Off the Map

No one ever explained why the House subcommittee investigating TV quiz shows never called a St. Louis Army supply clerk named Teddy Nadler. Maybe the probers believed that Teddy honestly knew all about classical music, history, mythology, baseball--the astonishing assortment of information that won him $264,000 on The $64,000 Challenge. But whether the legislators were fooled by the champion or not, last week another Government agency got hold of Teddy. The Bureau of the Census gave him an eminently unfixed quiz with a slim, two-week, $13-a-day prize, and Teddy flunked on the first round.

After a year and a half of dipping into his TV loot, Teddy had taken a look at his thinning bankroll and decided he needed a job. He asked to become a census taker. On the standard exam, he did well on the language sections, but Teddy was a flop when it came to map reading, i.e., showing that he could stay within his assigned area, spot landmarks, figure the distance to the city limits, etc. The Census Bureau decided that there was no sense in hiring a man who might get lost before he got out of town. "This is no reflection on Nadler's intelligence," said a kindly bureau spokesman, who added that nearly half the applicants flunk the test. But the fact remained: the man who had taken the networks' quizmasters for more than a quarter of a million had failed when he tried for a lowly 13-buck payoff.

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