QUIZ KIDS RADIO CAST - PROGRAM SIGNED CIRCA 1941 CO-SIGNED BY: QUIZ KIDS (JOAN BISHOP), HARVE (HARVE FISCHMAN) BENNETT, QUIZ KIDS (RICHARD LLEWELLYN WILLIAMS) - HFSID 285072

THE QUIZ KIDS RADIO CAST: HARVE BENNETT, RICHARD WILLIAMS and JOAN BISHOP
Pencil signatures on the front cover of an American Legion program.
Program Cover signed in pencil: "Richard/Williams", "Joan Bishop", "Best of/luck/Harve/Fischman", "Peg", 30 pages, 5x7¼. Program for the 21st Annual Convention of the American Legion Auxiliary, Milwaukee, Wisconsin, 1941 September 21. Signed on front cover, which bears tassel and the seal of the American Legion Auxiliary. The Quiz Kids were featured guests, along with actors Joe E. Brown and Laurel & Hardy. THE QUIZ KIDS was a popular show on NBC Radio from 1940 to 1953, also televised 1949-1953. The contestants were young people, under 16, mostly from the Chicago area, with high IQs (average 160) and knowledge levels. JOAN BISHOP, an original panelist, was a music expert. She had aspirations to become a concert pianist or opera singer, but abandoned her professional ambitions after marriage. HARVE FISCHMAN (1930-2015), a Quiz Kid for 5 years in the 1940s, became a successful TV writer and producer under the name HARVE BENNETT. He worked on Star Trek II to Star Trek V (1982-1989), variously involved in production, script writing and story development. He made a cameo on-screen appearance in Star Trek V as Admiral Robert Bennett. TV shows produced in full or in part by Bennett included the series Mod Squad, The Six Million Dollar Man and The Bionic Woman, as well as the mini-series Rich Man, Poor Man. RICHARD WILLIAMS (b. 1929), a math whiz on the radio show, became a career foreign service officer before retiring to write and to teach at Columbia. He was the first US Ambassador to the Mongolian People's Republic (1988-1989), and headed the State Department's China desk during the Tiananmen Crisis. "Peg" may have been Margaret Merrick, a whiz kid and polio victim, who made public appearances on crutches, but more research would be required to verify this. Overall, the Quiz Kids fared about as one might expect from a sample group of highly intelligent youths. Some, such as Nobel Prize-winner James Watson (co-discoverer of DNA) became famous, while others receded to obscurity. Soiled. Pencil signatures light but legible. Otherwise, in fine condition.