Yes, Virginia, there is a Santa Claus but no Charlotte, Va.

Answer: Charlotte, Virginia.

Question: What is not the town and state where Jim Carpenter of Charlotte, Vermont, lives?

Another correct question for this imaginary Jeopardy! response might be: What mistake did the seemingly flawless and unflappable Ken Jennings make when Carpenter appeared on the quiz show at the end of May?

Of course, the thing that Carpenter had worried about before going on the quiz show was making sure that Jennings would pronounce the name of our fair town correctly. Carpenter had carefully filled out the way we say “Charlotte” on a form where he supplied information and an anecdote for the interview segment that comes during the Jeopardy round.

And on Friday, May 23, everything went smoothly. So smoothly in fact that Carpenter won his first appearance on the show with a convincing come-from-behind win, sealed when he was the only contestant to answer correctly on the Final Jeopardy question with “What is the Julian calendar?” to the prompt: “Eponymously named and in use for more than 1,600 years, it was based in part on concepts from the Greek mathematician Sosigenes.”

Carpenter described the contest just as viewers saw it on TV as “a really, really competitive game.”

“I got off to kind of a slow start, but then, there were a couple of particular categories that I sort of got going with,” Carpenter said.

One of those categories was a music category, which had to be a pleasant surprise for the retired music professor.

“That one turned out to be right up my alley. In contrast to the category right next to it, which was a pop culture one, about which I had absolutely no clue,” he said. “I think what really helped was just getting a little more of the feel for the buzzer, which is one of the hardest things about the show, because you can know all the answers you want, but if you aren’t quick enough to get in ahead of somebody, then you don’t get a chance at it.”

During the Double Jeopardy round, Carpenter really began to get into the rhythm of the game, and began to close the gap with the front runner, like a trivial pursuit Sovereignty pulling ahead of Journalism in the homestretch of a minutiae Triple Crown.

Things dramatically improved for him when three-time winner Brendan Liaw of British Columbia missed his first Daily Double.

“I think he started to get just a little bit rattled at that point, so it sort of left an opening,” Carpenter said.

Although the music category turned out to be a productive hunting ground for him, Carpenter said that with the categories you often don’t know just from the label what kind of questions … er … answers you will find there. That category was labeled “country, music.” With the comma in the category label, Carpenter wasn’t sure whether or not he was wandering into a minefield of questions about country music, which would have been about as difficult as a current pop culture category for him.

He said he felt strong in a variety of knowledge areas from lots of reading in lots of different subjects “over a lifetime of just being curious about stuff.”

Carpenter said with little time to prepare before the taping, he didn’t cram or practice with a buzzer like many contestants do. He decided to rely on his extensive reading, lots of lived experience and “a fair amount of basically little bits and pieces of bizarre and mostly useless information hanging around in my brain.”

His strategy was to relax, rely on what he knew and stay away from categories he was uncomfortable with.

The show was taped in March, so it meant two months of struggling to keep his appearance secret. The show’s producers are insistent that contestants not reveal any spoiler alerts about whether they have won or not.

“I think it might have been a little tougher for my wife, actually, who was wanting to brag on me,” Carpenter said.

He was told in February that he was going to be competing on the show in March, and they were not supposed to mention that he was going to be on the show to anyone that wasn’t immediate family. About 10 days before his game’s air date, they got an email saying it was now OK to let people know that he would be on TV competing, but they weren’t supposed to say anything about how he did or about any of the categories.

His Friday win netted Carpenter $25,601 and advanced him to the next game on the following Monday.

If you watched the show on the following Monday, Jennings remained unflappable because the flappable part was edited out. Carpenter corrected him, the technicians stopped taping and the conversation started over. You didn’t see that because the little errors are corrected.

By the way, if you are ever in a trivia contest where you are asked for a state that doesn’t have a Charlotte, Virginia would be one correct answer. The state marketed as being for lovers has a Charlotte County and a Charlottesville, but there’s no Charlotte, Virginia — no matter how you pronounce it.

On the Monday of his competition, Carpenter did very well and had $25,000 at the end, which most of the time is enough to win, but on this night, Judith Friedman had done even better and had an impressive $32,001.

Carpenter took home $3,000 for finishing second on Monday night, giving him a total of $28,601 for his two games. He doesn’t know what he will do with his winnings, but his wife Lucy Thayer will have a say in that decision.

Thayer and Carpenter have lived in Charlotte since 2019, having moved to a home on Hills Point Road they inherited from his parents after retiring from the University of Wisconsin-Stevens Point.

A week’s worth of shows are taped in a day, so after his “Monday” match was filmed he had the opportunity to sit in the audience and watch the taping of the rest of the week’s shows, but he’d been on the set since 7:15 a.m. and had spent the whole day there the day before.

“I decided, ‘No, I’ll change my clothes and just do some exploring and enjoy being out in the California sunlight before heading back to Vermont,’” he said.

There was a nice park with lots of walking trails in Culver City, Calif., where the show is produced. And it was a nice way to spend some time reflecting on his appearance on a show he has been watching since the Art Fleming days when Jeopardy! was on in the morning and you could only watch it when you were sick and staying home from school.