Reaching for a bigger world

How I discovered life on other parts of the planet

In my teens I was on the local version of Reach for the Top, a televised quiz show for teams from competing high schools. Reach’s big claim to fame is the Toronto broadcasts were hosted by Alex Trebek, long before Jeopardy.

Our quiz master in Thunder Bay was a disc jockey named Ron Bottos, and the show was shot in a small cinder block building that housed both local tv stations, and two radio stations.

The studio was about the size of a two-car garage. It even had big overhead doors to allow them to move set pieces in and out. It all looked bigger on tv.

Reach was for serious students. I only got on because for 3 years before, the four members of our school’s team did so well, no one else ever auditioned. When they graduated out as champions, there was no “B” team waiting. The coach, a history teacher who truly did not like me, had to take anyone who’d come to practice. 

I helped recruit a crew of genuinely clever students, who excelled in the relevant subjects of math, science, history, and sports. I had nothing to offer in those areas, but was strong on pop culture, literature and current events. 

I also had decent recall for most anything I ever heard, read, or saw on television. Answers popped up in my head I had no earthly right to know. (Which, come to think of it, was part of what the history teacher didn’t like about me. I pumped out facts, minus the needed attributions.)

We didn’t actually play to win, which was fortunate, because most of the other teams took it very seriously. They actually practiced, using question packs from previous shows.

There were unexpected benefits to being on Reach. 

Benefit #1

I got to be on each end of the tv continuum. My father was a television repairman, back in the day when they could be restored to life on a house call, by swapping out a burned out tube. I went with him after school and on weekends, to carry the big tube caddy.

(This is what tubes looked like. They were a precursor to transistors and integrated circuits.)

This is a tube caddy. You can’t tell from the picture, but it was about the size and weight of a Fiat 500. 

More times than I could count, when the picture came back, Reach for the Top would be on, and there I’d be, with the team for Sir Winston Churchill Collegiate and Vocational Institute. I enjoyed watching the faces of the customers, as their eyes went from the screen, to me, and back to the screen. 

Benefit #2

I met weird and geeky high school students from all over town. A few shared my interest in comic books, Star Trek, and all things science fiction. Eventually, a little squad of us worked up the courage to travel to science fiction conventions in the nearest large American cities. I’ll say more about that in a future Secret Origins entry. For now it’s enough to say that my world got a lot bigger, very quickly.

Benefit #3

I got to play with real computers, just like on Star Trek. This was the mid 1970’s. Back then the Commodore PET computer, with 96 kilobytes of onboard memory, and a cassette tape to input programs was a huge deal. Our high school had only one, and a non-math student like me never got near it. 

A guy I met through Reach (an actual genius) had already advanced well beyond what his high school could teach, and he’d gained access to the computer lab at the local university. They loaned him a PET to take home, and encouraged him to “experiment”. This may have been before the term hacking was coined.

Years later he became the web architect for one of Canada’s largest networks.

Back then he’d use a dial-up modem the size of a kitchen microwave to squeal and squawk his way onto ARPANET, (The U.S. Defense Agency’s Advanced Research Projects Agency Network) I am not sure he should have been doing that, but it was cool.