Lawrence Today magazine, Summer 2005
Back when a first-class stamp set you back a nickel and the Beatles’ “We
Can Work it Out” was tearing up the pop charts, Lawrence University
student J.B. deRosset, ’66, decided he would try to
build a better mouse trap.
No mice were ever caught with deRosset’s creation, but he did manage
to ensnare a generation of college students who, for the past 40 years, have
turned matters of minutia into an annual 50-hour art form of outrageous questions
and answers.
This, then, was the 40th edition of Lawrence University’s Great Midwest
Trivia Contest, the nation’s longest-running salute to the obscure
and inconsequential, where first-place prizes like toilet seats and bags
of Ramen noodles are revered as badges of honor.
Broadcast on campus radio station WLFM, this year’s installment began
Friday, January 28, at the all-too-appropriately insignificant time of 10:00:37
and ran through midnight Sunday — 50 continuous hours of off-the-wall
questions culled from the minds of a team of student “trivia masters,” all
designed to challenge — and occasionally stump — even the best
competitors.
In honor of the 40th birthday, deRosset (pictured with the 2005 trivia masters),
who holds near cult-like status among Lawrence trivia diehards, returned
to the
scene
of
the crime,
flying
to Appleton from his home in Miami, Fla., to spend the weekend as the contest’s
guest of honor.
The founder
It was the dead of winter in 1966 when deRosset, then a senior at Lawrence,
began plotting how to
improve an idea he stumbled upon while visiting a woman-of-interest who was
attending Beloit College.
“Some group at Beloit was putting on a trivia contest at their student
union. My only recollection is that it was a lame, pathetic, pitiable attempt,” deRosset
recalls. “I knew it could be done a whole lot better. I came back to
campus all enthused about how Lawrence could do a better job at a trivia
contest.”
With the help of two friends who worked at the radio station, he started
tinkering.
“The three of us provided the synergy needed to create a weekend radio
contest,” says
deRosset, who has since built a successful career doing legal and financial
planning work for the McDonald’s Corporation. “We spent a month
or two drafting questions, each of us utilizing our particular specialty.
Mine at the time was rock and roll. Somebody else watched too much TV, and
another had comic books.”
The first contest -— only 26 hours long — hit the airwaves in
May of 1966, coinciding with Lawrence’s annual “Encampment Weekend,” an
academic retreat in which select students and faculty members headed off-campus
to discuss issues of great importance. DeRosset engaged those students who
were left behind in an intellectual exercise of a different sort, asking
them to call in answers to esoteric questions asked during the course of
a radio broadcast. The team that answered the most questions correctly received
a fitting prize for a contest of this ilk: an old refrigerator filled with
45 rpm records.
At the time, deRosset had no idea his creation would have such staying power.
But, with the perspective of 40 years, he’s not entirely surprised,
either.
“We had such great camaraderie that it was simply a blast that winter
of 1965-66 putting together the concept and working on the details,” deRosset
says. “I have to believe the same is still true today.
“From the listeners’ viewpoint, I don’t believe college
humor will ever get old,” he adds. “I love the team names. I
love the irreverence. I love all the strange pieces played during the contest,
especially
the Monty Python stuff. Most of all I love the brief relief it gives in an
increasingly troubled world.”
From “Frying Nemo” and “Apocalypse Cow” to “Smarter
Than the Average Bush,” creative, often outrageous, and sometimes borderline
offensive team names add another dash of fun to the weekend.
The winners
Playing this year as The West Bank of Kaukauna Concealing Weapons of Mass
Deduction, a team of several dozen smarty-pants twenty-somethings who gather
annually from eight states, including California and New York, captured a
fifth consecutive Trivia Contest title — their seventh team title in
the past nine contests.
The Bank racked up 1,237 points out of a possible 2,040 in the 50-hour, 356-question
contest. Skull Squadron was the off-campus runner-up for the second year
in a row with 1,132 points, while Iowans, Only Whack as Needed, Sir finished
third with 1,062 points.
Bucky’s Banastitudinal Buccaneers repeated as the on-campus team champion
with 1,115 points, while Nerds with Hooterphobia came in second with 1,043
and Ali Babar and The Forty Thieves placed third with 1,015.
Sixty-five off-campus teams and nine on-campus teams participated in this
year’s contest. No team was able to answer the contest’s final “Super
Garruda” question: On December 11, 2004, Mushtariy Madrahimova from
Uzbekistan visited the Capitol building in Madison and signed the guest book.
What were her comments?
Nobody knew that she had written “It is the hugest building I’ve
ever been,” but now you have a head start on 100 points to begin next
year’s contest