Word: doren
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...Magic Billfold. "In our senior year," says one of Van Doren's college roommates, "Charlie used to have a recurring dream about a billfold in which there was a $20 bill, and when you took the bill away, there would be another one there." Charlie sought the magic billfold last November when a friend told him about the easy money on Tic-Tac-Dough, another Barry-Enright production. He looked so promising that the producers put him on Twenty One. But Charlie's dream has come true with some nightmarish side effects. "Here I am with all this...
...Bronx to Basutoland, fans have deluged him with 2,000 letters, including 20 outright proposals of marriage, numerous veiled ones, solicitations from investment houses and wildcatters, requests for handouts that add up to more money than he has won. The town of Cornwall (pop. 1,100), where 26 Van Dorens gather each summer, asked him to finance a new fire engine, and some of Charles's schools would like endowments. One scholar suggested that Charlie endow a chair for himself at Columbia. One in four letters comes from a teacher, parent or student thanking Van Doren for taking...
There are other compensations, some of them strange. Now that he is a celebrity expecting a large sum of money, a cab driver, a tailor and a restaurant have refused to take anything at all in payment for their services. From his savings, Van Doren has splurged mildly on clothes and an extra round of Christmas gifts for his family. The only whim he plans to indulge is to replace his 1948 Studebaker with a 190 SL Mercedes-Benz. He will probably invest the rest of the money...
...become Columbia's most cherished hero since Sid Luckman was tossing passes at Baker Field. While his colleagues beam in admiring good will, President Grayson Kirk sings his praises as "an able and exciting teacher," the Graduate English Department information desk bears the legend "Only Charles Van Doren Knows All the Answers." and his students decorate the blackboard with such questions as "For $52,500, what did Plato mean by Justice?" At St. John's, where only two faculty members deign to own TV sets, President Richard Weigle went to a neighborhood bar to catch last week...
...Eleven-Point Question. Will Van Doren keep gambling on Twenty One? His friends and family are sharply divided on whether he should, and, in his own mind, so is he. Says St. John's Classmate Steven Benedict, now a U.S. Information Agency officer: "He's almost a Greek tragic hero, a vast commercial property being used by Geritol. He has strong opinions about the debasement of values by commercialism, but he can't condemn commercialism now. He's under a kind of Faustian pact with the devil." Says Laural Whipkey: "Charlie will play until...