Our pal Doug Abramson wrote to ask…
I am curious if in your wandering around the Burbank Studios, if you ever got an idea of how big the original squares for Hollywood Squares were? I know that they weren't anywhere as large as they appeared on screen, because I was in a Summer day camp in 1978, when I was 6, where we went someplace everyday and one day was the Burbank Studios; where the squares were sitting out in the hallway. Even to a 6-year-old, they looked really small. Not a space you would want to be squeezed into for several hours during a marathon taping session.
Well, the stars weren't in there all through the taping session. They taped five shows in about seven hours so they were in the boxes for half an hour, then out for half an hour, then in and so on.
I sat in one once when the big set was out in the hallway outside Studio 1. It was there, no one was around and I couldn't resist sitting in a ground-level box that had Jonathan Winters' name on it. I'm not good at estimating sizes but I'm 6'3" and the ceiling in that box was about two inches over my head. I was sitting kind of low but sitting there wasn't uncomfy; just getting in and out of it.
Sitting there for the length of a game wouldn't have been uncomfy. I might have gotten worried if Louie Anderson was in the box above me.
