Before there was “It’s Academic,” there was “The Inquiring Editor.” I’d love to see that show come back.

       As the name implies, “The Inquiring Editor” featured a curious journalist: Alfred Friendly, the assistant managing editor of The Washington Post, who hosted the high school quiz show from 1953 to 1955.

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       “Underlying the program,” The Post explained in a story at the time, “is the feeling？.？.？. that increased awareness of today’s events and issues will equip students to deal more successfully with their own problems and, in a few short years, with the national and community affairs in which they must play their roles as citizens.”

       At first, the competition was within a Washington-area high school. A school selected six students. For two weeks before the show, those students received their own copies of The Post.

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       On game day, Friendly and his crew descended on the school, and two three-person teams would face off. All the questions were drawn from those issues of the paper. The shows were originally prerecorded and broadcast on WTOP radio. In the fall of 1954, “The Inquiring Editor” moved to WTOP television and was broadcast live.

       Like a newspaper, the questions represented a smorgasbord of current events, from politics to pop culture, from the serious to the silly.

       Friendly had fun with it. For one show, he held up a mushroom and asked its significance. Harriett Turner of Fairmont Heights High pointed out, correctly, that a series of atomic bomb tests had been conducted in the Nevada desert.

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       For another show, each Coolidge High team was handed a pie and asked to cut it, one team into slices representing the major expenditures in Dwight D. Eisenhower’s $62.4 billion budget, the other into the budget’s major revenue sources.

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       At Wilson High, students had to identify a news story connected to a snippet of piano music. Ed Games knew it was the music of Liberace, “who last week announced that he would be married within a year.”

       The show’s popularity — at its height it drew 100,000 viewers a week — was probably due to its host. Al Friendly had joined The Post as a reporter in 1939. During World War II he served in England in the Army Air Forces, helping to make sense of decrypted German military codes. After the war, he worked on the Marshall Project, then returned to The Post, becoming assistant managing editor in 1952.

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       Of course, “The Inquiring Editor” was rather self-serving. The Post owned WTOP — today’s WUSA — and enthusiastically promoted the show in the paper and on the air. But it had an impact on at least one contestant, the person who told me about the show: John Herbert Niles.

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       In November 1954, Niles was a student at Spingarn, a school for Black students on Benning Road NE. He did well in an intra-school “Inquiring Editor” battle and was chosen to return in January 1955 for a boys-against-girls all-star show that drew from schools around the area.

       At the time, the District’s public schools were in the difficult throes of integration. The boys’ team had two Black members: Niles and Richard Robinson from Gonzaga. When viewers tuned in, it was probably the first time they had seen Black and White students on the same side.

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       “It was the first time that I had been in a peer situation with other White students,” Niles told me. “It was something really amazing to me.”

       Niles remembers the show well. For one question, he was asked to identify a photo of a woman. It was Perle Mesta, the Washington socialite.

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       “I will tell you categorically I did not read the social section of The Post in preparation for that program,” he said.

       He was stumped. The girls beat the boys, a loss that still stings.

       Niles recovered. He graduated from Spingarn, went to Allegheny College, where he was the only African American student in his class, then to medical school at Howard University. Now 83 and living in Glen Echo, he has had a long career in obstetrics and gynecology.

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       “The Inquiring Editor” ended in 1955, the year Friendly was promoted to managing editor. He was The Post’s chief until 1965, when Katharine Graham replaced him with Benjamin C. Bradlee. Friendly shifted gears, returning to reporting and earning a Pulitzer Prize in 1968 for his role covering the Six-Day War in the Middle East.

       Friendly retired from The Post on his 60th birthday in 1971. After his death in 1983, The Post honored him in an editorial: “Mr. Friendly broke a lot of newspaper rules in his years here, none more repeatedly and enthusiastically than the old stricture about keeping poetry out of the paper.-？.？.？. He knew the difference between good writing and the other kind, and he liked to remind his staff that he knew it.”

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       None of the obituaries I read mentioned “The Inquiring Editor,” which, in its way, may have been Friendly’s biggest contribution to the city.

       Said Niles: “I’ve had many highlights in my life — including my seven children — but it was a big highlight in terms of my ability, of being able to compete.”

       For Niles, being on the program proved that “I didn’t have an inferior education or lack the capacity for academics.”

       And he’ll never forget Perle Mesta.

       Twitter: @johnkelly

       For previous columns, visit washingtonpost.com/john-kelly.