.Mining Minutiae: Marin’s Trivia Master Celebrates 40 Years

Pop the Champagne cork and raise a glass to Marin’s most learned man, Howard Rachelson. The brain behind the Pacific Sun’s “Trivia Café” and quizzes around the county celebrates his 40th year in the miscellaneous facts biz.

Even after four decades, Rachelson effusively expresses his passion for trivia contests. Not only does he research and write all the questions for the competitions he hosts, but he also likes participating as a contestant when another trivia master runs the show. 

I cry foul, saying that makes him a ringer. Sure, Rachelson admits, he has retained a wealth of knowledge from gathering thousands of pages of trivial material, yet he often gets stumped. 

Well, I still want to play on his team. 

Rachelson’s first trivia experience occurred when he worked as a math teacher at the American International School in Israel. A neighborhood organization for English speakers held a “quiz supper.” Neither he nor his wife knew what a quiz supper entailed, but the young couple was game. 

The quiz master got up on stage and said that each dinner table was a team in competition with all the other tables. Contestants were instructed that questions would be read out to the room, and each team would work to come up with one answer.

“This quiz supper, I enjoyed it so much,” Rachelson said. “I had never participated in an event where people were exchanging ideas about Mozart, history and other interesting subjects.”

For the next event, Rachelson helped write questions for the trivia master. The math teacher became hooked. Soon, he was holding quiz bowls for his students.

In 1984, about a year after he and his family moved to Marin, Rachelson walked into the Mayflower Inn, a traditional English pub in downtown San Rafael, and pitched then-owner Barry Oldham on a trivia event. Oldham gave him Tuesday nights, also the bar’s dart night. 

“This was exactly 40 years ago, the end of October, and I walked in with some questions that I’d written,” Rachelson said. “There were 8, 10, maybe 12 people sitting there. And I said, ‘It’s trivia night.’ But once I started reading questions, they got into it. The questions were accessible. That’s the idea, coming up with questions that people have some knowledge of or find interesting.”

Rachelson set up the competitions the same way that he had experienced trivia—teams pitted against teams. Each week, more and more folks attended until 100 people were crowded into the small pub. Oldham decided that darts and trivia didn’t mix, moving the more cerebral competition to Thursday nights. 

At the time, Rachelson was hosting the first and only trivia contest in Marin and the second in the Bay Area, he said. His Mayflower Inn competitions lasted for more than 20 years, ending in 2005.

Researching and writing trivia questions has always been a labor of love, especially before the internet existed. Rachelson used to drive to a library every week, ask the librarian for a few reference books and take out a sharpened pencil and pad of paper.

“I started opening the references randomly,” Rachelson said. “And then I’d find the fact that would be interesting for a group of people. That was hard—interesting for a group of people.”

Until Rachelson and I got together for a cup of coffee a couple of weeks ago, I hadn’t given much thought to the intricacies of putting together a trivia game. Don’t you just open Google, copy, then paste? Hmm. Let’s just say that this lack of nuanced thinking is the reason I am not a trivia master.

There are bad questions and good questions, Rachelson explained. And many factors go into weeding out the good from the bad.

“Some people say, ‘Here’s a great question; nobody will know this,’” Rachelson said. “That’s a terrible question. You want at least some of the people to know the answer; otherwise, it’s frustrating. The worst thing is when nobody knows the answer and nobody has heard of the answer. That’s the worst. Any question whose answer is Benjamin Franklin, it’s a good question.”

Crediting his many years as a teacher, Rachelson knows how to read the room. Even in a bar full of strangers playing his trivia game, he understands how questions will land for contestants.

“One instinct I developed over the years is the ability to determine how easy or hard the question is,” he said. “And how interesting or not. I can also tell by the people in the room what percentage of them will be able to figure out the answer.”

When he writes competition questions, Rachelson’s goal is for more than half the people to get more than half the questions right. They display their knowledge, he says, which is satisfying in and of itself. And they don’t feel frustrated, another essential component of a good trivia game. But he still needs to make the questions difficult enough that there’s room to separate the scores. 

The satisfaction of correctly answering a question, however, is just part of a trivia contest’s allure. And a master like Rachelson understands the science and art behind it.

“It’s not that people want to be right all the time,” he said. “Curiosity is the number one reason a person likes trivia. They enjoy learning new material. Enjoy the thrill of getting an answer correct in a competitive environment. There’s an endorphin rush when you get an answer.”

Camaraderie, too, plays an important role in a trivia competition. When a team gets an answer right, the high-fiving begins. There’s also a social aspect that comes from being with friends, eating and drinking together.

Phil Lesh, the Grateful Dead co-founder who died last month, was a trivia fan, hiring Rachelson to host contests at his San Rafael restaurant, Terrapin Crossroads, and even between concerts in Las Vegas.

As Rachelson recalls, writing the competition questions for Lesh’s 75th birthday at Terrapin Crossroads turned out to be his hardest trivia gig ever. Sure, he had to research questions that diehard Deadheads would know, but some folks were casual fans.

“I felt like I had to write a trivia contest for medical school students and high school students at the same time,” Rachelson said. “I remember buying books and pulling books out of the library to do research and making page after page of questions.”

Like all of Rachelson’s trivia endeavors, Lesh’s birthday trivia bash was a success. Folks left the event with smiles on their faces, he recalled. 

“The key idea is the pleasure people derive from the social experience,” Rachelson said. “The research and the execution of the event, that’s what I really enjoy. How often do people stand, high-five each other and cheer at an intellectual endeavor? It makes me happy to see the satisfaction that people get from it. And the proof is in the pudding—they keep coming back for more.”

Join Howard Rachelson for a trivia competition at the Sweetwater Music Hall in Mill Valley on Sunday, Jan. 5, at 5pm. Email ho*****@tr********.com to sign up for Tuesday Night Trivia Night, on Zoom at 6pm, or receive future event notifications.