“Sally, Sally, we’re going to be a category on Jeopardy!”
FILE PHOTO BY JEN FARIELLO

Thomas Jefferson’s Monticello will be a category on the December 17 episode of Jeopardy!, say Monticello officials. The category will have five video clues about Jefferson and Monticello and a brief “Spotlight” segment, which were filmed at Monticello earlier this year by the show’s Clue Crew.

In case you didn’t know, local resident, Julann Griffin, former wife of Merv and co-founder of the locally-founded online gaming company Boxerjam, which miraculously survived the dot.bomb era and had its offices in the Hook building (the company relocated to Texas, but their sign still faces the Mall), came up with the idea for Jeopardy! 25 years ago.

“We were on a plane from my hometown of Ironwood, Michigan back to New York, and Merv was writing on a pad of paper and said he was trying to come up with a new game show,” Griffin told the Hook in 2007.

A 1959 Congressional investigation had blown the lid off the scandal that had made the public and FCC reluctant to trust another knowledge-based game show: a show called Twenty One was supplying its most telegenic contestants with the correct answers.

“So I said, ‘Just give all the contestants the answers,’” recalled Griffin.

Also, since Annette Gordon-Reed’s book, The Hemingses of Monticello, won the National Book Award this year, might we see some answers involving Sally Hemings?

I guess we’ll have to watch. The episode airs locally on NBC-29 at 7:30pm