moon_custafer | John certainly did his part to make our ephemeral victory a sweet one

With a movie version of The House with a Clock in its Walls upcoming, it occurred to me that I’d never actually looked up anything about John Bellairs on the internet, at least not that I can remember. I was not really surprised to find out that he very much resembled one of his own characters, only not a wizard. Probably. The bit everyone seems to remember about him is that as a Norte Dame undergrad in 1959, he was on his school’s team for a tv quiz show called College Bowl, and during a points-for-every-line-of-Chaucer bonus round, jumped in and got most of the way through the Prologue to the Canterbury Tales before the show’s host stopped him. During the subsequent ad break, the host complimented him on his fluency in Middle English, and Bellairs cheerfully explained that his mother was Middle English and “we spoke it at home.”