The Kids

In Chicago last week, Northwestern University's Dr. Paul Witty credited Quiz Kids with having "erased any idea that the gifted child is usually a peculiar, eccentric misfit." He was speaking to a peculiarly receptive audience: some 235 past and present Quiz Kids who were gathered to celebrate the 12th anniversary of the program's first appearance on the air. Some of the earliest Quiz Kids are now parents (one has three children). So far, the grown-up prodigies have met none of the dire fates that are often predicted for precocious sprouts: not one has cracked up mentally or got into any serious trouble. Not one has even turned out to be just plain shiftless.

The careers of the first five to appear on the show back in 1940 are fairly typical of the group as a whole. Charles Schwartz, now 25, graduate cum laude from Harvard Law School, worked for a firm of Manhattan attorneys, returns to Harvard this fall on a teaching fellowship. Van Dyke Tiers, also 25, earned his Ph.D. in organic chemistry at the University of Chicago, is currently in the research department of the Minnesota Mining & Manufacturing Co. Mary Ann Anderson, 26, won a scholarship at Mundelein College, writes advertising copy for a Chicago drug company and teaches English and composition in the evenings at Loyola University. Joan Bishop, 25, has sung in Carnegie Hall, with the Chicago and San Carlo opera companies, and in the better Manhattan night clubs. Gerard Darrow, 19, who hates publicity and therefore never attends any Quiz Kids get-togethers, majors in music at James Millikin University and is described as a "very normal teen-ager."

Of the other notable Quiz Kids. Jack Lucal, 25, is studying to be a Jesuit priest; Harve Fischman, 21, has just graduated from UCLA where he wrote, directed and acted in the senior class play; Claude Brenner, 23, does aeronautical engineering research at M.I.T.; Ruthie Duskin, 18, already has one book to her credit (Chemi, the Magician), and took top honors at Northwestern's School of Journalism. Smylla Brind, 24. changed her name to Vanessa Brown and has appeared as a bright-looking ingenue in such movies as The Late George Apley and The Heiress.

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