Student Takes Trivia to the Airwaves

When last we checked, T. Logan Evans '85 was causing no little sensation in the Undergraduate Council with his outrageous antics and fiery megalomania.

After a year of forced leave, Evans is back--and the transfer student from Columbia who dubbed himself "King Trivia" has gotten a promotion.

Every Monday morning at 6:25 a.m. he is the "Emperor of Trivia" on WABC Radio in New York City.

With a telephone hook-up, Evans throws out three trivia questions of varying difficulty. The audience has 30 minutes to call up the station and answer.

"I think he has a great deal of promise," says Alan Colmes, on whose morning talk show Evans appears.

Evans thinks so too. "Those who work with me will be exalted," he says. "Those who don't will be transcended and ignored."

Table Talk

Evans said his talent for trivia goes back to his family's dinner table conversations, when his father used to ask everyone around the table trivia questions. He was also an avid reader of the Guiness Book of World Records and the Book of Lists.

Two years ago, he arranged and conducted an elaborate trivia game held in the Science Center. Funded by the Undergraduate Council, "King Trivia" involved "zones of ignorance" and immediate ejections from the game if the contestant got an easy question wrong.

Evans views his talent in a philosophical context.

"What is trivia but knowledge?" he asks. "It's a continuous classroom that never ends."

Evans landed the Emperor of Trivia slot at WABC in May after he set up a booth outside the ABC building in New York and asked trivia questions to random pedestrians.

An old friend of Evans, who also happened to be one of Colmes' producers, recognized him and decided to give him a shot on the air.

"The studio thought it might be a good idea to capitalize on the great popularity of trivia," Colmes says.

For Evans, however, this is a mere stepping stone to pop culture greatness.

Evans says he has submitted his "King Trivia" concept to ABC and NBC as a television game show.

He says he has also submitted other game show and situation comedy concepts to both networks, but he will not reveal the details for fear that they will be stolen by other producers.

"My concepts have been stolen all over the industry," he said. "They [the producers] take a little bit here and a little bit there."

Evans, who believes he is a genius (though he admits, "No one can be sure he is a genius"), is supremely confident that he will make it big in show business, whether through television, motion pictures, or even pop music. He is currently writing a horror movie script that will be both a comedy and a musical, and is forming his own ten-man band, featuring himself as lead singer.

The lyric, of his songs, he explains, will advance his radical geopolitical theory, by which all countries will voluntarily join the United States. His theory was published last year in The Washington Times, the newspaper owned by Sun Myung Moon's Unification Church.

But for now, being the "Emperor of Trivia" will suffice.