Mr. Bill's Traveling Trivia Show
154 NE 69th Place
Newport, OR 97365-9506
Phone: (541) 265-8749
Or e-mail at: mrbill@actionnet.net
Mr. Bill – Bill Klein of Newport, Oregon – created the show in 1984 while bartending in Salem, Oregon. “Some kids got to arguing about 1950's TV programs,” Mr. Bill recalled. The pub owner and I had been talking about midweek promotions, so when I came up with the idea of a trivia show, he asked me to do it.”
Klein created a show once a week at the pub, and then a friend at an Albany club asked for a performance. Soon after another Salem night spot called and the show began to travel.
“I thought this was a six-month fad and I’d have to find a real job soon,” Klein chuckled. “But after six months, I was doing eight shows seven days a week. The show has been going strong ever since.”
Mr. Bill likes to travel and has played DJ & Trivia Host in Arizona, California, Montana, North Carolina, Virginia, Washington, and Oregon!
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Mr. Bill is on TV check out Mr. Bill's Traveling Trivia Show @ www.youtube.com
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Check out Kim Kasch Blogsite:
http://kimkasch.blogspot.com/2008/11/mr-bills-traveling-trivia-show.html
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MR. BILL'S TRAVELING TRIVIA SHOW
What's the state's best drinking game?
By Mark Baker
The Register-Guard
Published: Friday, March 9, 2007
Two Blondes and a Fat Guy. The Drunken Mc-Stumblies. Team Hasselhoff.They're all here at the Eugene City Brewery on a Friday night, all trying to figure out how many U.S. state names end with the letter A.
Catherine Tenedios is fingering the map in her mind's eye that hangs right above her pint of amber brew.
Arizona, California, Nevada, Alabama, Georgia ...
Quick. What's taking you so long?
Ariel King - who is playing with Tenedios and Team Hasselhoff's other member, Ryan Brown of Portland - scratches down as many states as the group can think of. They come up with 20.
"Oh, noooooo!!"
OK, enough Mr. Bill jokes, Sluggo. The correct answer is 21.
And that was one of the tougher questions during this Mr. Bill's Traveling Trivia Show at the Rogue Ales-owned brewpub last Friday. A tad bit tougher than, "What color is a hockey puck?"
But that's the beauty of it, says Bill Klein, aka Mr. Bill, who drives to Eugene from his Newport home every Friday afternoon to stage the ever-popular trivia show he's been coordinating for 23 years now. It's a mix of the difficult and the easy, the obvious and the obscure, and everyone keeps playing even if they keep coming up with wrong answers.
Everyone can win, too.
"Unlike Trivial Pursuit, you don't feel stupid when you don't know the answer," says Tenedios, 25, a child therapist in Eugene. "It's more laid-back."
Brown has this theory: "We're in a group, so it probably takes away the pain a little bit not to get the answers right."
More and more people are being drawn to Mr. Bill, who bears more of a resemblance to actor Gene Hackman than that smashing little Play-Doh puppet of late 1970s "Saturday Night Live" fame.
The downtown restaurant regularly hosts a crowd of about 100 every Friday. An open table is hard to come by. Last Friday, 37 teams packed every table, both upstairs and down.
"Friday is definitely our busiest night because of Mr. Bill," says Dave Stark, the brewpub's manager. "We turned away 40 people three weeks ago. It was just out of control. We just didn't have the seating.
"It's just fun," Stark says. "There are a lot of people in this town looking for something different.
"And after a couple of pints, it's even more fun."
Some wild answers on tap
No, it doesn't hurt that the Eugene City Brewery has 35 beers on tap, eight of them brewed on the premises.
Trivia games at brewpubs and bars, popular for years in Great Britain, are springing up like karaoke machines in the United States and here in Oregon. But then, Americans love their trivia, too.
It probably started with TV's "Jeopardy" and peaked with "Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?" and Trivial Pursuit, the smash-hit board game that debuted in the early 1980s. More recently, there's the interactive DVD game Scene It? and Buzztime, the satellite-based game beamed to more than 3,000 bars and restaurants in North America and Great Britain.
Klein has five regular weekly games up and down Western Oregon, from Portland to Eugene to Newport. New Max's Tavern on East 13th Avenue even started a Tuesday night trivia game after some employees saw Klein's version, he says.
"When I first started, I thought it would be a six-month fad," Klein says of the format he developed to increase midweek crowds at the place he was bartending in Salem in 1984.
He moved to North Carolina for a couple of years in the early 1990s. He tried his game there in such places as Raleigh, thinking a larger population base would enable him to make a living at it. But he came back to Oregon in 1993 and resumed the event in Newport.
Today, he actually does make a living, he says, hosting his show five nights a week around the state. Not that he's getting rich. The Eugene City Brewery pays him a flat fee of $300, Stark says.
Dressed in a tuxedo, microphone in hand, Klein - who says he got his "Mr. Bill" moniker years ago when a bar patron tagged him with it "and it stuck" - hands out pieces of paper and golf pencils to each table to start the night.
Klein's "lovely assistant," Alice Derrickson of Corvallis, one of nine female employees who include Klein's daughters Beth and Trina, handles DJ duties (they have about 11,000 songs) and keeps score as Klein entertains the crowd.Klein asks three questions at a time. In the course of the evening, he will finish three or four 18-question rounds.Teams consist of as few or as many players as you want, and you can enter or leave the game at any time. But only one answer per question is allowed, no matter how many heads are on your team.A unique scoring system awards points for each correct answer. Raffle tickets are handed out after each round for "Mr. Bill Bucks" ($1 off food-and-drink coupons), gift certificates and T-shirts. "We're not going to make you a millionaire," Klein says after last Friday's first round as a long queue of team representatives line up for their winning tickets. "But we've got about $50 to give away."Klein's game is popular "because you can play trivia as a group," says Sara Stankey of Eugene, a regular who often plays at the Rogue Ale Public House in Newport, where her parents live. "And you can steal your friends' answers."Sean and Amy Eilers of Springfield also are regulars, playing with their friend Gabe Greiner."We actually got engaged at Mr. Bill's show," Amy Eilers says."In Newport," her husband says. It was midnight on New Year's Eve.
And, no, she did not write the answer to his question on a piece of paper.
Reach Mark Baker at 338-2374 or mbaker@guardnet.com.
What's the state's best drinking game?
By Mark Baker
The Register-Guard
Published: Friday, March 9, 2007
Two Blondes and a Fat Guy. The Drunken Mc-Stumblies. Team Hasselhoff.They're all here at the Eugene City Brewery on a Friday night, all trying to figure out how many U.S. state names end with the letter A.
Catherine Tenedios is fingering the map in her mind's eye that hangs right above her pint of amber brew.
Arizona, California, Nevada, Alabama, Georgia ...
Quick. What's taking you so long?
Ariel King - who is playing with Tenedios and Team Hasselhoff's other member, Ryan Brown of Portland - scratches down as many states as the group can think of. They come up with 20.
"Oh, noooooo!!"
OK, enough Mr. Bill jokes, Sluggo. The correct answer is 21.
And that was one of the tougher questions during this Mr. Bill's Traveling Trivia Show at the Rogue Ales-owned brewpub last Friday. A tad bit tougher than, "What color is a hockey puck?"
But that's the beauty of it, says Bill Klein, aka Mr. Bill, who drives to Eugene from his Newport home every Friday afternoon to stage the ever-popular trivia show he's been coordinating for 23 years now. It's a mix of the difficult and the easy, the obvious and the obscure, and everyone keeps playing even if they keep coming up with wrong answers.
Everyone can win, too.
"Unlike Trivial Pursuit, you don't feel stupid when you don't know the answer," says Tenedios, 25, a child therapist in Eugene. "It's more laid-back."
Brown has this theory: "We're in a group, so it probably takes away the pain a little bit not to get the answers right."
More and more people are being drawn to Mr. Bill, who bears more of a resemblance to actor Gene Hackman than that smashing little Play-Doh puppet of late 1970s "Saturday Night Live" fame.
The downtown restaurant regularly hosts a crowd of about 100 every Friday. An open table is hard to come by. Last Friday, 37 teams packed every table, both upstairs and down.
"Friday is definitely our busiest night because of Mr. Bill," says Dave Stark, the brewpub's manager. "We turned away 40 people three weeks ago. It was just out of control. We just didn't have the seating.
"It's just fun," Stark says. "There are a lot of people in this town looking for something different.
"And after a couple of pints, it's even more fun."
Some wild answers on tap
No, it doesn't hurt that the Eugene City Brewery has 35 beers on tap, eight of them brewed on the premises.
Trivia games at brewpubs and bars, popular for years in Great Britain, are springing up like karaoke machines in the United States and here in Oregon. But then, Americans love their trivia, too.
It probably started with TV's "Jeopardy" and peaked with "Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?" and Trivial Pursuit, the smash-hit board game that debuted in the early 1980s. More recently, there's the interactive DVD game Scene It? and Buzztime, the satellite-based game beamed to more than 3,000 bars and restaurants in North America and Great Britain.
Klein has five regular weekly games up and down Western Oregon, from Portland to Eugene to Newport. New Max's Tavern on East 13th Avenue even started a Tuesday night trivia game after some employees saw Klein's version, he says.
"When I first started, I thought it would be a six-month fad," Klein says of the format he developed to increase midweek crowds at the place he was bartending in Salem in 1984.
He moved to North Carolina for a couple of years in the early 1990s. He tried his game there in such places as Raleigh, thinking a larger population base would enable him to make a living at it. But he came back to Oregon in 1993 and resumed the event in Newport.
Today, he actually does make a living, he says, hosting his show five nights a week around the state. Not that he's getting rich. The Eugene City Brewery pays him a flat fee of $300, Stark says.
Dressed in a tuxedo, microphone in hand, Klein - who says he got his "Mr. Bill" moniker years ago when a bar patron tagged him with it "and it stuck" - hands out pieces of paper and golf pencils to each table to start the night.
Klein's "lovely assistant," Alice Derrickson of Corvallis, one of nine female employees who include Klein's daughters Beth and Trina, handles DJ duties (they have about 11,000 songs) and keeps score as Klein entertains the crowd.Klein asks three questions at a time. In the course of the evening, he will finish three or four 18-question rounds.Teams consist of as few or as many players as you want, and you can enter or leave the game at any time. But only one answer per question is allowed, no matter how many heads are on your team.A unique scoring system awards points for each correct answer. Raffle tickets are handed out after each round for "Mr. Bill Bucks" ($1 off food-and-drink coupons), gift certificates and T-shirts. "We're not going to make you a millionaire," Klein says after last Friday's first round as a long queue of team representatives line up for their winning tickets. "But we've got about $50 to give away."Klein's game is popular "because you can play trivia as a group," says Sara Stankey of Eugene, a regular who often plays at the Rogue Ale Public House in Newport, where her parents live. "And you can steal your friends' answers."Sean and Amy Eilers of Springfield also are regulars, playing with their friend Gabe Greiner."We actually got engaged at Mr. Bill's show," Amy Eilers says."In Newport," her husband says. It was midnight on New Year's Eve.
And, no, she did not write the answer to his question on a piece of paper.
Reach Mark Baker at 338-2374 or mbaker@guardnet.com.