16   Recorded October 5, 1972

Wren Prather from Carlsbad, New Mexico: “I’m going to tap dance – upside down”

The 19-year-old beauty queen is the reigning 1972 Miss New Mexico and only a month earlier had competed in the Miss America pageant.  This was her talent at both events.  She sets herself upside down in a brace with padded shoulder rests near the ground and taps away on a surface above her.  Wren Prather-Stroud would become a sculptor and a member of the New Mexico Arts Commission.  

Mr X: “I’m the fastest man on water…285 MPH in a jet-powered boat”
Mr Y: “I’m the fastest man on land…622 MPH in a rocket car”
Mr Z: “I’m the fastest man in the air…4,520 MPH in an X-15 rocket”

Lee Taylor from Cerritos, California set his record in June 1967 on Lake Guntersville in Alabama. His record would be bested by Australian Ken Warby in 1977.  Warby still holds the water speed record.  In an attempt to regain the record in November 1980 at Lake Tahoe, Taylor would lose control of his rocket-powered boat and perish when it plunged underwater. 
   
Gary Gabelich of Long Beach, California set his record on the Bonneville Salt Flats in October 1970. Gabelich is in a leg cast here from a near-fatal crash of an experimental car in 1972. In 1982 Gabelich and his family would appear on Dawson’s Family Feud game show, where he announced plans to beat his own record. (In a fairly long chat by game show standards, Dawson doesn’t mention having met Gabelich on Secret.)  Instead, a British driver took the record from him in 1983. Gabelich died in 1984 in a motorcycle crash.   
   
Colonel William J “Pete” Knight of Fairborn, Ohio set his record in October 1967.  Astonishingly, that record stands today. After serving as a test pilot for the US Air Force and NASA, Knight would complete more than 250 combat missions in Vietnam.  He would enter politics after his military service, serving as the mayor of Palmdale, California and eventually in the California State Senate.  

Special guest Rod Serling challenges Steve to a game of electronic table tennis

The Magnavox Odyssey game system is just starting to hit stores.  With the controllers obscured behind the desk and the television screen facing away from the panelists, they aren’t even blindfolded and still have no idea what’s going on.  Odyssey is considered the first commercial home video game console, and its success paved the way for what is now a $50 billion a year industry.  Atari’s more famous Pong would follow shortly after, first as a console game in bars and pinball arcades and later as part of Atari’s own home systems.  Magnavox sued Atari and others for infringing on their original idea. The lawsuit, and a market flooded with Pong clones, almost killed the industry in its early years.  In time, different and more elaborate games (by those early standards) such as Space Invaders (1978) and Pac-Man (1980) revived interest.  Serling, famous for The Twilight Zone (1959-1964) is here the host of the vaguely similar anthology series Night Gallery (1970-1973), a show he had much less creative control over.