Priceless Memories - Bob Barker [0]
BOB BARKER
WITH DIGBY DIEHL
New York Boston Nashville
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Table of Contents
Photo Credits
Photo Insert
Copyright Page
For my wife, Dorothy Jo,
and my mother, both of whom
loved me and supported me
all the days of their lives
PREFACE
A Phone Call from Ralph Edwards
If you are fifty years old or younger, I have been on national television your entire life, and I would like to begin this book by telling you how I got there. Hollywood mythology is full of overnight success stories. The urban legend of the discovery of Lana Turner in Schwab’s Drugstore is the best-known example, but the entertainment business doesn’t really work that way. Before producers are ready to risk a lot of money on you, they demand proof of your ability, your experience, and your professionalism.
In other words, it takes many years of hard work to become an overnight success. On the other hand, I received one unforgettable phone call from Ralph Edwards that truly made possible everything else that happened to me in a long and fortunate life.
• • •
My overnight success began in 1956, nearly seven years after my wife, Dorothy Jo, and I had moved to Hollywood in pursuit of “audience participation host” opportunities for me. At the time, I was doing a weekly radio program on the local CBS station for Southern California Edison. It was called The Bob Barker Show. I named it myself. Dorothy Jo produced the show. Southern California Edison was (and is) the electric power company for almost all of the Los Angeles metropolitan area. At the time, Edison maintained what they called Electric Living Centers all over their service area. Essentially, the centers were appliance store showrooms with theater seating—and a microphone.
On the stage were all sorts of ranges, refrigerators, freezers, washers, dryers—anything and everything that used electricity. These were the gleaming modern furnishings of the dream kitchen of the mid-1950s, and the Edison centers offered regular demos in the hope that people would go out and buy new electric appliances for their homes. Edison didn’t necessarily care whether you bought Westinghouse or Hotpoint or Maytag, as long as it plugged in. My show featured homemakers who attended these demonstrations and wanted to be on the radio. Dorothy Jo and I would visit two different cities a day, doing a show in each city. We logged a lot of miles traveling out to the rapidly growing suburbs of Los Angeles, including Pomona, San Bernardino, Oxnard, and Ventura—sometimes as far away as Lancaster—to visit these Edison Electric Living Centers and broadcast on KNX radio.
One day shortly after Thanksgiving in 1956, Ralph Edwards was driving his daughters—who were little girls in those days—to an ice-skating lesson. To say that it was my good fortune that he turned on his car radio, and tuned in to The Bob Barker Show, is an understatement.
Ralph Edwards was already a broadcasting legend. Beginning as a radio announcer, he went on to become the producer of This Is Your Life and a long list of other shows, including, of course, Truth or Consequences. Truth or Consequences was Ralph’s own creation and was based on a game he played on the family farm as a kid.
I had been a big fan of Ralph Edwards. I used to listen to him when he hosted Truth or Consequences on the radio, which he began doing in 1940. He painted such a vivid picture of what was happening that you didn’t have to see it, describing things with such flair and detail that you enjoyed every moment of it.
In 1950, they brought Truth or Consequences to television, and Ralph hosted that version as well until 1954, when Jack “Queen for a Day” Bailey took over. When we came to California, Dorothy Jo and I used to go to watch Truth or Consequences live. Ralph built and maintained a tremendous level of excitement. He was almost frenetic in the way he bounded around the stage on Truth—not at all as he appeared on This Is Your Life.
Occasionally, after playing a joke on a contestant, Ralph would look into the camera and say