AMHERST — Some shrewd maneuvering on the game show “Jeopardy!” landed a University of Massachusetts Amherst professor and Florence resident with some cash on Thursday.
Joseph Bartolomeo, an English professor specializing in 18th century British literature, was trailing until he wagered $200 in the final round — and won $14,000 because of it.
In the category “men of science,” the final question asked: “him vs. him: ‘The Life-Long Feud that Electrified the World’ is a book about these two men.”
Although he answered the question wrong, answering Nikola Tesla and Lumiere, his frugal betting landed him narrowly ahead of the two other contestants. The right answer was Nikola Tesla and Thomas Edison.
The defending champion, Amanda Berofsky, a quality assurance analyst from Waterford, Michigan, had the lead entering the final question. She lost after getting the question wrong and betting enough to drop her total below that of Bartolomeo.
Bartolomeo will be the defending champ on Friday’s show, where he will compete against a congressional press secretary from Washington, D.C., and a social worker from Columbus, Ohio.
In 2000, Bartolomeo was selected to be a contestant on “Who Wants to be a Millionaire?” but did not make it past the “Fastest Finger” round to the “hot seat.”
“When I was a child, my family and I were great game players,” Bartolomeo told the Gazette back in 2000, shortly after his stint on Millionaire. “We’d play the home version of ‘Jeopardy’ and ‘Trivial Pursuit.’ I have a reasonably good memory for otherwise useless pieces of information.”
Bartolomeo’s win in the trivia contest comes less than a year after Northampton poet and Smith College employee Jennifer Jabaily Blackburn came from behind to win the show last March, and take home $19,700.
Blackburn works as an administrative assistant at Smith in the Poetry Center and the department of French studies.
Amanda Drane can be contacted at adrane@gazettenet.com.