st. Then, The Oz asked Terry Wiegert’s dream question: “In the Bruce Dern classic film Silent Running, what was the exact poker hand that the drone Dewey used to win the hand?” Terry’s notes had the answer: “Full house, jacks over nines.” Getting this 400-point question correct would put us in 2nd place. We got the answer in, but at this point, a team member (who is no longer on the team) insisted we give the answer to Infomaniacs to help them beat Network. The ex-teamer rigidly stood his ground and demanded that we help Infomaniacs. Sanity prevailed and we didn’t give the answer to Infomaniacs—if we had they would have beat us, but not Network. We finished in 3rd place with 4775 points while Smell The Glove (major yuks) finishes in 23rd. |
| April 3, 4, and 5. Again at the Village Apartments, with a drop to 9th place and 4875 points. Trivia 18 was “Short and Sweet” due to a one-hour daylight savings time transition. This was Carrie Pfefferkorn’s and Doug Regan’s first year playing the contest. We had three phone lines this year paid for by $10 donations by each team member. A Trivia Kickoff event took place on March 28 at the American Legion Hall downtown Stevens Point: Live music by The Wailing Young Koch Band for $2.50 from 8pm to midnight. An interesting historical side note: The very first short of The Simpson’s ran two weeks after this contest. Eventually, all contests will have at least one Simpson’s question. |
| We are named after the Solzhenitsyn book The Cancer Ward. Our first year playing at Rod Larson’s parent’s home on Feltz Avenue. Doug Regan misses a plane and the contest due to bacterial dysentery acquired in Orlando (something tells me that Doug missing the contest was best for all of us). We continued the slide by falling to 13th place. The contest started on April 15 triggering the “A Taxing Contest” slogan. The contest was rescheduled from the previously announced March 25 for an unknown reason. This was the last year where questions were assigned a pre-determined point value and sometimes causing 50-point phone blowers. The question authors had to do a best-guess at the difficulty of the question when assigning a point value and sometimes they were a little off. The results were teams having difficulty in getting in on the phone to answer a high-value question. On the other hand, an occasional difficult question was assigned a small point value and it didn’t matter a whole lot if you didn’t get the question right. This is the first contest where John “Eck” Eckendorf assisted in writing the contest. This is the last year we use our quaint, hand-drawn scoring sheets for tracking our progress in the contest. Starting next year, the team scoring sheets are generated on an Apple Macintosh. Our contest technology this year included both Beta and VHS VCRs and two phone lines. We found out the hard way that having call-waiting was a bad choice as it disrupted our speed-dialer. |
1989 CNOF: A Kinder & Gentler Trivia Team
| Trivia 20, “The Anniversary Party,” is played at the Larson home with a team name inspired by a President George H. W. Bush moment. We gather a 2nd place finish with 9270 new-scoring-system-inflated-but-fair points. We deserved a 1st for having to listen to radio announcers repeatedly call us a “kindler” and gentler trivia team. This was the first year where points were awarded to teams using a pari-mutuel scoring method and the only year you could get 1000 points for a single question (We nailed two). The following year, the maximum point value for a question was set to 500. The two questions worth 1000 points that we got correct were: “What Hollywood actress was once fancifully publicized as 'the world's most beautiful animal'?” (Ave Gardner) and “What player was the 1986 Seagram’s Sports NBA Rookie of the Year?” (Xavier McDaniel). The new scoring method was suggested by us in a team letter written by Terry Wiegert to The Oz, Jim Oliva. Question values from 1989 and on are determined naturally according to their difficulty. |
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Last updated
February 20, 2010
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