I've been told I have a face for radio, so it's a good thing that I now have regularly scheduled radio appearances.Last night we had the test run of my Big Daddy Graham trivia question at about 2:30am on WIP (610 AM), the region's leading sports talk station. I asked which is the only US state with a majority Roman Catholic population, in fact 63% Catholic. The generous prize was a $50 spa gift certificate to a place in South Jersey not too far across a bridge from the city.
As you can see by the 2:1 scale map at left, the answer was Rhode Island. Massachusetts is second with 49% wafer-eaters. So there's your papist menace, a slight majority of the smallest state in the union land-area-wise.
You have a small, urban population in a state which had immigration from Ireland, Poland, Italy and Portugal. That'll do it. In fact, Providence County is an estimated 71% Catholic, which is supremely unusual in the US, something that's easy to forget in a city with the ethnic make-up of Philadelphia. Even more surprising: Rhode Island apparently has more than one county.
It took a couple of hours for someone to get the answer. Most unusually it was an American living in Singapore who was listening to the station via the web. In fact he wasn't even the primary listener, he was sitting next to an expatriate Philadelphian who listens at work. The winner grew up in Little Rhody, and has been living in Australia and Singapore for the past 11 years. Apparently he knows people in Berwyn, PA who'll be getting the certificate.
This time I stayed up to hear the conclusion, most nights I won't be able to do so. Hopefully this segment will take off and raise the profile of the four awesome quizzes I crank out each week. Tonight I will be asking a sports question, but the plan is to mix categories as I normally do in the game.
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