Last Wednesday, Francar’s Buffalo Wings in Mercer Village hosted a trivia night in honor of Black History Month. Carl Fambro, the owner of the restaurant, was approached by the Organization of Black Students about hosting the trivia night.
Mr. Fambro seems to hold great respect for Mercer’s groups, and has never hesitated to host fundraisers in the past, saying “We try to support student organizations.” It is a win-win for the event organizers and Fambro; the restaurant receives business and the organizers have a place to host fundraisers or special occasions.
Fambro even offered one-time coupons for a meal as the first place prize.
The trivia night was a success. Approximately 30 students were present and playing the Jeopardy-like game. Randyl Cochran, one of the organizers of the evening, said, “We had done something like this last year. We had a pretty good turnout, but we needed to do it in a more central location.” She also said they were trying “to see if we could get more people to come out, try to get different groups on campus, and give them something fun to do and at the same time something educational.”
The evening began at 6 p.m. as groups began to arrive and take their seats. The organizers of the event took the official groups names and began the evening. The game was set up on a television in the corner and created to resemble Jeopardy.
There were five categories: dates, quotes, location, inventions and music. Each category had five choices for questions, with points ranging from 100 to 500.
There were two rounds. The first ran like a normal Jeopardy round, but the second was a sudden death round— the points doubled. The first person to raise his or her hand got to answer the question, but the answer had to be in the form of a question. Otherwise their group would not receive the points. There was no penalty for wrong responses, in order to encourage people to go for it. However, if the question was not answered in 10 seconds, the person lost their turn.
A few of the questions were common knowledge. For instance, in the music category one of the questions was: “This artist had an album titled ‘Thriller.’” Most participants knew the artist was Michael Jackson.
There were also harder questions. For example, under inventions there was the question of which person created the traffic light. Few knew that it was Garrett Morgan.
“That Group” was the winner of the event with 4,000 points. This cluster of excited students consisted of seven people.
Angellica Howard, a freshman business and biology major here at Mercer, said, “It felt really good [to win]. I’m proud of my team, we pulled it through, and it is all about team work.” Angellica also affirmed that if there was another trivia night she would be there. The general population of students present really enjoyed the trivia. It wasn’t about winning, but rather different people coming together and having a good time.
To brush up on your black history knowledge for the next trivia night, check out www.infoplease.com/black-history-month.
