April 17--There are, give or take, 11 million millionaires in the Unites States, a figure expected to swell to 16.9 by 2017, and who wouldn't want to be part of that crowd?
So many of the rest of us aspire to big wealth, lining up at liquor and convenience stores, gas stations and going online to plunk down a few bucks on the off chance (1 in 20,358,520 for Lotto, to be precise) that the numbers and fates will align and our troubles will vanish.
On Monday on the television show "Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?" (4 and 4:30 p.m. on WPWR-Ch. 50), there was a contestant named Paul Rouffa. He answered the first three questions correctly, and then came this: "What city's main airport likes to boast that it's within a two-hour flight of 80 percent of the U.S. population?" The possible answers were Denver, Atlanta, Las Vegas or Chicago.
Perhaps influenced by chauvinistic pride, he said "Chicago." The correct answer was Atlanta.
"I just really blew it, on the fourth question too," Rouffa says. "Just a silly brain freeze."
He said this matter-of-factly, with no regret or rancor. That is because he has been there -- if not quite to the millionaire mountaintop, at least in that rarefied vicinity. He's a game show champ.
Born and raised in Downers Grove, he participated in his first game show while in high school at Downers Grove North. He was on "It's Academic," a program that once aired on Saturday afternoons here and in cities across the country. It's still around in some markets, the longest-running quiz show in TV history, more than 50 years old.
Presidential candidate Hillary Rodham Clinton was an alternate for her Maine South High School team in Park Ridge that was knocked out in its first round of competition. Rouffa was the captain of his three-member team that finished third during a match in the early 1970s.
"It was such a fun experience," he says.
He attended college at Northwestern University, graduating with a degree in speech, and a few years later (1986, to be precise), he was a working actor also waiting tables when he heard about local auditions being held for "Jeopardy!" He took some written tests, did some interviews and made the show. Knowing he would have to finance the airfare/hotel costs to the taping in Los Angeles himself, he debated selling shares in potential winnings.
"And then I decided not to," he says. "I decided I was not going to lose."
He did not. He won five days in a row, $46,100 in all, a sum that allowed him, as he told me at the time, "to work on my craft. Now, when I go to auditions, I'm not at all tense. I don't have to get parts in order to pay my rent."
He was selected later in that charmed year to participate in "Jeopardy's Tournament of Champions," one of 15 contestants selected for the two-week-long tourney. Each was a previous five-day winner. Rouffa made it to the finals, facing off against Marvin Shinkman, a California stamp dealer, and Chuck Forrest, a law student from Michigan.
"Oh, that Chuck Forrest," Rouffa says about the man called by the show's host, Alex Trebek, "the best player ever to appear." Forrest won $100,000, Rouffa and Shinkman $5,000 each.
The next year Rouffa was in LA again as a contestant on "Scrabble." Over four days he walked away with $32,000, which gave him the means to, as he said, "give it a shot" -- "it" meaning the acting scene in LA. So he moved to that tough town and stayed for eight months before returning to Chicago to marry Joanne Tague, a registered nurse with two young boys from a previous marriage.
In 1990, he appeared on "Super Jeopardy!" and took his new family to LA with him. He didn't win, but he says, "We had an amazing and memorable vacation."
The family moved to Orlando, Fla., in 1991 and stayed there for the next 13 years as Rouffa did a lot of commercial TV work, appeared in the 1998 HBO miniseries "From Earth to the Moon" and acted in theatrical productions.
They came back to this area in 2004 and settled in Naperville. The kids went off to college and adult lives. Rouffa eventually gave up acting and tried sales for a few years. "I just sort of lost the desire to act any longer and found that I was pretty good at sales," he says.
He also started a video production company, Every Picture Tells a Story, and two years ago began working as a "standardized patient," which means he acted as a real patient, simulating a set of symptoms or problems in order to assist medical students with their diagnostic and other skills. He did this at a number of area hospitals and currently works in the more detailed and intensive area of clinical skills at the University of Chicago hospitals.
"It's very rewarding," he says. "I get to use my acting experience in the training that involves teaching interpersonal skills and instruction on physical exams. I'm passionate about this."
Always a cheerful guy, he seems happy, content.
His sons, he says, are thriving. Carl lives in Florida and is an auto technician working on foreign sports cars, and Dan is the sous-chef at Mia Figlia restaurant on the Northwest Side.
Rouffa has no plans to continue his game show career.
"I did look on this opportunity on 'Millionaire' as unfinished business, but that didn't turn out as planned," he says, noting that he got involved primarily because auditions for the show were taking place near his home. "I don't anticipate any further shows."
He doesn't watch them, either: "We cut the cable cord about five years ago, so it would be hard to catch them," he says. "But I'm not aware of any shows that I would be seriously interested in. If I hear about something interesting that happened on 'Jeopardy!' I might look it up on YouTube."
That's one of the benefits of the Internet. Another is that Rouffa and anybody else can see his previous game show appearances and other images from his past, on https://vimeo.com/paulrouffa.
He doesn't often revisit his past triumphs on "Jeopardy!" He would rather watch the White Sox. He's a rabid fan. He and Joanne are still happily married.
"I don't really believe I am a game show jinx, but I can't help but notice that Paul did much better on game shows before we got married," she says. "If I sincerely believed I was a jinx, I would have divorced Paul prior to the tapings because I wouldn't want to hold him back. Just kidding, of course. Paul is a great husband and father. We laugh and have fun every day."
As for the lottery?
"We have bought a couple of lottery tickets when the jackpot's in the hundreds of millions," he says. "But mostly we think it's a waste of money."
"After Hours With Rick Kogan" airs 9-11 p.m. Sundays on WGN-AM 720.
rkogan@tribpub.com
