RICH: The I.Q.

Published 8:00 am Sunday, March 2, 2025

Tink was in his office, supposedly, working. We both have home offices because we are both writers and work from home. I am a serious writer who composes prose for books and this column.

You would be surprised how much harder it is to write this column of 650 words than it is to write an entire book. Tink, on the other hand, writes drama television that is a bunch of dialogue strung together with scene locations described. In fairness: He won an Emmy for his writing back in the days when it was really hard to win one. And, he is considered to be one of the best showrunners/producers in the business.

I would say his name is spoken with reverence in Hollywood but that’s a stretch yet this is true: it is spoken with respect.

I passed his office when he called to me. “Do you know what your I.Q. is?”

“Yes. 136.”

His eyes widened. “Seriously?”

“Yes.” It only crosses my mind if the subject comes up.

It turns out that instead of writing, he was reading about I.Q. tests.

“This test rates anything over 130 as ‘very superior.’”

Which, honestly, I find it hard to believe that a credible test would put “very” and “superior” together.

I also studied intensely, took two weeks of night classes, then scored in the top 20 percent of the participants for the LSAT.

“I believe,” said the teacher, “that you would have your choice of law schools.”

I was living a more exciting life on the stock car racing circuit so I never got to law school. Besides, I always believed my scores on both tests were flukes. (Although, I scored extremely high on the law exam’s analytical section and that could be true. In the mountains, we call it “common sense” and we learn it more than being born with it.)

Tink and most of his family went to Ivy League or other highbrow schools. My late father-in-law, Grant Tinker, went to Dartmouth and, eventually, became the chairman and CEO of NBC after co-founding MTM Productions with his wife, Mary Tyler Moore.

My daddy was a mechanic who died with grease-stained fingers. Regardless of how much he scrubbed with Lava soap nightly, and used his pocket knife to scrape under his nails, he took the stain of his occupation to his grave. He was common sense-smart so he owned his car repair shop and farmed cattle on the side.

“What’s your I.Q.?” I asked.

Panic struck and he said, “I don’t know and I don’t want to know. Ever. Especially since I found out yours — though, when you oversaw that law case for my family, I knew you were bright.”

It was a complicated suit that took two years to settle and Tink’s family voted to put me in charge. There are some votes that one shouldn’t care to win. That was one of them. I worked diligently with the attorney and, gratefully, it turned out well for the family. When we left the courthouse that day, our senior (high paid) attorney turned to me and said, “You should have been a lawyer. I don’t think I’ve ever seen anyone, who had no legal training, grasp the law like you.”

It’s all quite funny when you consider that my daddy’s daddy was a moonshiner. Not a very good one, I might add. The good ones ended up owning most of the land in four counties. He owned a shack.

My mama, though, was so smart that she went to school from four years old to age 18. That means she had 14 years of schooling in the mountains where other children got just six years — all because she begged her teacher to start teaching her early, then to keep on until the teacher ran out of knowledge.

Tink did some thinking on it. “You can’t be that smart. After all, you married me.”

That’s what you call a “smart aleck.”

—Ronda Rich is the best-selling author of Sapelo Island: A Stella Bankwell Mystery. Visit www.rondarich.com to sign up for her free weekly newsletter.