Challenge yourself to Tom’s Trivia!
See if you know as much as King of UConn Trivia and University Deputy Spokesperson Tom Breen ’00 (CLAS).
Scroll to the bottom to reveal the answers.
One of the books written by Nechama Tec, a professor of sociology at UConn Stamford from 1974 to 2010, was turned into a 2008 film starring Daniel Craig and Liev Schreiber. What is the name of the film?
A: Renaissance
B: Munich
C: Defiance
D: Infamous
In September 1989, dining halls began serving weekend meals for the first time in UConn history as part of an effort to get more students to remain on campus all week. The change was accompanied by a large rally at which effigies of what object were tossed onto a bonfire by students?
A: Empty plates
B: Calendars
C: Cars
D: Suitcases
Starting in fall 1993, it was finally possible to do what at the Student Union?
A: Use the internet
B: Walk the length of the upper floors
C: Eat lunch
D: Get from the ground floor to the top floor without an elevator
In the late 1940s and early 1950s, UConn Extension held a local version of a national contest aimed at encouraging poultry farmers to adopt new scientific methods of breeding larger, meatier chickens. What was the name of this contest?
A: The Chicken of Tomorrow
B: Victory Chicken
C: Chickennecticut
D: Chicken for Dinner, Chicken Forever
UConn Extension agent and poultry sciences professor William Aho, left, talks with 4-H Club students visiting UConn in the mid-1950s. Read about the now 105-year-old Aho, UConn’s oldest retiree.
Answers
- (C) The film was based on Prof. Tec’s “Defiance: The Bielski Partisans,” (1993) which chronicled a group of Jewish resistance fighters in the forests of Belarus who were responsible for saving more than 1,200 Jews from the Holocaust. Tec, a Holocaust survivor from Poland, died in 2023.
- (D) The promotional campaign, called “The Week Ends at UConn,” was aimed in part at countering UConn’s reputation as a “suitcase school,” i.e. a place that students deserted on the weekends to return to their hometowns. On the night before the first Saturday breakfast at dining halls, huge suitcase effigies were burned at Graduate Field.
- (B) For 40 years, there were technically two Student Union buildings – the Student Union proper, and Student Union South, which is the portion of the building along Fairfield Way. The two buildings were only connected on the ground floor until 1993, when a breezeway and skywalks linking all floors were built.
- (A) In the aftermath of World War II, beef and pork were relatively scarce, leading to a need for cheaper sources of protein. Initially launched by the A&P supermarket chain, the Chicken of Tomorrow contest was administered by land grant universities across the country and ran for several years. Glastonbury farmer Henry Saglio was one of two winners of the inaugural national contest.
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