From the Roundtable: Digging into the origin of KFRU’s ‘Quicky Quiz’ anything but quick

It began with a call from David Lile, host of the Morning Show on News Talk 1400. A listener wanted to know when KFRU’s daily “Quickie Quiz” feature first aired, and Lile asked me if I could come up with the date.

The answer came after rolling through microfilm copies of both Columbia daily newspapers in the superb newspaper library at the State Historical Society of Missouri in Columbia. The mission was successful, but it also sprung a trap.

Gathering history can become a dangerous addiction. Journeying through newspaper files more than a half-century old brought forth an overloading amount of detail about local people, places, events and simply life hereabouts in general. One headline sprayed across eight columns of the Tribune’s front page on the afternoon of January 4, 1956, underscoring the ebullient feeling people in general felt about Columbia both at the time and for the years to come.

The story under the headline, “Columbia Population is Nearing 50,000,” was based on information gleaned from surveyors canvassing the city for listings in the R.L. Polk Company’s annual city directory. But oh how overly optimistic they were.

They began with an estimate of 45,000 inhabitants and then added another two thousand or so they expected to add if more than 2,000 acres of territory was annexed to the city in a special election a few weeks later, which in fact did occur.

With Columbia’s 1950 population just over the 31,000 mark according to the official federal census, the folks from Polk were really going out on a limb. There it was on the Tribune’s front page for future generations to read on microfilm. An estimate gone wild, because the official census figure for 1960 was only 36,650.

A few weeks ago, the Tribune’s 100,000 population headline used a typeface significantly less bold and was spread over only two columns of a significantly narrower front page. We have been assured much more accurate information buttresses the boldness of Columbia’s passage into the six-figure realm.

Journalism was practiced so much differently half a century ago. These days, regretfully, in my opinion, journalism has diminished. Healthy competition back then between both afternoon dailies (the Missourian became a morning paper in 1968) wonderfully chronicled the events of this growing city in a way that I’m afraid will never return.

Both dailies’ front pages overflowed with a dozen or more individual news items. There were stories about courthouse activities, including the daily traffic court, police and fire news from reporters on the “fires and wrecks” beat. There was a “society” page that included photos of area children, a weekly page devoted to homebuilding and a “home of the week.” Dozens of smaller local – some would say “filler” – pieces rounding out each day’s chronicle, giving me a sense of what life in Columbia was like at the time.

Perhaps the whining about its diminishment within the Fourth Estate could be reversed if the press returned to its simple, basic raison d’être. Let’s bulletin a headlong plunge into super-serving the community. An amazing concept: a return to the traditional core values and practice of journalism. This means news items without the reporter’s personal bias or opinion and editorials on pages traditionally reserved for that purpose.

My recent exercise became addictive in a thousand-and-one ways as I turned page after page of the Missourian and Tribune on microfilm.

Nailing the première of “Quickie Quiz” to 7:50 on the morning of Monday January 9, 1956, I quickly became enmeshed in what was really going on 53 years ago.

News items nationally included President Eisenhower’s recovery from his heart attack the previous September and whether or not he’d go for a second term. Actress Grace Kelly was engaged to Monaco’s Prince Rainier, and the nuptuals were planned for the following June. Trains wrecked, planes crashed and workers went on strike. And then there were human interest pieces from all over.

Growth dominated the local news, and life here seemed to be much harder than it is today. There were too many vehicle crashes with more people injured and killed per capita than today. Pictures of wrecked cars appeared every third or fourth day. Talk about beefing up the police department mingled with daily accounts of speed enforcement using the department’s new radar “van” directed me to the daily police court report with fines pegged at a dollar for each mile per hour exceeded over the posted limit and an occasional citizen’s challenge to the whole procedure.

As for “Quickie Quiz that Tricky Quiz,” KFRU’s 53-year-old program is still with us, though it is aired at a slightly later time weekday mornings.

It’s so hopelessly out of date and style with whatever modern radio is supposed to be, and let’s hope that it never goes away. “Quickie Quiz” is a Columbia icon that had become such a temporal marker that when it was foolishly removed decades ago from its longtime home at 7:55 a.m., the area was thrown into a panic because altering this morning waypost was akin to some outsider meddling with one’s alarm clock.