When I heard that longtime game show host Chuck Woolery died this weekend at 83, I flashed back to the only time I spoke to him.
It was in 2000, and I was doing my midday show at KTRS/St. Louis, taking calls from listeners on a variety of subjects. Yes, there was a time when a general-interest talk radio show could be highly successful, with lots of input from the audience and absolutely no politics.
The lines were usually pretty full, and I had a monitor where I could see the name of each caller and what they wanted to talk about — info provided by Lauren, the woman who answered the phones for me. At some point, I looked up and saw the name on line three was Chuck Woolery.
I knew I hadn’t booked him or any other guest for that hour, so while another caller was speaking, I turned off my microphone and asked Lauren if this was a joke. She said it wasn’t.
I wasn’t particularly excited about talking to Woolery since I was never a fan of his. I thought most of the game shows he hosted were pretty stupid, including the first six years of “Wheel Of Fortune,” “Love Connection,” and the recently cancelled “Greed” (a ripoff of “Who Wants To Be A Millionaire” produced by Dick Clark, which lasted about nine months). I had no idea why Woolery was calling, but thought what the hell, maybe I could turn this into something.
I finished up with the caller on the air, then punched line three and said hello. I recognized his voice immediately as he announced, “Hi, Paul, it’s Chuck Woolery.” As I did with everyone, I greeted him and asked why he was calling. He said he was enjoying my show as he drove across Missouri. I thanked him and asked why he was in our state. He responded, “I’m headed to Springfield, and you probably know why.”
I had no idea why he was going to Springfield, nor was I sure whether he was talking about the one in Missouri or Illinois — and told him so. Woolery couldn’t believe that as soon as I heard the word “Springfield” I didn’t think of Bass Pro Shop, the giant fishing-and-hunting store headquartered there.
I apologized, explaining I wasn’t an outdoors kind of guy, more likely to spend my free time in a poker room than with a rod and reel in my hand. He laughed and started talking in detail about a boat he was thinking of buying, at which point I became completely bored. But I tried to salvage things by mentioning that the first time I’d ever seen him on TV was in the early seventies on “Tattletales,” a game show hosted by Bert Convy that featured married celebrity couples answering inane questions. The reason I remembered him was because, at the time, he was married to Jo Ann Pflug, who I had a high school crush on from the moment I’d seen her a few years earlier as Lt. Dish in the movie “M*A*S*H.”
He laughed again and said he’d been attracted to her in that movie, too, which is how they ended up getting married in 1972. Then he told an anecdote about appearing with her on “Tattletales.” I can’t recall how it went, and have no audio of the conversation to share with you, but he seemed like a nice-yet-smarmy guy — the exact personality you’d need to host TV game shows.
We chatted for five or six minutes before I had to go to commercials, so he said goodbye and I cued my engineer to roll the break. When the ads were over, I went back to the phones and the first caller was a woman who thought it was really cool that I was friends with Chuck Woolery and asked how long had I known him. I answered, “Until about ten minutes ago, I had never spoken to him before.”
And I never would again.
That’s a good thing, because about a dozen years later, with his TV hosting career behind him, he started doing a conservative radio show which morphed into an even more right-wing-wacko podcast. It was full of the same conspiracy theories and liberal-bashing that are still the backbone of Fox News, where he guested several times. In 2019, at age 78, Woolery claimed his very vocal support of Donald Trump was the reason no one in TV would hire him. In 2020, he tweeted that the COVID pandemic was a lie being spread by the CDC and the Democratic Party — right up until the time his son tested positive for coronavirus, which made him admit the truth.
I like to think that, somewhere, Jo Ann Pflug, who divorced him in 1980, was shaking her head in disbelief.
By the way, here’s a slightly out of focus photo (taken from Buzzr TV) of Woolery and Pflug on an episode of “Tattletales” which aired March 27, 1974. They are flanked by two other game show hosts and their spouses — Betty White and Allen Ludden on one side, Ann and Bill Cullen on the other….
