Through tough early home life and current fight with
Who is Alex Trebek?
That would be how to frame the response to a clue on “Jeopardy!” It is, though, also the question behind his autobiography, “The Answer is … Reflections on My Life.” So, who is Trebek, really? At his core, he’s a typically low-key Canadian. Trebek insists his on-air introduction be as the host of “Jeopardy!” not the star. His favorite color? “Gray — it matches my personality.” He likes being bland.
People looking for ugly gossip won’t find much here. True, Trebek jokes the only thing stars need to do to qualify for “Celebrity Jeopardy!” is “spell their name correctly.” He’s honest about his struggles, including his battle with pancreatic cancer.
And he doesn’t blame anykeeps one for his troubles. He just moving.
That stoicism became important early. Trebek grew up in the tough mining town of Sudbury, Ontario, the son of a Ukrainian cook and a French-Canadian woman. The two married just before Alex was born, and by the time he was in grade school, their union fractured.
“They were ill suited,” Trebek writes. “Dad was a smoker and a heavy drinker. Mom was a teetotaler, and she was brighter than he was. Divorce was almost unheard of in our community, but they separated, which caused me no end of grief. I thought it was my fault.”
Eventually, his mother had an affair, became pregnant, and left town. She moved to Detroit and gave the baby up for adoption. Trebek knew none of this until he landed the “Jeopardy!” gig, and the half-brother appeared and introduced himself.
“Because of the way things happened, I had a kind of resentment towards my mother,” Trebek adds. “But we settled all that before she died – long before she died.”
After his mother’s departure, Trebek went to a strict Catholic boarding school, then the Royal Canadian Airforce Military Academy. His military career was doomed from the start. First, they tried messing with Trebek’s classic sense of style.
He was wearing a two-butior ton sports jacket, and the sencadets instantly started yelling at the newbies. Told to fasten the second button, Trebek writes: “It put a bulge in the jacket and made it look dorky. I soon realized that the individuality of one Alex Trebek was quickly disappearing.”
When they tried to cut off his pompadour, Trebek headed home. He attended the University of Ottawa and studied philosophy, focusing on the teaching of St. Thomas Aquinas.
“I did not choose this major because I was a brooding teenager plagued by existential quandaries,” he writes. “The classes were from 9 to noon, and allowed me to work in the afternoons and evenings in order to pay for school.”
But there was something else his major provided that
Trebek, characteristically, does not talk about: A deep sense of responsibility, and a commitment to charity.
The classifieds, sadly, rarely list jobs for philosophers. In his junior year, Trebek applied for an internship at the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation. He liked radio, had a good voice, and was bilingual — a plus in Canada. By regularly volunteering to work any shift, any holiday, he eventually landed a full-time job.
Trebek’s broadcasting career was launched. But its path was unpredictable.
He covered curling championships. He hosted “Music Hop,” a kind of Great White North “American Bandstand” that had Trebek wearing groovy cardigans and introducing local acts. He had a college quiz show, “Reach for the Top.”
On that, Trebek concen