Joel Kupperman has passed away at 83.
The name probably doesn’t ring any bells with you unless you are really old:
More specifically…
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“All of us on the program experienced to some degree ‘child star letdown,’ but we remembered the actual experience fondly,” Richard L. Williams, the show’s other math whiz, now a retired diplomat, said in a phone interview. “It was a high for us. But Joel said it destroyed his childhood. When he was 6, I was 11. The program put stress on the smallest kids. They got the most attention and were the least equipped to deal with it.”
He added: “Once the show went on television they kept Joel, because he was so well known, but the general age got lower and lower. I’m guessing that experience was pretty sour for him. No real competition and no real comradeship.”
After he left the show, Mr. Kupperman went to the University of Chicago: a professor there suggested that he leave the country.
Professor Kupperman earned a Ph.D. in philosophy from the University of Cambridge in England and joined the philosophy department of the University of Connecticut in 1960, remaining there until his retirement in 2010. His scholarly focus was on ethics and aesthetics, and he was an early champion of Asian philosophy at a time when Eastern traditions were considered more akin to religion or mysticism than philosophy.
He drew from a variety of traditions, many of them ancient, which made his work cosmopolitan and original, said David Wong, a professor of philosophy at Duke University.
“The tone of much of Joel’s work is that of a gentle and wise interlocutor who refrains from lecturing to us on what the good life is,” Professor Wong added, “but rather assists us in our individual and collective endeavors to live a good life by articulation of much good advice and well-taken cautions.”
He was extremely reluctant to discuss his time as a Quiz Kid: his family says he’d walk away if anyone brought it up.
He met Karen Ordahl in Cambridge, Mass., after she had earned a master’s degree in history at Harvard University, and they married in 1964, settling down together in Storrs, Conn., near the University of Connecticut campus.
“When we were dating that first summer, if a store clerk heard his name, they would invariably say, ‘I hated you when I was a kid,’” Ms. Kupperman said. “He was really determined to reinvent himself, and by college he was already thinking of himself as a philosopher. He wanted to retreat into the life of the mind, and in many ways he succeeded. He really lived in his head.”
And yet when his wife decided to pursue her Ph.D. in history at the University of Cambridge, Professor Kupperman took a sabbatical for a year followed by another year without pay so that she could do so. In England he cared for Michael and Charlie, then 7 and 4, while she worked toward her doctorate — not typical male behavior for the times, Ms. Kupperman said.
Ms. Kupperman survives him, as do a son and a daughter. His son, Michael Kupperman, is an artist who wrote a graphic novel memoir of his father called All The Answers (affiliate link).