Besting the brightest students from an Ivy League university would make the highlight reel of just about anyone's life.

But for four women from Agnes Scott College, upending Princeton University's team in the final seconds of the nationally televised GE College Bowl in 1966 was just a hint of academic accomplishments to come.

Renee Hannans Henry/AJC (ENLARGE)

Team member Karen Gearreald (from left), coach Eleanor Hutchens and team member Malinda Snow gather to view a DVD of their victory. Not present was Betty Butler Ravenholt of Seattle. Katherine Bell is deceased.

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Three went on to earn Ph.D.s and teach at colleges. A fourth became a leading expert on family planning and health in developing countries.

The three surviving members were leading lives of quiet distinction last year, when a video of their four-decade-old victory surfaced on YouTube.

There on the grainy video sit Katherine Bell, Betty Butler, Karen Gearreald and Malinda Snow, their clothes and hair a testimony to '60s fashion and their quick answers an homage to the Decatur college they say prepared them for their dramatic comeback.

On Saturday, Snow and Gearreald joined the team's coach, now 88, and manager, now 63, to watch a DVD of that show in the campus lounge and reminisce about how far they had come.

"The College Bowl was just an expression of what we planned to do," said Snow, the team captain. "We always planned these goals for ourselves."

Snow, 63, earned master's and doctoral degrees from Duke University after graduation. She has spent 41 of the past 42 years as an English professor, most of it at Georgia State University.

Gearreald, also 63, was Agnes Scott's first blind student. She earned a Ph.D. from Harvard University, taught a few years at the Hadley School for the Blind, then got a law degree from Duke. She recently retired after 20 years as a Navy lawyer and is a Braille music adviser and instructor for the Library of Congress.

She called the College Bowl win "a cumulation of all I had done and a foretaste of what I might be able to do."

Betty Butler Ravenholt, 62, a consultant in reproductive and primary health, was unable to attend because she was preparing for a trip to Honduras and India for a report on better health-service delivery. Her work has taken her to Africa, Asia and Europe. Among her projects: developing health-delivery plans in Eastern Europe after the Berlin Wall fell and creating a plan for post-civil war Cambodia.

"While that was certainly a wonderful experience and contributed to what I am now, that win wasn't the high-water mark of my life," Butler Ravenholt said by phone from her Seattle home.

Bell died in the 1980s, after a career as a botanist that included research on a little-known arctic mountain plant, Kobresia bellardi. She taught botany and ecology at the University of Nevada.

"I thought they were outstanding people and always would be," recalled Eleanor Hutchens, the team's coach and an English professor at the time.

The victory put a national spotlight on their potential.

"College Bowl" was a popular quiz show in its eighth year at a time when the Northeast was seen as dominating intellectual life. Princeton was the returning champion, having beaten Mount Holyoke College, another women's college, the week before. Princeton itself wouldn't admit women undergrads for three more years.

"They were making great fun of them for having to go against the ignorant, unknown girls from the South," Hutchens recalled. "When someone asked what Agnes Scott was, one of the [Princeton] students said, 'I think it's a riding academy.' "

The teams kept pace early, answering questions about Degas, Hayden and historic military battles. Agnes Scott fell behind but edged closer.

Butler Ravenholt correctly identified Einstein as formulating the theory for converting mass to energy. It should have been a gimme for Princeton, since Einstein worked at a lab on the Princeton campus.

That gave Agnes Scott a chance for a bonus question. A correct answer would give the team a 5-point win.

Gearreald blurted out "Swords!" in answer to the question: "Bucephalus and Roan Barbery were steeds. What were Balmung and Durandal?"

The win took a moment to register with the team, but Agnes Scott alumnae in the crowd immediately began screaming. Host Robert Earle called it "one of the most exciting contests ever" on the show.

By modern standards, the prizes seem anticlimactic. Agnes Scott got a $1,500 scholarship; the teammates each got a GE product. Snow got an iron, Gearreald a toaster oven.

A better prize awaited back in Atlanta, where more than half of Agnes Scott's 900 students waited at the gate for the returning champions.

"We thought they were terrific. We thought we were terrific," said Mary Bullock, a 1966 Agnes Scott grad who recently stepped down as president. "It sounds strange, but there was a lot of intellectual confidence here. It's just accepted here that we, and all the students, would go on to do great things."