This story by Liberty Darr was first published in The Citizen on May 29.
Some Charlotters might recognize Jim Carpenter as a regular on the pickleball courts, but now all of America knows him as a champion on the beloved television show “Jeopardy,” after winning last Friday’s nail-biter of an episode.
The six-year Charlotte resident — born and raised in Burlington — is now one of 53 Vermonters since 1995 who have competed on the show. But according to Alison Shapiro Cooke, the TV show’s executive director of publicity and communications, Carpenter is the only Charlotter to make an appearance in the show’s history.
The show itself has garnered a cult following over the years and many people associate watching the show with their growing-up years. For Carpenter, his experience was similar. He said he grew up watching the show with his dad.
“Even after I was grown up and gone and would come back and visit, he and I would watch it together and try to beat each other out,” he said.
He had been taking the online 50-question “anytime tests” — an entry point for anyone who wants to compete on “Jeopardy” — for a few years but had never actually anticipated being on the big screen. But one day, out of the blue, he got an email asking him to do a monitored test over zoom.
“I mean, there are so many people who take those tests, I never really expected much to come of it,” he said.
He continued through a few more Zoom tests, making it to the final mock test round before he was placed in a pool of applicants eligible to be on the show, but still the odds of actually getting called aren’t guaranteed.
In February, he got the phone call and luckily his wife was around to suggest he answer the random California number that he thought was spam.
“My cell phone rings, and I looked at it and it was a California number that I didn’t recognize,” Carpenter recalled. “And my wife, I said, ‘Oh, who’s calling your cell phone?’ I said, ‘Well, it’s California. It’s probably spam.’ She said, ‘Well, no, wait a minute, that might be ‘‘Jeopardy.’’ So, I answered it, and it was.”
He flew to Los Angeles in February for two days of filming with nearly 10 other contestants. When it came time for his turn, Carpenter was up against some stiff competition, the prior three-day champion, Brendan Liaw, a recent college graduate from Vancouver.
“He was looking pretty hot and pretty confident going into the game,” Carpenter said. “I got off to a little bit of a slow start.”
One of the most challenging parts of the game, he said, was learning the timing of the buzzer. Contestants are only allowed to buzz once the entire question has been asked.
“You don’t see this on TV, but there are blue lights on either side of the big game board, and those blue lights flash on when the buzzers are actually enabled to answer the question,” he said. “When it comes on, you start clicking away to see if you can actually beat everybody else to the buzzer.”
Carpenter, a retired music professor, doesn’t tout himself as some sort of trivia buff. The knowledge that it takes in a multitude of different topics to compete on the show came from being both well-read and well-versed, he said. Teaching music at different colleges and being immersed in the university realm also helped him to engage in a slew of different subjects and conversations.
And, of course, he is an avid New York Times crossword buff.
“There’s a lot of funny and obscure little bits and pieces that come out of that sort of thing,” he said. “I’ve always just had kind of a sticky memory where I will remember all kinds of odd little bits of information that somehow get stuck in my head.”
Carpenter won $25,601 during his first game and ultimately brought home the gold in Final Jeopardy. The question in the category of “Time” was: “Eponymously named and in use for more than 1,600 years, it was based in part on concepts from the Greek mathematician Sosigenes.”
Carpenter, the only contestant to answer correctly and wager enough money to give him a leg up, wrote down “What is the Julian calendar?”
“Where I knew that from, I have no idea at this point, but it came into my head,” he said, letting out a laugh.
While he didn’t secure a win Monday night in his follow-up appearance, competing for that long as a fan — and securing a win as a contestant — was enough for him. Not many people can add ‘winning Jeopardy’ to their list of accolades, after all.
“My whole thought was, whether I win or whether I lose, this is an experience that not very many people get to have,” he said. “I was a little nervous going out and certainly hoping that I would not do something to look really dumb in front of a national audience, but my whole mindset was just to go out and enjoy the experience.”
