Wink Martindale dead: ‘Tic-Tac-Dough,’ ‘Gambit’ game show host dies

Wink Martindale, the king of the tv recreation present who hosted “Tic-Tac-Dough,” “Gambit,” “High Rollers” and a slew of different applications that grew to become staples in dwelling rooms throughout America, died Tuesday in Rancho Mirage. He was 91.

Martindale, a longtime voice of Los Angeles radio who had an surprising hit document within the late Nineteen Fifties, died surrounded by household and his spouse of 49 years, Sandra Martindale, based on a information launch from his publicity agency.

All through an extended profession in radio and tv, Martindale was incessantly requested how he got here by his uncommon first identify.

As he would clarify, certainly one of his younger associates in Jackson, Tenn., had hassle saying his given identify, Winston, and it got here out sounding like Winkie. The nickname, shortened to Wink after he obtained into radio, caught — with one exception.

After Martindale signed to host his first nationwide TV recreation present in 1964, NBC’s head of daytime programming felt that the identify Wink sounded too juvenile. So, for its almost one-year run, “What’s This Song?” was hosted by Win Martindale.

Not that he notably minded having the “k” dropped from Wink.

“Not really, because I loved those checks [from NBC],” he stated in a 2017 interview for the Tv Academy Basis. “They can call me anything they want to call me: Winkie-dinkie-doo, the Winkmeister, the Winkman, you name it.”

The genial, dapper TV host with the gleaming smile and completely coiffed hair had hosted two native TV recreation reveals in L.A. earlier than going nationwide with “What’s This Song?”

Over the a long time, based on his web site, Martindale both hosted or produced 21 recreation reveals, together with “Words and Music,” “Trivial Pursuit,” “The Last Word” and “Debt.”

“That’s a lot of shows,” he acknowledged in a 1996 interview with the New York Every day Information. “It either means everybody wants me to do their show or I can’t hold a job.”

Martindale was greatest identified for internet hosting “Tic-Tac-Dough,” the revival of a late Nineteen Fifties present, which aired on CBS for lower than two months in 1978 however continued in syndication till 1986.

In contrast to tic-tac-toe, wherein two gamers merely attempt to get three Xs or three Os in a row in a nine-box grid, “Tic-Tac-Dough” required contestants to pick a topic class in every of the 9 bins, the whole lot from geography to tune titles. Every appropriate reply earned the gamers their X or O within the chosen field.

“Tic-Tac-Dough” achieved its highest scores in 1980 throughout the 88-game, 46-show run of Lt. Thom McKee, a good-looking younger Navy fighter pilot whose successful streak earned him $312,700 in money and prizes and a spot within the Guinness E book of World Information.

“Our ratings were never as big until he came on and were never as big after he left,” Martindale stated in his Tv Academy Basis interview.

As he noticed it, the simplicity of “Tic-Tac-Dough” and different TV recreation reveals helps clarify their continued recognition.

Folks at house, he stated, “gravitate to games that they know. They can sit there, and they say to themselves, ‘Man, I could have gotten that; I can play that game.’ And when you get that from a home viewer or a person in the audience, you’ve got them captured.”

Martindale left “Tic-Tac-Dough” in 1985, a yr earlier than it went off the air, to host a present that he had created. Alas, “Headline Chasers” lasted lower than a yr.

As Martindale informed The Instances in 2010, “There have been a lot of bombs between the hits.”

Born Winston Conrad Martindale on Dec. 4, 1933, in Jackson, Tenn., he was certainly one of 5 youngsters. His father was a lumber inspector and his mom a housewife.

Whereas rising up, Martindale was an enormous fan of the favored radio reveals of the day and early on dreamed of turning into a radio announcer. For years, he recalled in his Tv Academy Basis interview, he’d tear out commercials from Life journal and, behind a closed bed room door, he’d ad-lib commercials as he pretended to be on the radio.

All that follow paid off. After repeatedly hounding the supervisor of a small, 250-watt native radio station in Jackson for a job, Martindale was supplied an audition lower than two months after graduating highschool in 1951.

At 17, the previous drugstore soda jerk was employed at $25 per week to work the 4-11 p.m. shift at radio station WPLI.

On-air jobs at two more and more higher-wattage native radio stations adopted earlier than he landed his “dream” job in 1953: internet hosting the favored morning present “Clockwatchers” at WHBQ Radio in Memphis, Tenn.

For Martindale, working at WHBQ was a matter of being in the fitting place on the proper time.

One evening in July 1954, he later recalled, he was exhibiting some associates across the station when in style DJ Dewey Phillips performed an indication disc of a lately recorded tune that had been given to him by Sam Phillips (no relation), the founding father of Solar Information in Memphis.

The tune was “That’s All Right” and the singer was a younger Memphis electrical firm truck driver named Elvis Presley.

“Dewey put it on the turntable and the switchboard lit up,” Martindale stated in a 2010 interview with The Instances. “He kept playing it over and over.”

The tune brought about a lot pleasure {that a} name was made to Presley’s house to have him are available for an on-air interview. Elvis wasn’t house, so Gladys and Vernon Presley drove to a movie show, the place their son was watching a western, and drove him to the radio station for his first interview.

“That was the beginning of Presley mania,” stated Martindale. “I think of that as the night when the course of popular music changed forever.”

After WHBQ launched a tv station in Memphis in 1953, Martindale branched into TV, first internet hosting a every day half-hour youngsters’s present known as “Wink Martindale of the Mars Patrol.” The stay present featured a costumed Martindale, who would interview half a dozen children in a cheaply constructed spaceship set, and segue to five- or six-minutes of previous Flash Gordon film serials.

Then, influenced by the success of Dick Clark’s still-local teenage dance present “Bandstand” in Philadelphia, Martindale started co-hosting WHBQ-TV’s “Top 10 Dance Party.”

He scored a coup in June 1956 when he landed Elvis, by then a show-business phenomenon, for an look and interview with Martindale on his stay present — without cost.

Col. Tom Parker, Presley’s supervisor, “would never speak to me after that because he wanted to be paid for everything. We had no budget. They hardly paid me, for Pete’s sake,” Martindale informed The Instances in 2010.

Due to Martindale’s native recognition along with his “Top 10 Dance Party,” a small Memphis document firm, OJ Information, signed him to a recording contract.

His recording of “Thought It was Moonlove” led to his signing with Dot Information, for which he recorded nicely into the Nineteen Sixties.

Martindale, who had a nice however not memorable singing voice, additionally performed himself because the host of a teen TV dance present within the low-budget 1958 film “Let’s Rock!,” wherein he sang the mildly rocking “All Love Broke Loose.”

Whereas engaged on radio and TV in Memphis, Martindale graduated from what’s now the College of Memphis, the place he majored in speech and drama.

In 1959, he moved to L.A. to change into the morning DJ on radio station KHJ.

That very same yr, he scored a shock hit in “Deck of Cards,” which reached No. 7 on the Billboard Scorching 100 and No. 11 on its Scorching Nation Songs chart. Martindale, who obtained a gold document for the recording, carried out the piece on Ed Sullivan’s in style Sunday-night selection present.

Whereas working at KHJ Radio in 1959, he started internet hosting “The Wink Martindale Dance Party” on KHJ-TV on Saturdays. The favored present, broadcast from a studio, additionally started airing weekdays, stay from Pacific Ocean Park in Santa Monica.

Through the years, along with KHJ, Martindale labored at L.A. radio stations KRLA, KFWB, KMPC and KGIL.

In 2006, he obtained a star on the Hollywood Stroll of Fame. A yr later, he grew to become one of many first inductees into the American TV Sport Present Corridor of Fame in Las Vegas.

“I always loved games,” he stated in his Tv Academy Basis interview. “Once I got into the world of games, I just seemed to glide from one to the other. … I never looked down upon the idea that I was branded as a game-show host, because most people like games.”

Martindale is survived by his spouse, Sandra; sister Geraldine; his daughters Lisa, Lyn and Laura; and several other grandchildren and great-grandchildren.

McLellan is a former Instances workers author.