TV & Radio: The Wizard of Quiz

(5 of 8)

The Dictionary as Literature. Charlie and his family say he was "slow getting started," did not walk until he was 18 months or talk until he was two. His records at the City and Country School, a progressive school in Greenwich Village, seem strangely prophetic: at four, "one of the best block builders in the group; his dramatic play is very vivid"; at six, "outstanding for clear thinking and intelligent planning"; at eight, "a ready fund of first-hand knowledge." His mother taught him to read at five during a Connecticut winter away from school. He remembers his first book: The Little Fir Tree. By the time he was eight, his parents would find him with his light on at 11 p.m., reading anything that was handy. "Children should be allowed to read things they don't understand completely," says Mark. "We had thousands of books around the house. God knows what he read!" By nine he was devouring books on baseball; the elder Van Dorens read up on the subject to please their children and soon the whole family was expert. Adler recalls grumpily: "I can remember dinner parties where I was frankly bored by all this talk about who batted what when."

From his father, Charlie learned a passion for getting facts straight by checking them in reference books. Friends have often seen Mark go to a dictionary or encyclopedia a dozen times during a conversation. But Charlie also developed a passion for reading a dictionary as living literature. "When I look up a word," he says, "I start to browse, and next thing I know, I've read four or five pages." (Now he bones up on the Rand McNally Atlas and the World Almanac before his sessions on the air.) One weekend in his teens, he picked up the Bible and read it through. He feels, however, that he never read in earnest until he decided to try for a Ph.D. in English literature. He systematically read his way through the Columbia library stacks on the subject, averaging 20 books a week for two years.

From Pall to Pernod. When Charlie was eleven, the year he learned to drive a car on the farm, a worried teacher told his father: "Charlie is capable in any direction. But I wonder if he'll ever be able to concentrate on any one thing." To the greater glory of Twenty One, the fear proved well grounded. In Manhattan's High School of Music and Art, Charlie Van Doren studied the clarinet to become a concert artist. But though he ran up a 95 average and became the school's first student to qualify for college at the end of his junior year, he abandoned music as a profession. He has since picked up piano and guitar by ear. After graduating from St. John's cum laude in 1947, he decided to become an astrophysicist, partly, he now thinks, because he wanted to get out of the shadow of his father and uncle. In graduate school at Columbia he soured on astronomy, took his master's degree in higher mathematics with a thesis on An Introduction to Inversive Geometry. He still regards mathematics as "the most beautiful of all human activities," but dropped it as a career on deciding that his talent for the subject equipped him for nothing more creative than teaching it.