The day I interviewed the host of Jeopardy

I have never met Alex Trebek, but 30 years ago this month, I interviewed the host of Jeopardy.

One of the first assignments the managing editor of the Carthage Press in June 1990, Neil Campbell, gave me was to go to the Historic Phelps House and interview Art Fleming.

Though I have come to appreciate the job Alex Trebek does and has done for many years on today's Jeopardy, it was Art Fleming who was the original host of the show and the one I remembered from the summer vacation days when the neighborhood kids would gather in the Turner living room and compete at Jeopardy.

During the 22 years I worked in newspapers, I had a chance to meet and interview some well known people and a few such as future Attorney General John Ashcroft and future Vice President Dick Cheney who would go to greater heights.







Even bigger than those two was Grandpa Jones of Hee Haw, who I interviewed on May 5, 1984 when he performed at the Truman Centennial.

I had the opportunity to meet former Chicago White Sox manager Don Gutteridge, who was the last surviving member of the 1944 St. Louis Browns team that lost to the Cardinals in the first all-Missouri World Series and Cloyd Boyer, the oldest of the baseball-playing Boyer brothers.

But my favorite "celebrity" interview was Art Fleming, who was one of the nicest people I have ever had the opportunity to meet. Fleming was the host of Jeopardy from 1964 until 1975 and then in a couple of short-lived revivals before Trebek became the host.

At the time I interviewed him, he was the co-host, along with schoolteacher and trivia expert David Strauss of a three-hour radio program, the Trivia Spectacular, every Sunday night on KMOX, a program I rarely missed.

We talked about that program and Jeopardy and his role as Gen. Omar Bradley in the 1980 Gregory Peck movie MacArthur.







We ended up talking for 45 minutes and I probably ended up telling him about as much as he told me. Not surprisingly, Mr. Fleming spent much of his conversation putting things in the form of a question.

About a week after the interview, I received an unexpected a surprise in the mail, an Art Fleming trivia book, complete with an autograph and a thank-you letter.

It is a shame that the people who watch old game shows on the cable and satellite networks will most likely never see Art Fleming in action since NBC made a habit of erasing the tapes used to make Jeopardy so they could be reused and save money.

Only 24 of the thousands of episodes for which Fleming was host survived.

But for those who want to see Art Fleming in action, MacArthur was not the only major movie he had a role in during the 1980s.

Fleming was also featured in the comedy "Airplane II: The Sequel," playing the role he was born to play- the host of Jeopardy.