Around the margins, a darker story flourishes. Trebek was born in Sudbury, Ontario, in 1940, to Ukrainian immigrants, warm and loving people, if they were not fit for each other. His father drank. Trebek’s early years were filled with poverty, instability and disease, but he presents his typical cloudless charity: “I don’t have many ghosts. I have no bad memories that affect my life. Everything is fine. “When he was 7 years old, he fell into a frozen lake and was affected by painful rheumatism. For 12 years he woke up crying at night until the pain suddenly disappeared.” Imagine, “he shrugs.
Young Trebek had a rebellious streak. He collided with the nuns at school and bounced between jobs. He resigned from the military university when he heard that voice cuts were mandatory. “He had good hair, a kind of pompadour with a duck tail on his back,” he writes. (Photographic evidence is provided.) “I would be damned if I let them shave.”
Trebek might have inspired fear in his teachers and first employers, but discovered that his true talent was projecting calm, allowing others to shine. As the host, it has been her proudest quality: her ability to encourage an anxious contestant only through tone.
Facts in themselves can confer stability. A small aside: I put myself in “Danger!” early, and in high school she had a strange and perfunctory career competing in televised trivia contests. My teammates and I, all immigrants, by chance, saturated ourselves with dates and data with a hunger that I could not have explained at the time but that now seems embarrassingly obvious. The facts can be trusted. Facts consoled. His patient and stubborn acquisition constituted a kind of timid possession of the world.
Of course, any possession in this life is, at best, temporary. “My life has been a search for knowledge and understanding, and I am not close to having achieved it. And that doesn’t bother me in the least, ”Trebek concludes cheerfully. Finish the book at home, like all of us, in quarantine. He is exhausted by cancer treatments, exhausted by uncertainty but still sublimely calm and grateful. As you have always advised your contestants to do, you are already waiting for the next question.
