A group of Paly students rummaged through libraries this past weekend, Feb. 2-6, supplied with bags of coins, searching for random facts concerning an array of topics from television shows to world wars.

Paly placed third in this year’s Millard Fillmore Trivia Hunt, behind Castilleja, which came in first, and Carlmont, in second. The annual competition commemorates the birthday of United States President Millard Fillmore for his "trivial" presidency, according to team captain Paly senior Doreen Bloch, who is also a Paly Voice editor-in-chief. The trivia hunt involved seven schools in the Bay Area, testing how well they could come up with and document sundry facts.

The competition started on Friday afternoon when all the schools met at Carlmont High School for the reading of about 80 questions that were to be answered by the end of the weekend, and students took part in a "bonus round" trivia contest. The team who wins the "bonus round," which this year was Carlmont, got to bring home a cake.

On Friday night, students and parents met at their "home base" to search for answers. The rest of the weekend, students used books, magazines, articles and other forms of documentation to answer questions as random as the name of the middle school that the "Brady Bunch" kids attended.

Many students found the documentation aspect of the search to be one of their favorite parts.

"You feel really satisfied when you find the documents that back up your answers," said junior Katie Chow, who has taken part in this competition for the past two years.

Junior Lily Feng, who has also been on the team for two years, said, "It’s an excuse to be geeky and hang out in the library."

Parts of the competition turned into a "covert operation," according to teacher advisor Arne Lim, who has been advising the team for more than 21 years and competed in the competition when he was in high school. According to Lim, teams in the past have destroyed library property and mis-shelved books to get ahead. In fact, in the past, Stanford libraries have openly forbid all competitors to access their books during this weekend.

Feng said she estimated she spent about 10 to 12 hours working in the competition, though time commitment varied between students.

"If you participate in Millard Fillmore, you need to have a lot of competitive drive," said sophomore Alexei Koseff, who has been on the team for two years. "You need to be the kind of person who is willing to spend all weekend finding answers and will look in any book in any library just to get the exact wording within a source that you need."

"It [brought] together a lot of people in an amazing weekend of collaboration," said junior Adrian Sanborn. "You get all sorts of people from different backgrounds, students and parents, contributing random facts they happen to know."

All the questions were divided into categories, including music, movies, sports, WWII, potpourri, and celebrity cipher, which is a quotation from a celebrity encoded in numbers that teams need to decode into letters.

"You need to be able to follow a lead until the end, and if it fails, you have to start over and try again," said freshman Vienna Tran.

Another part of the competition was something called "bring-in items," which have in the past included things like a midnight opening day ticket of the first Harry Potter film or identifying and taking a picture with a statue. The bring-in items are worth a lot of points so finding them is vital to a team’s win, according to Bloch.

Paly won last year, triumphing over skilled competitors Castilleja and Carlmont. According to Bloch, Castilleja was doing very well in the competition last year but was severely marked down for bringing in their answers late.

Though Paly hoped for another win, the Vikings knew it would be a challenge. According to Bloch, Paly has won twice in the last three years and no team in the past ten years has won twice in a row.

Paly was one of the smaller teams in the competition, according to Koseff. According to Bloch, this year, Carlmont had well over 300 participants, Castilleja had nearly 150 and Paly competed with about 30. Paly was also less experienced this year, as they lost many of last year’s seniors, including Daniel Sheehan, David Coughlin, Cy Bates, Raphael Solari, Timon Karnezos and Sean Gasiorek.

Another difference this year was the age of the team.

"Going into this weekend, we had only a few people on our team who had driver’s licenses, a necessity to get from library to library," Lim said.

However, Lim also noted that the new participants gave the team a lot of energy and drive that was important for the competition.

In addition to using spreadsheets as a new way to organize which questions were done and which were not, this year’s team found a lot of strength from the resources available to them.

"The basement at Palo Alto Main [Library] is an incredible resource, rich with magazines and newspapers that go back almost a century," Lim said.

Paly turned in answers and "bring-in items" Sunday night and was able to document all answers, and use two sources for most of the answers, according to Bloch.

The adjudication session took place on Monday, Feb. 6, after school, where at least three members on each team join to battle out their points with the six other schools. Each team had a lawyer, a reader and a librarian.

The lawyer’s job was to defend his or her team’s answers. The reader’s job was to rotate around the room and sit at other team’s tables and judge how many points they should get for each question. If there is a dispute between a lawyer and reader about how many points should be awarded for a question, the official judge or the Hunt director would make the decision. The librarian’s job was to be the middle-man between the team and his or her lawyer.

According to Bloch, Paly, Castilleja and Carlmont were tied for first place until the first bring-in item set Carlmont back. Paly remained ahead, switching off between first and second place with Castillja throughout most of the competition, however the last bring-in item set the Vikings back.

The final bring-in item was a signature from a Bay Area Sports Hall of Fame (BASHOF) inductee and Paly had a signature from Stanford’s Dick Gould with all the necessary documentation as well. Paly seemed to be one of the few teams who had accomplished this task, earning them 16 points. However, the reader from Carlmont’s team captain invalidated Paly’s signature by pointing out that Gould, although soon to be a BASHOF inductee, was not actually one until his "Enshrinement Ceremony" is held in April of 2006. Coincidentally, Paly did have a second signature from BASHOF inductee Al Attles, that they decided not to use because of better documentation on the Gould signature, which they would have submitted had they realized that Gould was not yet an inductee.

Although the Vikings didn’t win the Hunt this year, the Paly Millard Fillmore Trivia team still maintained great strength despite the loss of experience and numbers.