The Gortons and Slades - Washington Secretary of State

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quirky young guy attending college on the GI Bill. Wearing headphones
in their glass-enclosed “Isolation Booths,” they dueled round after round
at $2,500 a point, with 50 million Americans slack-jawed over their TV
dinners. “You guys sure know your onions,” host Jack Berry marveled.
Van Doren won $129,000 and ended up on the cover of Time.
Gorton went home, with instructions to call the studio next time he
was in town. In April, he was back. Van Doren’s run had finally ended but
there was a new champ who refused to lose. They invited Gorton to appear
on their new daytime show, Tic-Tac-Dough.
“A little black lady school teacher from North Carolina had won 900
bucks and got to be ‘X’ in the game,” Gorton recalls. She also learned that
the next contestant was a Phi Beta Kappa lawyer. “I quit!” she said. “I’ll take
my money and go.” Gorton right off had the advantage of being X and won
$900. He was making $800 a month as a junior associate at the law firm.
Gorton called his boss and asked if he could stay a few more days. That
Monday he won two more games and headed home with $3,800—some
$30,000 in 2010 dollars; enough to buy a nice house and a new car in 1957.
A year later, a letter arrived from the game-show producer. Gorton
quotes it virtually verbatim from memory: “Dear Slade, Tic-Tac-Dough
has been so successful in the daytime that it is now going on primetime
once a week at 10 times the value per square. We’re starting the nighttime
show with winners from the daytime show. The next time you’re in
New York would you drop by the studio to see whether you qualify?”
“Qualify? What the hell did that mean? Of course I qualify. I’m a daytime
winner. But I’m not going back to New York anytime soon.” He
tossed the letter in the back of a desk drawer. Six months later, a huge
scandal erupted. Fuming about his loss to the more telegenic Van Doren,
Stempel blew the whistle. The show was fixed. Van Doren repeatedly denied
it but came clean when he was hauled before a congressional committee.
“That’s what they meant by ‘qualify,’” Gorton says. They wanted
to know if you’d play along with the script to boost ratings and sell more
Geritol. The daytime version wasn’t fixed, because the turnover in contestants
actually helped, “but they found out with the night-time show that
they could build up the drama by having the same person stay on night
after night,” Gorton says, “so they fed that person the answers.”
though his tv cAReeR was short-lived, Gorton’s political career was on
the upswing. In the 1957 legislative session, R.R. “Bob” Greive of Seattle,
the Senate Democrats’ new majority leader, presided over the first redistricting
of the state since 1933. Greive had deftly politicized a League of