Game Show Contestant

 It didn’t last long – just one show, where we we eliminated from the competition – but, hey, how many people can actually say they were on a television game show? Even though it was only a local TV station , KPRC-TV did – and does – serve one of the largest conventional television markets in the country. It was so long ago, though, – 46 years – that there is almost nothing on the internet related to the HL&P Prep Bowl.

While I don’t remember much of the specifics about the competition, I do remember a little.  I did provide some of the answers to questions and it was hot under the studio lights, which were so bright that I could hardly see the audience in the bleacher-like seating.

The competition was held during the 1969/70 school year when Peggy Bulanek, team captain, Paula Krumpelbeck and I were seniors, as I recall, and Pat Kotal and Jerrie Stahl were juniors. It was Peggy’s second time in the competition and the first for the rest of us. Our faculty sponsor, if that’s the right word for it, was history and social studies teacher, Earl Richardson.

I can’t say that we were really a team as I understand the concept today.  I don’t remember any sort of practicing or preparing for the competition.

I honestly do not know how I was selected to be on the team.  Academically, I certainly wasn’t a standout and actually got a “D” – barely passing, and my lowest grade while in high school – from Mr. Richardson one semester.  Up to that point, I had coasted my way through high school, and, during my senior year, I got out early each day so I could go to work under some sort of student-to-work program that they had at the time.  At graduation, I was barely in the top half of my class – as I recall, about 55 out of around 105.

I joined the Navy a couple of years later and never went back to the Houston area, other than three short visits in 1972 – 73 and a couple of days in 1986.  I heard that Mr. Richardson passed away sometime in the last few years, but know nothing of any of the others since I graduated from CE King High School.

(Update: I’ve since learned that, on the date this was first published, February 13, 2016, all of us except Mr. Richardson were still living. Pat Kotal and I exchanged information in a Facebook group. I later read on the Facebook group that Jerrie Stahl was ill with pancreatic cancer and passed away the next day, February 14.)