RIP Alex Trebek

If there’s an afterlife, poor Alex is now being mobbed by a million senior citizens like my grandmother who religiously watched Jeopardy. That game show, her soaps and Lawrence Welk. It was just easier to hand her the remote than to argue. Personally, I think she loved the show to see if she was smarter than the contestants. I have to admit, the majority of the questions weren’t terribly hard yet I’m not terribly smart nor well rounded.

Anyway, I knew of Alex long before he was the beleaguered Will Ferrell bit (a skit SNL stole from SCTV). He hosted something on NBC with dice before the Jeopardy revival. My family also have a couple little connections to him.

When my brother Brian was in college, he auditioned for the show during one of their many college student tournaments. Sadly, he didn’t get past the first round. Brian wrote about it but I didn’t have any luck finding a link and he doesn’t recall where it is either.

The other brush with Alex was a real encounter! In the late Eighties, my parents lived in San Diego and there’s some celebrity golf thing there. My mother got to be Alex’s driver at least once. I clearly recall her sharing this story while I was visiting over Christmas or Spring Break. He wasn’t the established celebrity we knew yet so my reaction was obviously, “that’s nice.”

Thanks Alex. Namely for having a great sense of humor regarding the SNL routine and being one of the three people Stephen Colbert retired with.