[msb-alumni]

From: Steve <pipeguy920@xxxxxxxxx>
To: <msb-alumni@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Date: Sat, 16 May 2020 15:29:22 -0400

BlankJoel Kupperman, Scarred by Success As a Precocious 'Quiz Kid,' Dies at 83.
By
Penelope Green.

As a philosophy professor in adulthood, he would not speak of the World War
II-era
radio show (later on TV) that had made him famous and left him embittered. They
called him the midget Euclid, and baby Einstein. In 1944, The New York Times
said he
lisped in logarithms.

For a time, during World War II and its aftermath, Joel Kupperman was one of
the most
famous children in the country, and also one of the most loathed.

From 6 to 16, Joel was a star on "The Quiz Kids," a thunderously popular radio
program that later migrated to television. He captivated Marlene Dietrich and
Orson
Welles by performing complex math problems, joked with Jack Benny and Bob Hope,
charmed Eleanor Roosevelt and Henry Ford. He played himself in a movie ("Chip
Off the
Old Block," in 1944), addressed the United Nations and was held up as an
exemplar of
braininess to a generation of children. (Hence all the loathing.)

But his early fame became a taboo subject for his family in his adulthood, most
of
which was spent teaching philosophy at the University of Connecticut.

"It was something we knew we were not ever to mention," said Karen Kupperman,
his
wife of 56 years and a history professor at New York University. "If someone
brought
up the 'The Quiz Kids,' or even television, he would walk away."

In a rare interview with The New York Times in 1982, Professor Kupperman said
his
memories of being a national sensation were painful.

"Being a bright child among your peers was not the best way to grow up in
America,"
he said. He died on April 8 at an assisted living facility in Sheepshead Bay,
Brooklyn. He was 83. His wife said he had struggled with dementia for years.
His
death certificate lists an "influenza-like illness (probably Covid-19)" as the
cause,
she said.

Originally broadcast from Chicago and sponsored by Alka-Seltzer and One A Day
vitamins, "The Quiz Kids" aired every Sunday night. For a while Joel was the
youngest
and, because of his lisp, the most adorable of its contestants, precocious boys
and
girls who fielded questions about math, literature, sports and history, all
sent in
by listeners.

The Quiz Kids toured the country selling war bonds and, perhaps, an appealing
image
of Jewish children, as Professor Kupperman suggested to his son, Michael, a
comic
artist and illustrator, though not all of the children were Jewish. They were
paid in
war bonds, one per appearance, and a war bond was the price of admission for
the
studio audience. (By the end of the war the children had sold bonds worth an
estimated $120,000,000 -- about $1.7 billion in today's money.)

In her 1982 memoir "Whatever Happened to the Quiz Kids? Perils and Profits of
Growing
Up Gifted," Ruth Duskin Feldman, the show's literature buff (she died in 2015),
noted
the rampant anti-Semitism of the time. "When we moved through crowds," she
wrote,
"there were loud remarks of 'Oh, they're all Jews!"

The show moved to television after the war, and the cameras did not favor a
maturing
Joel, who stayed on until he was 16, the dutiful son to a controlling stage
mother,
Michael Kupperman said.

Though the producers brought in younger and cuter children to field questions,
Joel's
hand was always up, sometimes blocking the faces of the smaller children, which
didn't make for riveting TV, as Michael put it -- a spectacle made only worse
by
Joel's robotic demeanor, which made him seem priggish.

And then it was over: 10 years of Joel's life, nearly his entire childhood,
meted out
in 400 episodes. (

The program, which ended in 1953, except for a brief run in 1956, largely
escaped the
quiz show scandals of the time, though Joel's mother later said that the
producers
had known of his interests and had tailored questions to them.)
"All of us on the program experienced to some degree 'child star letdown," but
we
remembered the actual experience fondly," Richard L. Williams, the show's other
math
whiz, now a retired diplomat, said in a phone interview. "It was a high for us."

But Joel said it destroyed his childhood. When he was 6, I was 11. The program
put
stress on the smallest kids. They got the most attention and were the least
equipped
to deal with it. He added: "Once the show went on television they kept Joel,
because
he was so well known, but the general age got lower and lower. I'm guessing
that
experience was pretty sour for him. No real competition and no real
comradeship."

Joel was bullied at the University of Chicago, which he entered at 16. He
studied
math and was introduced to Asian philosophy and found a mentor in a visiting
professor, who told him, as Karen Kupperman said, "You need to leave the
country."

Professor Kupperman earned a Ph.D. in philosophy from the University of
Cambridge in
England and joined the philosophy department of the University of Connecticut
in
1960, remaining there until his retirement in 2010. His scholarly focus was on
ethics
and aesthetics, and he was an early champion of Asian philosophy at a time when
Eastern traditions were considered more akin to religion or mysticism than
philosophy. He drew from a variety of traditions, many of them ancient, which
made
his work cosmopolitan and original, said David Wong, a professor of philosophy
at
Duke University.
"The tone of much of Joel's work is that of a gentle and wise interlocutor who
refrains from lecturing to us on what the good life is," Professor Wong added,
"but
rather assists us in our individual and collective endeavors to live a good
life by
articulation of much good advice and well-taken cautions."

Professor Kupperman wrote several books on philosophy, including "Character"
(1991)
and "Six Myths About the Good Life: Thinking About What Has Value" (2006).

"He started out writing about pure ethics," his daughter, Charlie Kupperman,
said,
"but as his career went on, he was trying to understand character, and why it's
so
hard for people to be good."

Joel Jay Kupperman was born on May 18, 1936, in Chicago to Solomon and Sara
(Fischer)
Kupperman. His father was a civil engineer, his mother a homemaker. Joel's
older
sister was also briefly a Quiz Kid.

There was so much mythmaking around the show, Michael Kupperman said, that it's
hard
to know with any conviction what parts of Joel's story are true.

It is a fact that as a toddler he was taught math by his father, and Joel may
indeed
have lulled himself to sleep by singing the multiplication tables, but he
probably
did not use a beaded toy on his crib as an abacus, or catch a grocer cheating
on a
bill.

On the other hand, it's quite possible that he spotted errors in an early math
textbook, and it's fairly certain that a kindergarten teacher suggested that
his
parents reach out to "The Quiz Kids" producers.

He met Karen Ordahl in Cambridge, Mass., after she had earned a master's degree
in
history at Harvard University, and they married in 1964, settling down together
in
Storrs, Conn., near the University of Connecticut campus.

"When we were dating that first summer, if a store clerk heard his name, they
would
invariably say, 'I hated you when I was a kid," Ms. Kupperman said. "He was
really
determined to reinvent himself, and by college he was already thinking of
himself as
a philosopher. He wanted to retreat into the life of the mind, and in many ways
he
succeeded. He really lived in his head."

And yet when his wife decided to pursue her Ph.D. in history at the University
of
Cambridge, Professor Kupperman took a sabbatical for a year followed by another
year
without pay so that she could do so. In England he cared for Michael and
Charlie,
then 7 and 4, while she worked toward her doctorate -- not typical male
behavior for
the times, Ms. Kupperman said.

In addition to her and his children, he survived by his sister, Harriet Moss,
and a
grandson.

Michael Kupperman began querying his father about his "Quiz Kids" experience in
2010,
but within a few years Professor Kupperman's dementia was so advanced that any
further memories were lost.

Michael, however, had found scrapbooks in his father's study, meticulous
records of
his accomplishments -- press clippings, schedules and photographs -- that had
been
kept by Joel's mother. The memorabilia allowed Michael to further explore his
father's long-ago fame, its packaging and its bitter aftermath, which had led
Professor Kupperman not only to forbid discussion of his childhood but also, it
seemed, to block out of many of the details. The project led in 2018 to "All
the
Answers," Michael's graphic memoir of his remote father's life.

Professor Kupperman told his son, "There's this weird notion that intelligence
is a
single thing, but people can be smart in some ways and stupid in others."

His daughter, Charlie, recalled: "He talked a lot about the meaning of life,
and how
to be a good person and what happens after you die. I remember him telling me
that
when you die, it's like unplugging a radio. There's a glow that remains."

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