Margaret Shelton learned early that being good at trivia could get her far in life.
“I liked to talk a lot,” Shelton, 43, of the East End, told the Post-Gazette Monday morning. “I realized at a young age that if you were saying something grown-ups found interesting, they’d let you talk as much as you wanted.”
The Drew, Miss., native recently put both her gift of gab and trivia acumen to good use as a contestant on “Jeopardy!” As of Friday, Shelton was on a four-game winning streak and had earned a total of $79,700.
Her run ended Monday evening after she bet all $12,300 she had built up on a Final Jeopardy answer that turned out to be incorrect. That left her in second place behind newcomer Maureen O’Neil.
“I was lucky I got some questions I knew and that things worked out as long as they did,” she said of her “Jeopardy!” experience. “I’m a fortunate girl.”
During her week of “Jeopardy!” dominance, Shelton captured social media’s attention with her style, Southern drawl and seemingly endless wealth of knowledge.
Though Shelton’s 15 minutes of fame have been quite the whirlwind, she was at least somewhat prepared for it due to being the niece of Archie Manning, the former NFL quarterback and father of retired NFL QBs Peyton and Eli Manning.
“When you grow up with ‘yes, he’s my brother’ as your mom, you see how fame is,” she said. “There are good things, and there’s a downside. ... I’ve seen them be gracious to people who come up when Archie’s got his mouth full. Whatever they say, it doesn’t really have anything to do with them or me, because it’s not real.”
Shelton spent an “idyllic childhood” in the Mississippi Delta that included studying history and anthropology at Ole Miss. Being child-free afforded Shelton and her husband the luxury of moving around a lot. They lived in places like Jackson, Miss., and Juneau, Alaska, before settling in Pittsburgh after her husband got a job at PPG and “because it’s a nice town,” Shelton said.
They’ve been here since 2017, and her husband now works remotely for ButcherBox, a meat delivery subscription service. Shelton currently doesn’t have a job, and she’s taken advantage of all that extra time to explore the city and continue amassing the sort of trivia that has served her well on “Jeopardy!”
She said she has been a bit reclusive during the COVID-19 pandemic because of some lingering health problems and is looking forward to finally checking out Pittsburgh staples like Kennywood and Picklesburgh when it’s safer for her to do so.
“I wouldn’t mind staying here forever,” Shelton said of Pittsburgh. “I just really like the city. There’s a good vibe here. It’s a friendly town. ... It’s like the South, but it’s not as hot and buggy.”
As a huge “Jeopardy!” fan, Shelton “was incandescent” when she found out she would be appearing on the show. She broke out the Southern expression “she had a runnin’ fit and bit herself” like a dog to describe how she was bouncing off the walls after receiving the good news.
She filmed her “Jeopardy!” run in January and said her only regret was never getting to meet late “Jeopardy!” host Alex Trebek. Shelton was, however, “equally jazzed” to be playing with Ken Jennings as the host and also enjoyed getting to know her fellow contestants.
“It’s hard to make friends when you’re in your 40s and don’t go to school and don’t have a job,” she said. “It’s so nice to make new friends.”
Though her husband tried to coach her on how to determine what the best wager will be in any given situation, Shelton said she didn’t go into “Jeopardy!” with a particular strategy in mind. She was more focused on taking advantage of her passion for history and literature than doing real-time math on dollar amounts.
Shelton joins a recent spate of folks with Western Pennsylvanian ties appearing on “Jeopardy!” over the last six months, which included a Greenfield doula in September and a Penn State University professor in December. Knowing that she isn’t great at keeping secrets, Shelton withdrew from enough people in her life that they began to worry something was seriously wrong.
Considering that Shelton thinks of this experience as “dang close to the pinnacle of my life,” it’s no wonder she made a point to keep this one close to the vest. She thanked everyone at “Jeopardy!” for the opportunity, and for how they quickly began referring to her as “champ” as she kept accruing wins.
“I got to live my dream,” she said. “That’s not nothing.”
Joshua Axelrod: jaxelrod@post-gazette.com and Twitter @jaxelburgh.
First Published: March 7, 2022, 5:20 p.m.
Updated: March 8, 2022, 1:16 p.m.
