A: ‘Jeopardy!’ winner. Q: Who is Julia Dominick?

By Jeanne Starmack

The Struthers woman beat out a teacher and a copy editor.

STRUTHERS — It’s an old saying: If you do what you love, the money will follow — and a Struthers woman turned her love of trivia into a $30,000-plus windfall.

Julia Dominick, 26, who lives on Wilson Street with her husband, Nick, and their year-old son, Christopher, made it happen on the TV game show “Jeopardy!”

Her appearances were taped in November, and the first one aired Friday with her winning $30,401.

She’ll be on again Monday as the returning champion. Will she win or lose? She’s contractually obligated not to tell us. So tune in to find out.

It was a long road for Dominick to Culver City, Calif., where the show is taped.

A native of Hubbard, she began watching “Jeopardy!” “at her mother’s knee.”

“For my entire life, I’d been watching the show.”

People often encouraged Dominick, who graduated from Hubbard High School in 2001 and attended Youngstown State University, to put her strong interest in trivia to good use by becoming a contestant.

“Someday,” she’d promise.

But it took a harder push from her husband, who encouraged her last year to take an online test the show offers in January.

She’d just given birth about a week earlier to Christopher, and she wasn’t sure she was up to it.

Her husband kept encouraging.

“So here I am, all sleep-deprived,” she said, and she didn’t get her hopes up that she’d done very well on the test.

“But in May, I got an e-mail from the producer,” she said.

She was invited to an audition in Cleveland, after which she was told, “‘You’re going into a contestant pool.’”

She tried to put the experience out of her mind then, telling herself that maybe she didn’t perform that well, maybe she was too young, better luck next time ...”

But at the end of October, she got the call: “Would you like to be on ‘Jeopardy!’?”

Unsure she would be able to leave Christopher, she actually told them she had to think about it.

Her parents, John and Nancy Kuty of Hubbard, agreed to baby sit.

In Culver City, Dominick, a stay-at-home mother, got a chance to watch other tapings while she waited for her turn.

She saw the returning champion she would eventually face, teacher Gail Flemmons of Clinton, Miss., in action then.

She also faced Laura Groch, a copy editor from Escondido, Calif.

“I was a bundle of nerves going in,” she said. “Gail was formidable, and I was nervous.”

Watching other tapings, however, gave her that chance to size up her competition and learn the process. She got off to a good start, winning a Daily Double at the end of the first round.

She wasn’t putting herself under pressure — she told herself she just wanted to have fun, but by the end of the first round, she was ahead $5,000.

By the second round, “it was a dogfight.”

“In the last round, Gail got one wrong and pushed me into first place, and you could see the shock on my face,” she said.

In the final category, “music legends,” she thought she knew that Johnny Cash was the answer to the clue. She second-guessed, but she went with her first instinct and won by $1.

How much more money did she win as the returning champion? “Jeopardy!” airs at 7:30 p.m. Monday on Channel 33.

Dominick had a great time on the show. Even her makeup artist was fun to meet, having had brush-ups with celebrities such as Bob Saget and Ed Asner.

She thinks about her experience a lot now. “Every day, when I watch the show.”