Wink Martindale Dies at 91

Wink Martindale, the legendary television game show host and radio personality whose charm, quick wit, and signature smile made him a household name for generations, passed away at the age of 91 after a year-long battle with lymphoma.

With his toothy grin, penchant for loud fashions, and flair for showmanship as emcee of various quiz and game shows for over half a century, Martindale cut the image of what would become known as the archetypical — perhaps stereotypical — American game show host. Genial in style, precise in delivery and generous with a glad hand, his ubiquitous television presence served as the inspiration for hundreds of impersonations by man and Muppet alike. Well into the 21st century, he remained one of America’s most recognized and beloved TV personalities thanks to his many performances as host of fondly-remembered programs like Debt, High Rollers, Gambit, and Tic Tac Dough.

Born on December 4, 1934, in Jackson, Tennessee, Winston Conrad Martindale — who earned the moniker “Wink” as the result of a friend’s attempt to say Winston through his speech impediment — began his broadcast career at 17 years old as a disc jockey at station WPLI in Jackson, Tennessee. He spent the next six years working disc jockey shifts at various Tennessee stations — including one, WHBQ in Memphis, that would premiere Elvis Presley’s first single while Martindale phoned Presley at home to request an interview — before graduating from Memphis State University in 1957.

Wink gained some of his first on-camera experience at WHBQ as the host of Dance Party, a music series featuring dancing teenagers and the most popular music of the day in a format not unlike that of the phenomenally popular contemporary series American Bandstand. It was in this role that he interviewed Elvis Presley on-camera in one of the legendary rock and roll singer’s first television appearances.

Wink transitioned from radio to television game shows in 1964 as host of the obscure musical game show What’s This Song. The show began life as “What’s The Name Of That Song?”, a locally-produced program for the legendary station KTLA in Los Angeles. Regional ratings success, however, prompted NBC to promote the series to the major leagues and air it on the network, albeit with a shortened title so that it would show up better in TV Guide.

The name of the show wasn’t all that had changed as What’s This Song hit national airwaves. Believing his childhood name sounded, indeed, too childish, NBC brass suggested Martindale shorten it. Therefore, viewers were treated to the hosting of Win Martindale for one year, until the show was cancelled in 1965.

Martindale, who after What’s This Song would go by Wink for the rest of his career, took various odd jobs in Hollywood as the sixties progressed. He played the part of a nightclub singer in the 1964 film The Lively Set alongside James Darren and future Rifleman star Doug McClure. He starred as a husband living in the House Of The Future in 1967 for Philco and the Ford Motor Company, as well as played a DeSoto spokesperson in a corporate film produced for the Volkswagen company in 1968.

The decade would also see Martindale attempt to return to the game show fold. 1968’s How’s Your Mother In Law, a short-lived ABC program from the mind of Dating Game creator Chuck Barris, saw three contestants, in a mock courtroom setting and with the help of guest celebrities, prove their case as to why their wife’s mother was the best of them all.

Other game show entries in that same decade never made it to television. 1965’s Let’s Get Away was a monumentally expensive pilot shot by NBC for a series that, if aired, would have seen Wink become the first game show host to perform that duty on a cruise ship. Additionally, Martindale hosted the 1969 pilot episode for another Chuck Barris creation, this one a Newlywed Game-style exercise called Three’s A Crowd, an entire decade before the series would air with Jim Peck in syndication to the horror of dozens of local affiliates and embarrassment of hundreds of secretaries.

The only two game shows to premiere in the year 1970 were Wink Martindale vehicles, neither one lasting more than two seasons. Words and Music was a game centered around completing song lyrics, given clues, for cash. Can You Top This was the television version of a popular radio show of the 40s and 50s created by vaudevillian “Senator” Ford. On that show, legendary comics such as Richard Dawson, Red Buttons, Nipsey Russell, and executive producer of the reboot Morey Amsterdam would tell jokes in an attempt to get more laughs from, or “top”, the studio audience’s reaction to material sent in by home viewers. Both of these shows would be cancelled by the beginning of 1971, around the same time Wink divorced from Madelyn Leech, his first wife with whom he had four children.

On September 4, 1972, CBS would reinvent the game show genre in one fell swoop with three dynamic, colorful daytime programs. Gambit would ultimately not remain quite as memorable as its fellow shows The Joker’s Wild and The Price is Right, when discussing the pantheon of classic TV games. However, the combination of trivia and blackjack, with married couples’ lucky cards dealt by model (and co-producer Merrill Heatter’s wife) Elaine Stewart, would make Wink Martindale a household name during its five year run, which concluded in 1976. Gambit would later be joined by hit shows like the celebrity gossip game Tattletales and the wildly successful panel show Match Game ’73 to comprise one of the most powerful and beloved programming blocks on 1970s daytime television.

In 1975, Wink married Sandra Ferra, a former voiceover client with whom he had initially become friends upon his move to Los Angeles. Their marriage would endure for half a century.

Later in the decade, Jack Barry-Dan Enright Productions sold CBS on a revival of one of the rigged quiz shows of the 1950s. Tic Tac Dough premiered on the network’s daytime lineup in 1978 and lasted a single season before getting cancelled. In later interviews, Martindale would recall that the quiz show, in which two players competed to place their symbols on the 3-by-3 game board by answering questions in categories contained within the board’s boxes, had simply failed to find its audience on the network.

In syndication from 1978 to 1986, however, Tic Tac Dough would serve as half of a one-two punch that included a daily non-network edition of The Joker’s Wild. In an era before the dynamo that was the Wheel Of Fortune/Jeopardy hour of power, Tic Tac and Joker formed the most popular game show twosome in syndication for a time, before Richard Dawson’s Family Feud came to dethrone it.

It was on Tic Tac Dough that Wink would serve as facilitator for the shattering of a record that would stand for decades to come. In 1980, Lieutenant Thom McKee made his first appearance on the show, defeating the incumbent champion and winning $4,100 in addition to a vacation-themed prize package. This precipitated an unprecedented 89-game winning streak that would see Mr. McKee earn, in total, over $300,000 in cash and prizes including several Buick automobiles. The public’s interest in Thom’s championship run could be seen as rivaling that of Ken Jennings, the 74-game Jeopardy champ who would later become the show’s permanent host. The experience on Tic Tac Dough solidified a bond between host and contestant, with Wink and Thom — and their wives — having remained close friends for the rest of Wink’s life.

In 1980, four years after its CBS demise, Wink would revisit the Gambit format with Las Vegas Gambit, a version with somewhat similar rules that taped at the former Tropicana Hotel in front of a live studio audience. Rumored to have been an element of this series was what an early press release for the show called the Living Deck, a group of 52 audience members each representing a different playing card. This information served as the source material for one of the final comedy bits of The David Letterman Show, a seminal but ill-advised daytime vehicle for the burgeoning talk show star that was cancelled to make way for Las Vegas Gambit, as well as the Bill Cullen game Blockbusters. Dave’s audience did not take the news of the cancellation well; footage of his 1980 series finale included a shot of an audience member holding a large KILL WINK sign in tongue-in-cheek protest.

After its 1986 season, Wink left Tic Tac Dough to pursue a career as a game show producer. However, no other project of his would ever match Tic Tac’s longevity or popularity.

Among Martindale’s post-Tic Tac Dough creations was Headline Chasers, a current events word game co-produced by himself and Wheel-Jeopardy magnate Merv Griffin. Following the end of Headline Chasers’ unsuccessful syndication run in 1986, Wink had better luck with another series, this one a joint venture between himself and Barry-Enright productions. The conceit of this new show stemmed from Martindale’s experiences driving down the 405 freeway in Los Angeles and seeing so many personalized license plates, vehicle tags often with phonetically creative combinations of letters and numbers custom-ordered by the car’s owner. Bumper Stumpers, the result of that creative inspiration, as well as its host Al DuBois, became one of the most loved and fondly remembered word games in Canadian TV history.

Wink would host two other syndicated game shows in the late 1980s — a revival of 70s dice quiz High Rollers and an original creation called The Last Word, both produced by his former Gambit boss Merrill Heatter — before returning to production with The Great Getaway Game, a word game hosted by Wink himself and taped in New York for the Travel Channel in one of the fledgling cable network’s earliest attempts at original programming.

In 1993, Martindale and his business partner Bill Hillier obtained the television rights to several game properties including Boggle, Jumble and Trivial Pursuit. These games served as the source material for a series of interactive games on the Family Channel, a cable outlet which in the early 90s was known for its game show-centric daytime schedule. In-studio contestants would compete for merchandise and vacations while at-home players called a 1-900 number from a touch-tone phone to play a similar game. The venture was modestly successful and had fizzled out by 1995, along with the rest of USA’s game show block.

1996 saw Martindale become the host of Debt, a quiz show for the Lifetime cable channel that saw three contestants solve clues to earn cash to pay off their real-life debts. The show quickly became Lifetime’s highest rated show, as well as earned a CableAce award, one of the most prestigious awards given out in the then-burgeoning cable television industry. After Debt’s cancellation in 1998, Wink did not host another game show until GSN’s Instant Recall, a hidden camera series that premiered on the channel and ran for 8 episodes in 2010.

Wink had made hundreds of appearances as himself in movies, sitcoms, and radio programs over the years, both in service to his career as a game show host and his longtime friendship with Elvis Presley. Most recently, he had provided voiceovers for game segments played on SiriusXM’s Howard Stern Show.

Game show fans in recent years have come to associate Wink Martindale with the YouTube channel that bears his name. For the past decade, rarely-seen game show footage had been uploaded to the channel as part of the ongoing Wink’s Vault series. Although the comments on the channel’s hundreds of videos thank Wink personally for giving of his personal video collection, the Wink Martindale YouTube channel was in reality maintained by his social media managers, themselves game show industry veterans.

In addition to his wife of 49 years Sandra, Martindale is survived by sister Geraldine, and daughters Lisa, Lyn and Laura.