September is Library Card Sign-Up month, and the Goshen Public Library has produced a video testimonial with the city’s most recent famous son.
Goshen native Ben Ganger in May used his knowledge and buzzer skills to win $105,000 on the game show Jeopardy! The 30-year-old data analyst and opera singer's preparation for the show included trips to the Goshen Public Library, a place he also loved growing up.
Grace Thomas is the library’s development and community engagement manager. She had seen him coming to the library to prepare, and so recently, she asked if he would shoot a video interview with her for Library Card Sign Up Month. He quickly agreed.
In the interview, Ganger recalls telling reference librarian Roberta Vanderwal that he was a little shaky on English monarchs, so she printed out a poem that had helped her memorize them. He didn’t end up getting any such questions on the show.
“But it was still such a huge relief not to have like, ‘I don’t even know the monarchs!’ like kicking around in the back of my head as I went on stage," Ganger says in the video. "The people here are experts in solving information problems like that.”
Ganger will compete next year in Jeopardy’s Tournament of Champions and says he’ll be back in the library soon to prepare.
Thomas says she loved how the video turned out but she noted you don’t have to be a Jeopardy! Champion to benefit from the library. Looking to the future, she called the video, “An Interview with a Patron.”
”I don't know, I named it that because I wanted to leave the door open because I think there are going to be a lot of opportunities like this where we find a really interesting story of somebody who lives in the community and comes to the library.
What I’m kind of hoping is that maybe someone else sees this and then comes and would like to share a story that they have about a way that they’ve used the library or that the library has affected their lives. So I really hope that that happens.”
