What Is Jeopardy!'?

Conversations with Pankratz tend to blossom into a series of small lectures that seems to trail brilliant exotic blooms like a bougainvillea vine. He watches Jeopardy! two or three times a week. "It relaxes me," he says, "and there's also a large element of nostalgia."

As a senior at DeVilbiss High in Toledo, Pankratz was a member of the quiz bowl team that won the city trivia championship. He keeps the trophy near his copy of the 1968-69 Pot O' Gold, the DeVilbiss yearbook, which devotes a half-page picture to that championship season. It's the only place in the Pot O' Gold where Pankratz is spelled correctly.

He's 37 now, a vigorous upright guy with an ironic sense of humor. With a Jeopardy! telecast as a backdrop, he expounds on Jeopardiana from a straight-backed chair in the handsome, comfortable sitting room of the early 18th-century town-house he owns on Philadelphia's Elfreth's Alley. (What is the oldest continuously inhabited residential street in the U.S.?)

"If two ideas come to mind," he says, "go for the more obvious one. Read the World Book, not the Britannica. A high school encyclopedia is the level of sophistication. Any education beyond that is a handicap. Nothing you learned in college is of any help in Jeopardy!'

The first contestant chooses the category Fish Facts. The TV casts aquarium-blue shadows on the wall.

"This fish lacks a certain organ and spends most of its time on the ocean bottom," says Trebek.

Like most Jeopardy! junkies, Pankratz gets a vicarious thrill from spitting out answers before the contestants. But this one stumps him, and he shakes his head in disgust. "Fish facts isn't my area of expertise," he alibis.

Musical instruments are, and he plays the category like a concertina. By the time the Spain category rolls along, Pankratz is looking almost cocky. "I'd be willing to bet one of the answers is Franco, another is the Alhambra, another is Barcelona and another is Toledo." He"s not even close. "Spain for $500." says Trebek. "These people occupied the peninsula that bears their name 2,000 years ago."

"Who were the Visigoths?" says Pankratz before Trebek even finishes the question.

Wrong again.