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By Root 631 0

team during the tournament, but I was the second-highest scorer among all the teams in the tournament. It was very exciting for me. We won the tournament and I received a small gold basketball as a trophy. When I came home, I gave my gold basketball to Dorothy Jo, and she wore it proudly around her neck all through the rest of high school and college. After we were married, she had that gold basketball put on a charm bracelet along with other symbolic aspects of our lives together. She would wear that charm bracelet when we went on trips, on airplanes, and it was a topic of conversation wherever we went. As the bracelet grew, many mementos from our lives were joined to it, but it started with that basketball. The charm bracelet became huge finally. I have it upstairs in my home, and my gold basketball is still on it.

Incidentally, at the turn of the century, that Central High School team I played on my junior year was named the best Central High School team of the first half of the twentieth century. My senior year we didn’t fare as well, mainly because Bob Gentry graduated. Bob was our center and a ferocious rebounder. With Bob gone, we didn’t have a top-notch rebounder, and you can’t score without the ball.

In spite of the team’s decline during my senior year, Drury University offered me a basketball scholarship. I have to thank my high school coach, Jim Ewing, a former Drury star, for putting in a good word for me. In any event, I immediately grabbed the scholarship because Dorothy Jo was going to Drury, so that’s where I wanted to be.

I stayed in touch with coach Jim Ewing for as long as he lived. When I was hosting Truth or Consequences, we had a stunt that required contestants to shoot free throws. I said, “It’s easy. Let me show you how my high school coach, Jim Ewing, taught me to shoot free throws.”

Well, I shot and I shot and I shot again. I could not make a free throw. The audience thoroughly enjoyed my plight. I finally made a free throw and we moved on with the show. But the next day I got a telegram from coach Ewing that read, “The next time you shoot free throws on television, please don’t mention my name.”

Another time, when we were still in high school, we were down at Lake Taneycomo, which is now better known as a suburb of Branson. During my high school years, I worked summers as a bellhop at the hotel, and Dorothy Jo was visiting me. We were sitting on the veranda of the hotel at a table, and there was a deck of cards there that someone had left. Dorothy Jo picked up the deck, and as she was thumbing through them, she turned over the ten of spades. She threw it over to me and said, “Keep that, it will bring you luck.” I still carry that card with me. I have carried it my entire life, and it certainly has brought me luck. I never got in an airplane cockpit without it. I keep it in my billfold. I have had it in my pocket for every show I have ever done in my life. Dorothy Jo’s lucky ten of spades.

• • •

Dorothy Jo and I were together in high school and college, but I left college after two years to become a naval aviation cadet in World War II. As a cadet, you could not get married until you had earned your wings. Dorothy Jo went ahead and finished college at Drury while I was a cadet. It seemed as if everyone in my cadet battalion got married as soon as he got his wings. It was part of the graduation ceremony: get your wings, go home, get married, and report to your next base with your bride.

I came home on leave to Springfield after I got my wings (which took longer than I expected, but I’ll tell that story in a later chapter). Dorothy Jo and I had not planned a wedding, but we knew we wanted to get married. We went down to Ozark, Missouri, to get a license because we wanted to surprise everyone in our town. Her father, Oliver Gideon, was the Greene County assessor at that time, with offices in the courthouse where Dorothy Jo and I would have had to go for our marriage license if we had gotten it in Springfield. So off we went to Ozark. Later, we learned that Oliver knew we had purchased a license