Tunnel Vision

As summer was turning into fall in 1979, I was nine years old and starting the fifth grade in East Lansing, Michigan. Mrs. Swanson was my teacher, and starting the first week of class we had a weekly game of Quiz Bowl. We broke into teams to write questions based on current events, so every Sunday night I’d flip through the Lansing State Journal and the Detroit Free Press looking for ideas. Because of this steady engagement, the news of this time still has a peculiar resonance for me. In November, the Iran Hostage Crisis started, and “How many days have the hostages been in captivity?” became a fallback question. If you memorized the answer and were fast enough raising your hand, you were guaranteed at least one answer right.

Reading the paper made me feel more grownup, but my comprehension wasn’t quite there. Childhood being what it is, the truth of any given event might be overlaid with a veil of distortion. So Quiz Bowl news could take on what now seems to me a surreal quality. What did I understand about people being held captive in Iran? Conversely, another item from that fall became a regular source of discussion: What happened to James Dallas Egbert, III?