Word: doren
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...Doren is the first to admit that he is no genius and can claim neither a photographic memory nor total recall. Indeed, most of his education was in schools that had little interest in memory work or tests, regarded facts as mere accessories in the handling of ideas and the development of taste and reasoning. Some of his classmates at St. John's College in Annapolis, famed for its "great books" course and its cloistered devotion to scholarship, say that Van Doren's quiz wizardry flies ironically in the face of what the college and Charlie himself stand...
...Bunch of Uncles." For his freakish TV success and, more important, for being the remarkable young man he is, Charles Van Doren owes most to the remarkable Van Doren family (see box). Says a friend: "I have always thought the Van Dorens the most successful family I've ever experienced in terms of closeness, intellectual vitality, mutual respect, in terms of exchange of ideas and the flow of electricity that keeps everybody learning all the time. Charlie spent his whole life saturated in this sort of thing." His father is Mark Van Doren, 62, Pulitzer Prizewinning poet and professor...
...bunch of uncles to him," says Fadiman. As a tot, Charlie played with Philosopher Adler at a highbrow game of "neologizing" (inventing words in sentences to sound like a foreign language). As a youth, he played word games with Cornwall Neighbor James Thurber, who was so taken with Van Doren's acting skill ten years ago as the lead in an amateur production of The Male Animal that he recently began trying-before Charlie became famous-to persuade him to take a role in a play he is preparing for Broadway next season...
...told his father: "Charlie is capable in any direction. But I wonder if he'll ever be able to concentrate on any one thing." To the greater glory of Twenty One, the fear proved well grounded. In Manhattan's High School of Music and Art, Charlie Van Doren studied the clarinet to become a concert artist. But though he ran up a 95 average and became the school's first student to qualify for college at the end of his junior year, he abandoned music as a profession. He has since picked up piano and guitar...
...Even Cook. Throughout his career, Van Doren has been so well-rounded that none of his friends ever regarded him as a bookworm. He plays good squash and tennis, won a $60-a-month athletic scholarship at St. John's to coach intramural basketball and baseball, played extracurricular bridge and pool. As a World War II pre-aviation cadet whose initials doomed him to the nickname "V.D.," he became adept at poker. Pooling resources with a buddy named Laural Whipkey, now an advertising man in West Virginia, Corporal Van Doren played poker twelve hours...