FOR the friends and family of Charles Van Doren, most of the fascination of his mental marathon is not what he says—which is fascinating enough—but the fact that he can say anything at all before the implacable eye of the television camera. "Why, I couldn't say a word up there with those earphones and all," marvels one distinguished Columbia scholar. "I'd come completely unstuck."
Charles Van Doren sticks together, in the opinion of Critic Clifton Fadiman, because of his family heritage. "Charlie was brought up to be unconscious of the fact that he has an inferior or superior," says Fadiman. "Because of this, he never starts to press. The Van Dorens represent a tradition of people that is almost dead now, like Thoreau and Emerson. They have their roots in the 19th century. They are content and confident in themselves."
The Van Doren tradition of self-reliance crossed the Atlantic in the 1650s when Pieter van Doom arrived in Peter Stuyvesant's Manhattan from Gravezande, Holland. The family grew up in the U.S. heartland, on the farmlands of Illinois. Charles Lucius Van Doren was a kindly, industrious country doctor and farmer. His wife, Eudora A. Butz, was a stern taskmaster who at the age of ten carried the mail on horseback across the prairies. Married in 1883, they raised a family of five boys. "We lived together in a busy tumult," wrote Carl, the oldest of those sons, in his autobiography Three Worlds, "in a close-knit affection which the later scattering of the family has never weakened."
Although not widely read, the country doctor had a consuming curiosity and a determination that his sons should have every opportunity for education. When Mark, the fourth-born, was six, Dr. Van Doren quit his practice at Hope, Ill., packed off his brood to Urbana 25 miles away so the boys could study in good elementary schools and be handy to the University of Illinois. "Everything interested him," says Mark of his father. "Nothing was unimportant. He had no patience with error. Since this TV business started, I got a letter from a distant cousin who said he closed his eyes when Charlie was on the air and he could see my father talking."
As the country doctor had planned, all five boys attended the University of Illinois. Guy Van Doren, 69, is now a semi-retired consulting architect in Clinton, Mich., runs a prosperous antique business on the side. Paul Van Doren, the youngest, 57, is an investment banker in New York City. Frank Van Doren, 65, is a retired farmer and agriculture expert in Tuscola, Ill.