Said Richard L. Williams, who was on the radio version of the show in the 1940s, quoted in "Joel Kupperman, Scarred by Success as a ‘Quiz Kid,’ Dies at 83/As a philosophy professor in adulthood, he would not speak of the World War II-era radio show (later on TV) that had made him famous and left him embittered" (NYT).
In her 1982 memoir “Whatever Happened to the Quiz Kids? Perils and Profits of Growing Up Gifted,” Ruth Duskin Feldman, the show’s literature buff (she died in 2015), noted the rampant anti-Semitism of the time. “When we moved through crowds,” she wrote, “there were loud remarks of ‘Oh, they’re all Jews!’”Later, Joel Feldman heard over and over from people who said they grew up hating him. He reinvented himself as a philosophy professor and taught ethics for 50 years. His wife said, "He wanted to retreat into the life of the mind, and in many ways he succeeded. He really lived in his head."
The show moved to television after the war, and the cameras did not favor a maturing Joel, who stayed on until he was 16, the dutiful son to a controlling stage mother, [Joel's son] Michael Kupperman said.
Though the producers brought in younger and cuter children to field questions, Joel’s hand was always up, sometimes blocking the faces of the smaller children, which didn’t make for riveting TV, as Michael put it — a spectacle made only worse by Joel’s robotic demeanor, which made him seem priggish....
I'm familiar with work of the son, Michael Kupperman. He's a comics artist, and he figured out a way to do a graphic memoir about his father, "All the Answers":
I just added that to my Kindle.
ADDED: Was Joel Kupperman Seymour Glass?
['The Quiz Kids'] would inspire J.D. Salinger’s fictional Jewish Glass family, whose children were all featured on a fictional radio quiz show and grew into deeply neurotic adults. Like Kupperman, Seymour Glass fast tracks to a Ph.D. In his 2010 book “Theories of Human Nature,” Kupperman appeared to wink at Salinger as a kindred spirit, describing him as “a well known example of someone who retreated from his celebrity, as did the actress Greta Garbo.”AND: Here's what that ancient TV show was like:
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Seymour Glass didn't turn out so well either.
A philosophy professor -- embittered about being on a radio show when he was a child.
The first thing I thought when I saw "Whiz Kids" was Nine Stories. I'm glad that the Glass kids were brought into the conversation. Seymour was the eldest of the Glass children and it sounds like Joel moved into that role on the show.
“When we moved through crowds,” she wrote, “there were loud remarks of ‘Oh, they’re all Jews!’”
Similar shock when people met the Mouseketeers and realized that they were all gentiles.
America was like that back then.
"Silver?" HTF did he (some other kid) know that?
“When we moved through crowds,” she wrote, “there were loud remarks of ‘Oh, they’re all Jews!’”
Not much has changed. Not complaining. Just sayin...
‘Oh, they’re all Jews!’
Here's an article about the NYT's anti-Semitism
‘Oh, they’re all Jews!’
Today, they would all be Asian.
There is a great depiction of quiz kids in the movie Magnolia.
Joel’s hand was always up, sometimes blocking the faces of the smaller children,
No one thought to move him to the back row?
With the deference we're supposed to show experts these days, I wonder if the reaction to a show like this would be the same now. Would we come to hate the smart kids? Or be willing to be lead by them, a la Greta Thunberg? Although I don't know that she qualifies as a smart kid, more just really passionate about something. Which now includes COVID-19 apparently.
The soft racism of high expectation.
Yes, there's ALWAYS Antisemtism, because who can say what that actually is? Even when the jewsish producers, based in NYC, put a lot of Jewish Kids from NYC on the program, no one is supposed to mention that. Because that's "antisemtism". However, Jewish authors can mention it, and be quietly proud of it. Because that's Ok. Good grief! But hey I understand, in today's feminine society everyone gets points for being a victim.
But it'd nice if we could ever talk about something in the past, without someone constantly bringing up homophobia, racism, sexism, xenophobia, antisemitism, no irish need apply signs. etc. etc. etc. Especially since the amount of the that going on was extremely small in the 1940s and 1950s. They've not only beat that dead horse, they've pulverized it into dust.
And I'm not interested in hearing about how some Kid spent a couple months on a radio show and "it ruined my life". Sorry. No one's life is ruined because of what happened when you're six or 11. Most people move on, and once you get past a certain age, your happiness is your responsibility, not someone else way back when in childhood or as a teenager. And that includes your parents.
I'm currently reading Brando's autobiography, which was written when Brando was 70. So what does he write endlessly about? Oh, his sad childhood! Here's a guy who was rich, famous, and good looking, and never had to do any real work, and he writes 50 pages on how Mommy was a drunk and Daddy was a meanie. Incredible!
Some peeps just can't let go, and don't realize that talking about your poor childhood when you're over the age of 30, is just pathetic and annoying.
I was in the Academic Olympics in 8th Grade. My team won and I got sent to the All-Star round the next week, where my team also won. The trophy still sits in my mother's cottage at the Cape. Pretty much the peak of my academic career (I soon after discovered girls).
I note it's the Show that Joel says killed his childhood. I would say it's his Mother who killed his childhood. She's the one who allowed it to happen. Do I expect the NYTimes to blame a woman here? Nope.
Ah, for the days of steam television. It's a miracle it ever caught on.
Jewish Glass family, whose children were all featured on a fictional radio quiz show and grew into deeply neurotic adults.
Yeah....it was the radio show that made them neurotic.
They try to wrap up the issue into racism but it sounds like the problem is that one day you cease to be a prodigy. Secondary are probably the typical social and spectrum issues many intelligent people have to cope with.
rocean
And I'm not interested in hearing about how some Kid spent a couple months on a radio show and "it ruined my life".
Nor are you interested in actually going to the NYT link and informing yourself about Joel Kupperman's childhood, where you would have learned that Joel Kupperman spent ten years on the show, not "a couple months."
From the NYT link:
From 6 to 16, Joel was a star on “The Quiz Kids,” a thunderously popular radio program that later migrated to television.
(I soon after discovered girls).
I was well on my way to re-inventing the atom bomb when the whiskers hit my chin. Thinking hasn't been the same since!!
I think they probably did better than the Mouseketeers or the kids on the MGM backlot. They weren't sexually abused or made to work long hours so their sad stories don't sound that horrendous. ....I don't think all that many kids have happy childhoods anyway. Most of us don't have truly ghastly stories or stories with a glamorous showbiz background but lots of things are lost, denied, cheated, or stolen during our wonder years.
He could have grown up to be Herb Stempel, the guy they paid to take a dive on Twenty One in favor of Charles van Doren. It was scandalous.
No one thought to move him to the back row?
He was in the back in the linked video. He seemed cute and personable in that, not robotic.
“When we moved through crowds,” she wrote, “there were loud remarks of ‘Oh, they’re all Jews!’”
We can note that "They spit on me when I returned from Vietnam" turned out to be largely apocryphal, while acknowledging that the dominant culture was not kind to them or sympathetic to their story.
I have become skeptical of all personal claims of oppression/abuse that are used to sell a book or advance an agenda. Maybe the above quote is supported by others. I don't know. But I have witnessed many false claims in recent years. Maybe it was the same in 1982 when this book came out.
These are not victimless claims. If they are true, the writer is a true victim. If not, an entire swath of American society was unfairly demonized.
When Kupperman went to college at 16 everyone would have known who he was and that he had a reputation as a genius Quiz Kid. That can't have been easy, though the hard part may have been going to college at 16.
It's interesting that he went to UChicago. That would have been the best place for eggheads and oddballs in those days, unless there were so many bright students there that they resented him as a famous competitor (or was it the few stupid ones that gave him a hard time?).
I can understand his family thinking that he retreated from life. Maybe he withdrew from them as well. But how many former prodigies and philosophy professors end up like that even without youthful fame?
I have become skeptical of all personal claims of oppression/abuse that are used to sell a book or advance an agenda.
Yes, if you were around in the 1930s or 1940s you wouldn't have seen very many "No Irish Need Apply" signs in cities like New York or Boston. That phrase was found in ads a century before that, but you wouldn't have seen such signs when there were so many assimilated third generation Irish-Americans in those cities.
And I doubt many respectable hotels in those days had signs out front saying "No Dogs and No Jews." They had other, more subtle ways of conveying that Jews were unwelcome. There were signs like that in Nazi Germany, and I'm inclined to believe that some London boarding houses in the 1950s could have had signs that said "No Dogs and No Blacks" (whether or not they added "No Irish"), but memory can make people believe that abuses and outrages were more blatant than they were.
I don't remember this show; I was too young at the time. I do remember similar shows on Saturday morning local TV with jr. high/hs students from different schools competing. It was something of an aspirational model, in my view. Why don't they do that anymore? (He asked, rhetorically)
I didn't know that was a real show. I only know of it through William H. Macy's character on Magnolia.
I remember when some local biddy said to my mother, "Oh, you're the one with the smart kids!" And it was clear from her tone of voice the biddy did not mean that as a compliment. We were Gentiles in an all-Gentile town. I think that was why, in an area and time when Jew-hating was more common than it is today (and VERY common in my hometown), I didn't grow up hating Jews. I kind of identified with them.
Would we come to hate the smart kids? Or be willing to be lead by them, a la Greta Thunberg?
I also immediately thought of Greta. I wonder if she will similarly come to blame the people who did this to her or if the political nature of her performances will cause her to blame others.
So Greta, now that you are 65, how do you view...
Yes, if you were around in the 1930s or 1940s you wouldn't have seen very many "No Irish Need Apply" signs in cities like New York or Boston. That phrase was found in ads a century before that, but you wouldn't have seen such signs when there were so many assimilated third generation Irish-Americans in those cities.
The last thing I read on NINA signs was that this, too, was largely a myth. (If I recall, I read about one man's attempt to track down verifiable examples of this.)
As an Irish lad, I heard stories of such signs all the time. Of course, I'm pretty sure they still called us "rednecks" when working in the fields. So I can claim a few ancestral Victim Pokemon Points.
Looked like there was at least one Irish-American kid upper far left.
I couldn’t watch the whole thing to find out how it went, but it seemed unfair for the kids to have to compete against that adult on the upper right, and deal with Uncle Milty’s jacksssery.
GE College Bowl was a quiz show for college students hosted by Mr. Betty White, Allen Ludden -- not to be confused with an even earlier short-lived College Bowl sitcom with Chico Marx (double bonus points if you remember that one).
Some channels in some markets still have high school quiz shows, one school against another, maybe on public TV. If you're on the show you are probably very bright, but also completely oblivious to what other kids think about them (or about anything).
"The last thing I read on NINA signs was that this, too, was largely a myth."
Wanna bet?
The relevant paragraphs from the link:
According to one academic, however, that history, which has been handed down from generation to generation of Irish-Americans, was “a myth of victimization.” Richard Jensen, a Yale Ph.D. and a retired history professor from the University of Illinois at Chicago, wrote in a 2002 article in the Oxford Journal of Social History that although “No Irish Need Apply” (NINA) signs existed in Great Britain, “There is no evidence for any printed NINA signs in America or for their display at places of employment other than private homes.”
...
“Just for the fun of it, I started to run a few quick searches on an online newspaper database that I found on Google,” [Rebecca Fried] told The Daily Beast. “I was really surprised when I started finding examples of NINA ads in old 19th-century newspapers pretty quickly.”
The deeper Fried dug through online archives, the more she found. The teenaged historian discovered dozens of NINA newspaper advertisements printed in big cities such as New York and Boston and small towns such as Alpine, Texas, and Monmouth, Illinois. In 1842 editions of the New York Sun alone, she found 15 instances of advertisements telling Irish men not to apply.
This was a 14-year-old girl using Google News' newspaper database, proving wrong a retired Harvard professor, who graciously accepted her findings.
Ha, ha, I'm kidding, of course: Jensen told the Washington Post that the dozens of examples of NINA ads cited by Fried in her piece still do not prove that anti-Irish job discrimination was anything but rare. “I will suggest that that may be a lot for a historian to digest, but there was very little for an actual Irishman to see,” he said.
I went to the library of congress newspaper archive and typed in "No Irishmen need apply" "No Irish need apply" and "No Irish" and "Irish Apply" for 1842 and got Zero hits.
I wouldn't trust ANY SJW when it comes to history. The Irish DESPERATELY want to believe the Proddy-stants in the USA held them down. Sorry, can't find the evidence for that. And if you look at the Know-nothing riots in the 1850's, you'll find half of them were started by the Irish. And of course, any Irishman who didn't feel welcome in the USA in the 1850's could've headed on back to Ireland or gone on to Brazil, Canada, South Africa, the UK or Italy. To name a few. Last time I looked no one in the USA Government invited anyone in.
Ted Kennedy and Tip O'Neill claimed to have seen "No Irish Need Apply" signs in Boston in the 1930s and 1940s, long after the Irish started running the city politically, and it would be hard to make a a case that they were right. As for the 19th century, different databases can give different results. Jensen was wrong to minimize the number of ads and deny that signs existed, and ungracious in his response to Fried, but there's room for disagreement about how significant the how common the ads and signs really were. It seems like they were a lot more common in ads for domestic service than in ads for laborers.
I was on my high school's "It's Academic" team in 1969-70. We won the first round, but lost in the second to the team that went on to win the Chicago-area competition. When I saw my fellow teammates, Mike and Brad, at our 20th reunion, Mike said, "Do you remember that red-headed sophomore from New Trier West that answered all the questions before they were asked?" Brad remembered his name.
National Honor Society kids got to try out for the team. Someone threw out questions and we shouted out answers. (I still remember that I got "kelp," though I don't remember the question. Something about seaweed eaten in Japan?) Very few girls made the team, we were told, but they were less likely to guess quickly. They waited to be sure, and missed their shot. In two rounds of three three-person teams, I was the only girl. The moderator kept addressing us as "gentlemen."
"I have become skeptical of all personal claims of oppression/abuse that are used to sell a book or advance an agenda."
Though I haven't seen him in a long time, years ago I was, through a mutual friend, glancingly acquainted with Michael Kupperman, the cartoonist son of Joel "Quiz Kid" Kupperman. I knew him just enough to say hello to, but no more than that. I heard second-hand anecdotes at the time (from the mutual friend) about Michael's father's childhood notoriety, and how much he had hated it. It seems he truly felt it to have been a genuine blight on his life, and it was not fabricated subsequently for self-serving reasons.
(I have always enjoyed the deadpan absurdity of Michael's cartoons.)
Cookie, thanks for adding that story about Kupperman's son.
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