CANDID QUEEN
Miss Canada shares story of abuse.
Answer: This longtime Windsor trivia buff will create an annual Battle of the Brains fundraiser for the Alzheimer’s Society. Question: Who is Jack Ramieri? That is correct! Ramieri, Windsor’s own trivia king, recently tested the waters with a 240-competitor-strong trivia contest at the Ciociaro Club, which raised about $3,000 for the Alzheimer’s Society. Now Ramieri wants to make the brainy brawl a yearly event and possibly lure even more Einsteins into the ring.
“All the people coming up to me after the event said they had a wonderful time,” Ramieri said about the 80-question competition. “And the question is always the same: Will you do this again next year? The answer is yes.”
Ramieri began what he calls his “lifelong obsession” while at Brennan high school, where he helped win two division titles on Reach for the Top. He also earned a spot on the Windsor all-star team two years running.
In 1996, he competed on Jeopardy, placing second on the day.
“The buzzer and I were not one,” he said. “The buzzer is not armed until Alex [Trebek] finishes the question and a tech offstage hits the button for your buzzer system. So it’s more like a jump ball for most questions. It’s not speed of recall.”
Ramieri was a champ on Canadian quiz show Time Chase. He competed in Toronto in 2006 on the CBC’S Test the Nation trivia challenge.
He was a producer and head question writer on Quest, a Windsor show that ran for six years in the early 2000s on TV Cogeco.
And he still competes in two pub-trivia leagues on Monday night at the Victoria Tavern, and on Wednesday nights at the Manchester Pub.
Though he jokes that he sometimes forgets what he ate the previous evening, he tends to remember what he reads. And what questions he answers.
One of his favourite responses came during Reach for the Top, playing a What Am I question, where competitors earn 40 points after the first clue, 30 points after the second, and so on.
“The first question was, ‘I originated in the Philippines jungles,’” he recalls. “And I hit the buzzer and said, ‘A yoyo.’ And [host] David Compton looked at me like I was an alien, because I was right. It was first used in the Philippines as a weapon.”
Knowing how much fun pop questions and answers can be, Ramieri started thinking big. He figured it made sense to create a Battle of the Brains fundraiser for the Alzheimer’s, because of the mind connection.
So he teamed with Maurizio Tiberia, the local Alzheimer’s development officer, and Frank Maceroni, the president of the Ciociaro Club, to create perhaps the biggest single-night trivia contest in the area.
Trivia, to Ramieri, is not trivial.
“I’ve always believed that knowledge is a great thing,” said Ramieri, a lawyer by day. “And that the more we know about the world and the people in it, the more inclined we are to care about the world and the people in it.”