What Is Jeopardy!'?

GAME-SHOW HOSTS FOR $200: The walls of Art Fleming's Buffalo Flats Saloon & Grill in Breckenridge, Colo., are covered with the heads of various deceased animals. "What is a deer?" he asks. "What is a moose?" Though Fleming hasn't appeared on Jeopardy! in 11 years, in a sense he has never left. He hosts a Sunday trivia-style radio show out of St. Louis. He stages mock-Jeopardy! contests at business conventions. He presides over a weekly talk show called Biff America at Buffalo Flats on local TV, which includes a section that is a Jeopardy! knockoff. Winners get plastic buffalo piggy banks.

Jeopardy! purists still regard Fleming as the authentic Mr. Know-It-All, a title he doesn't exactly discourage. He can scarcely walk down the street without being petitioned.

"Mr. Fleming! Mr. Fleming! Could you help me, please? My wife and I have been arguing."

"And you need my help?"

"It's about General Custer. Was he killed in 1876 or 1878?"

"Oh," says Fleming. "June of 1876."

"I knew you'd know!"

Thirteen years on Jeopardy! provided him with a more or less inexhaustible fund of stories. "Every show was like opening night on Broadway." he says. And you believe him. Indomitably genial. Fleming is somehow friendly without being overfamiliar, chipper without being coy, articulate without being showy or pedantic. Aside from an affinity for pocket squares, he and Trebek have little in common. Under Fleming. Jeopardy! was a little slow, a trifle square, slightly dull, not unlike much of America in those days.

"When Merv and Julann first approached me with the idea, I thought the show might last three or four weeks," he says. "But I said, "Let's try it. It sounds kinky.' Well, it went for 13 years—2,858 shows."

Being a trivia meisterhas not been all fun and games. Fleming remembers appearing once on Hollywood Squares—occupying the secret square no less—when he was asked to pick out the woman who won Wimbledon in 1938. "I said Helen Wills Moody," he says, "but I really had no idea." The contestant believed him so implicitly that she put $11,100 on his answer.