Trivia

It is opening time at the Templebar in San Francisco and Mel Corvin is positioned near the kitchen, a squat, imperious figure in a dark suit of impeccable 1952 cut. Sipping coffee soundlessly, he has the wary aspect of an aging gunfighter steeling himself for the inevitable challenge. This is an image Corvin encourages, for he wishes it known that he is "trying my damnedest to phase myself out of this game." He has as much chance of achieving serenity in his time as Wild Bill Hickok had in his, and Corvin knows it. His reputation, alas, precedes him.

"It's getting so I can't walk into a place without somebody nailing me with, 'I got one for you,' " he says.

But this is merely a pose, for Corvin is not as discomfited by the prospect of somebody having one for him as he lets on. He is, after all, a trivia player, a man who welcomes—nay, embraces—challenge. And he knows further that there are only a handful of competitors in his town with the necessary grasp of arcana to extend him. Let them, then, have one for him.

If they should demand of him the batting order of the 1936 New York Yankees (a question so easy Corvin does not think it qualifies as trivia), let them try Crosetti, Rolfe, DiMaggio, Gehrig, Dickey, Powell, Lazzeri and Selkirk. If they require the actress who played Humphrey Bogart's long-suffering mother in Dead End, give them Marjorie Main. And if they should ask for the opening sequence of the old radio show Grand Central Station , he will re-create the sound of a speeding locomotive and then breathlessly announce in a voice hauntingly familiar:

"As a bullet seeks its target, shining rails in every part of our great country are aimed at Grand Central Station, heart of the nation's greatest city. Drawn by the magnetic force, the fantastic metropolis, day and night great trains rush toward the Hudson River, sweep down its eastern bank for 140 miles, flash briefly past the long, red row of tenement houses south of 125th Street, dive with a roar into the 2�-mile tunnel which burrows beneath the glitter and swank of Park Avenue and then... Grand Central Station...crossroads of a million private lives."

That should hold them. But probably not for long. Indeed, while Corvin and his fellow trivialists are involved in no formal competition, they are seldom off duty. Somebody always has one for them. They are, in fact, part of a subculture group composed of persons of a certain age whose minds are hopelessly cluttered with the detritus of the Depression '30s and the warring '40s. They are, as one of their number, Tom Dunn of Albuquerque, suggests, "Forty-year-old kids singing the Jack Armstrong song." While civilization quavered before economic disaster and military threat, these kids—now, roughly, between 35 and 50—found enormous pleasure and, as it develops, lasting satisfaction out of Little Orphan Annie, Duke Mantee, Albie Booth, Ossie Bluege, Tonto and Margot Lane.

Trivia players are not to be confused with the current clutch of stowaways on the nostalgia bandwagon; the best of them have been playing the trivia game in earnest for at least 20 years, or from the time they were far enough along to look back. They are obviously in the vanguard of the backward movement.

"I'd almost burned out nostalgia on the air before it became popular," says Dunn, who occasionally livens his morning show on Albuquerque radio station KOB with excerpts from old serials and Orson Welles' War of the Worlds.

Trivia players regard the Johnny-come-latelies to old times with undisguised contempt. Likening the new nostalgia crowd to their distinguished company is a bit like comparing No, No, Nanette with A La Recherche du Temps Perdu. It is a question of sophistication.

A further distinction should also be made between trivia players and those who may be defined as collectors—librarianish sorts who squirrel away old magazines, pulps and baseball guides, often for resale at propitious moments. Although they are not necessarily averse to such exotica, trivia players are primarily attached to the more obvious sources of entertainment—sports, movies and radio. It is the little parts of the big things that entice them. Then, too, they are verbal people not given to rummaging in secondhand bookstores for first editions of Detective Comics or Human Torch. They are, in a sense, our oral historians.