This coming weekend, I’ll participate in the fifty-fourth staging of The World’s Largest Trivia Contest^TM. As per tradition, this week is filled with idle reminiscing about trivia answers that have been especially memorable for me over the years.

During the five years I spent as an undergraduate at WWSP-90FM, the student-run radio station at the University of Wisconsin-Stevens Point, I helped run the annual Trivia Weekend, which by that time had already been officially dubbed the largest of its kind in the world. Helping to run that contest didn’t mean penning questions. That task was handled by Jim Oliva and John Eckendorf, a pair of community volunteers. There was, however, one instance during my tenure when a fervent subset of the 90FM executive staff sprung into action to wordsmith a question into proper shape before it was officially read over the airwaves to the five hundred or so teams playing the contest.

During the 1991 contest, there was a question that was drawn from a song that had gotten a ton of airplay on our station the preceding few months. The question was roughly as follows: “What is the name of the alternative band that released the song titled ‘I Want to Drive the Zamboni’?”

The answer, as the 90FMers all immediately knew (we rarely knew the answers to the question unless we were reading them on the air and had the correct response at the Trebekian ready), was Gear Daddies. The only problem was that the song in question didn’t officially have a title, or it didn’t have a title that any mere music fan could access at the time. The song appeared as an untitled bonus track at the end of the Twin Cities’ acts 1990 album, Billy’s Live Bait. Having the radio equivalent of a stop-the-presses moment over this mild discrepancy might seem like the height of overreaction, but we all knew that any teams that didn’t manage to call in the desire answer would seize on what they could reasonably deem to be misleading phrasing and flood the complain line.

Our little crew of excitable exec staff busybodies cornered the writers and expressed our alarm. They probably thought we were being overly fussy. Still, the question was modified to quote lyrics rather than give a title, making it rock solid in its accuracy. In retrospect, we just wanted to participate in the part of the contest that seemed the most fun: writing the questions that sent thousands of highly attentive listeners rifling through their resources. In a small way, because of one of our station’s favorite bands, a few of us students were able to shape at least one of those prized puzzlers.

More info about 90FM’s Trivia can be found at its official website or at the radio station’s online home. There’s also a feature documentary about the contest, but it’s fairly hard to come by these days.