QUIZMASTERS

Bronwen Hruska’s article “They Conned America” (Aug. 28) gave us a comprehensive review of the TV quiz-show scandals of the late ‘50s, now being turned into a movie. But I’d like to add a personal note about one of the figures involved--the late Dan Enright, co-creator of “Twenty-One” with Jack Berry.

I met Dan in later years, and we became good friends. Did you know that Dan helped start television in Israel? And let’s not forget the Emmy Award he received only a few years ago for a top TV movie of the year, the beautiful Hallmark Hall of Fame special “Caroline.”

Dan and his companion, Susan Stafford, sponsored Arab-Jewish workshops in conflict resolution. He proved to be one of the most generous, gentle and talented human beings I’ve ever met.

If we’re going to mention Dan’s legacy, I think we should mention this side of it as well.

CASEY KASEM

Los Angeles

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I know Bronwen Hruska was writing about the quiz-show scandal, not about the life of Charles Van Doren. But couldn’t she have told your readers something more about Van Doren’s post-quiz-show life? Couldn’t she have at least acknowledged his monumental 1990 book “A History of Knowledge,” called by the San Francisco Chronicle “no less than the summation of the human race from the bird’s-eye view of a tremendous, encyclopedic intelligence”?

Charles Van Doren’s intellectual contributions are part of the “great ideas” movement--that the great ideas of world civilization should form the core of all education--promulgated by Robert Maynard Hutchins, his father and uncle Mark and Carl Van Doren and his intellectual mentor Mortimer J. Adler. The importance of the great ideas traditions, and his contribution to it, will be recognized and appreciated long after an evanescent commotion about a TV quiz show has been forgotten.

TAD DALEY

Los Angeles