Mamma Mia

Everybody remembers John Carpenter and his run to the first top prize on Millionaire. Of course, he burned the phone-a-friend lifeline on the last question simply to tell his father, with a smirk, that he was gonna win the big money.

Miami lawyer Dan Blonsky suffered the (in some ways) unenviable fate of becoming the second million-dollar winner. Not that he cried too much over taking down all that loot. But relatively few people recall Dan, or how phone-a-friend saved his game show bacon on the 500K question.

Luckily, Jeff Crockett (see the link), one of Dan's partners in his law firm, knew that a winsome picture of Mia Farrow graced the first cover of People magazine. Nowadays, with Google on a high-speed Net link, it takes maybe five seconds to type "People magazine first cover" and get back a bunch of pictures of Mia. That's why the lifeline has gone the way of buggy whips. Technology marches on. (And who knows, maybe Jeff used a primitive computer search to come up with the answer.)

The final question was anticlimactic, a surprising gimme about the distance of the Earth from the Sun. Dan nailed it no-sweat, and the rest is somewhat forgotten game show history.