Wink Martindale, the king of the tv sport present who hosted “Tic-Tac-Dough,” “Gambit,” “Excessive Rollers” and a slew of different applications that grew to become staples in residing rooms throughout America, died Tuesday in Rancho Mirage. He was 91.
Martindale, a longtime voice of Los Angeles radio who had an sudden hit report within the late Nineteen Fifties, died surrounded by household and his spouse of 49 years, Sandra Martindale, in response to a information launch from his publicity agency.
All through an extended profession in radio and tv, Martindale was often requested how he got here by his uncommon first title.
As he would clarify, one in every of his younger associates in Jackson, Tenn., had hassle saying his given title, 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 sport present in 1964, NBC’s head of daytime programming felt that the title Wink sounded too juvenile. So, for its practically one-year run, “What’s This Music?” was hosted by Win Martindale.
Not that he significantly minded having the “okay” dropped from Wink.
“Probably not, as a result of I cherished these checks [from NBC],” he stated in a 2017 interview for the Tv Academy Basis. “They’ll name me something they wish to name me: Winkie-dinkie-doo, the Winkmeister, the Winkman, you title it.”
The genial, dapper TV host with the gleaming smile and completely coiffed hair had hosted two native TV sport exhibits in L.A. earlier than going nationwide with “What’s This Music?”
Over the a long time, in response to his web site, Martindale both hosted or produced 21 sport exhibits, together with “Phrases and Music,” “Trivial Pursuit,” “The Final Phrase” and “Debt.”
“That’s a number of exhibits,” he acknowledged in a 1996 interview with the New York Day by day Information. “It both means everyone desires me to do their present or I can’t maintain a job.”
Martindale was finest recognized 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.
Not like tic-tac-toe, by which 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 packing containers, every part 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 rankings in 1980 through the 88-game, 46-show run of Lt. Thom McKee, a good-looking younger Navy fighter pilot whose profitable streak earned him $312,700 in money and prizes and a spot within the Guinness Guide of World Information.
“Our rankings had been by no means as huge till he got here on and had been by no means as huge after he left,” Martindale stated in his Tv Academy Basis interview.
As he noticed it, the simplicity of “Tic-Tac-Dough” and different TV sport exhibits helps clarify their continued recognition.
Folks at dwelling, he stated, “gravitate to video games that they know. They’ll sit there, and so they say to themselves, ‘Man, I may have gotten that; I can play that sport.’ And while you get that from a house viewer or an individual within the viewers, you’ve obtained them captured.”
Martindale left “Tic-Tac-Dough” in 1985, a 12 months earlier than it went off the air, to host a present that he had created. Alas, “Headline Chasers” lasted lower than a 12 months.
As Martindale instructed The Instances in 2010, “There have been a number of bombs between the hits.”
Born Winston Conrad Martindale on Dec. 4, 1933, in Jackson, Tenn., he was one in every 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 exhibits of the day and early on dreamed of changing 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 observe 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 every 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 precise place on the proper time.
One night time in July 1954, he later recalled, he was exhibiting some associates across the station when fashionable DJ Dewey Phillips performed an illustration disc of a not too long ago 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 Proper” 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 saved enjoying it time and again.”
The tune prompted a lot pleasure {that a} name was made to Presley’s dwelling to have him are available for an on-air interview. Elvis wasn’t dwelling, 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 start of Presley mania,” stated Martindale. “I consider that because the night time when the course of fashionable music modified without end.”
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 “Prime 10 Dance Occasion.”
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 spending a dime.
Col. Tom Parker, Presley’s supervisor, “would by no means converse to me after that as a result of he needed to be paid for every part. We had no funds. They hardly paid me, for Pete’s sake,” Martindale instructed The Instances in 2010.
Due to Martindale’s native recognition together with his “Prime 10 Dance Occasion,” a small Memphis report 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 effectively 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!,” by which he sang the mildly rocking “All Love Broke Unfastened.”
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 turn into the morning DJ on radio station KHJ.
That very same 12 months, he scored a shock hit in “Deck of Playing cards,” which reached No. 7 on the Billboard Scorching 100 and No. 11 on its Scorching Nation Songs chart. Martindale, who obtained a gold report for the recording, carried out the piece on Ed Sullivan’s fashionable Sunday-night selection present.
Whereas working at KHJ Radio in 1959, he started internet hosting “The Wink Martindale Dance Occasion” 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 12 months later, he grew to become one of many first inductees into the American TV Recreation Present Corridor of Fame in Las Vegas.
“I all the time cherished video games,” he stated in his Tv Academy Basis interview. “As soon as I obtained into the world of video games, I simply appeared to glide from one to the opposite. … I by no means appeared down upon the concept that I used to be branded as a game-show host, as a result of most individuals like video games.”
Martindale is survived by his spouse, Sandra; sister Geraldine; his daughters Lisa, Lyn and Laura; and a number of other grandchildren and great-grandchildren.
McLellan is a former Instances workers author.
