Quiz show child star later wrote about her fame
The question was reasonably obscure — “What was the last opera in Wagner’s ‘Ring’ cycle?’ ” — but Ruthie Duskin knew the answer.
“The Dusk of the Gods,” she intoned into the microphone.
A fellow panellist leapt to correct her. “It’s Gott-dam ... Gott-dam,” he stammered, as the producers of the live radio broadcast winced. “He means the German name, Gotterdammerung,” Ruthie interrupted. “But in English, it’s what I said.” She was 7 years old at the time. Ruth Duskin Feldman, who died on May 18 at age 80, was a regular panellist, and perhaps the best known of the comparatively few girls, on The Quiz Kids, the torrentially popular radio show of the 1940s. Broadcast nationwide from Chicago on NBC, the show tested its young combatants weekly with rigorous questions in math, science, literature and much else.
The young panellists quickly supplanted the Dionne quintuplets as small objects of international fascination — doted on by adults, snubbed by their peers and swooned over by advertisers. Little Ruth sang a duet with Bing Crosby, sat on Chico Marx’s lap and saw her likeness grace a welter of merchandise. Jack Benny once spent actual money to buy her a gold ring.
In adult life, as a freelance writer, editor and lecturer focusing on child development, Feldman was one of the Quiz Kids who emerged relatively unscathed from the immense celebrity and rigorous intellectual pressure the show engendered. But as the years went by, she was nettled by a vague discontent. “I felt I should be making more of a name for myself on a national stage,” she told the Boston Globe in 2005. “And I think that expectation went back to all the acclaim I got as a child.”
In middle age, Feldman sought out her former co-stars. The result was a book that combined memoir, historical narrative and longitudinal study: Whatever Happened to the Quiz Kids? Perils and Profits of Growing Up Gifted (1982).