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.

Much as I loved pitching in at WWSP-90FM to mount the annual Trivia Weekend, I was excited to get to the other side of that radio broadcast. As someone who was centrally responsible for literally wearing out the first Trivial Pursuit board that was in the family game chest, I was ready to strain my brain for the cultural minutiae that I had been cramming into my brain my whole life. I wanted to answer questions.

During the first few years that I participated with my storied trivia team, answering questions definitely necessitated some heavy thinking. The internet existed by then, but it wasn’t widely accessible and certainly hadn’t yet evolved to resemble a highway of superior size with information roaring down its lanes. Using resources — such as books, magazines, and notes — was very much in play, and drawing on accumulated knowledge to make educated guesses was the primary strategy a remarkable amount of the time. The latter was our only hope when the DJ asked, “What is the title of the film that was promoted with the ad line ‘The man and the motion picture that simply do not conform’?”

We bantered around different theories, finally landing on Cool Hand Luke. The main writer of the contest had a certain affinity for classic Paul Newman films, and the plot and general vibe of Cool Hand Luke were good matches for that marketing blurb. I’ll admit that the clincher for me in casting my vote was a recollection of a former college sweetheart’s term paper that argued Luke Jackson was the ultimate cinematic antihero. We called in our answer and waited anxiously for the correct answer to be announced.

Back in the days when Trivia Weekend involved a sizable number of such guesses, it was a whole other level of thrill to discover we were right with one of our submitted suppositions. In the case of Cool Hand Luke, the contest’s scoring system that offered higher points when fewer teams answered correctly resulted in our squad picking up the exceedingly rare triple-digit value. It also represented one of the first times that I really believed our motley crew might be able to become competitive in this oddball event. That belief proved to be true.

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.