Chuck Woolery, Host of ‘Wheel of Fortune’ and ‘Love Connection,’ Dies at 83
Chuck Woolery, the charismatic game show host who kicked off the long run of Wheel of Fortune before spending 11 years playing matchmaker on Love Connection, has died. He was 83.
Woolery died Saturday at his Texas home outside Austin, his friend and podcast co-host Mark Young told The Hollywood Reporter. Young also posted about it on X.
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Woolery started out in show business as a singer in the orchestral pop band The Avant-Garde, whose most famous song, “Naturally Stoned,” made it to No. 40 on the Billboard Hot 100 chart in 1968. The tune later served as the theme song for his (very) short-lived Game Show Network reality series in 2003.
After the Kentucky native performed “Delta Dawn” on The Merv Griffin Show, Griffin offered him a chance to audition as the host of a new game show he had just developed called Shopper’s Bazaar. Woolery beat out former 77 Sunset Strip star Edd “Kookie” Byrnes for the job, and the renamed Wheel of Fortune premiered on NBC on Jan. 6, 1975.
With the show pulling in a 44 share in 1981, Woolery requested a raise from $65,000 a year to about $500,000, what other top game show hosts were making at the time, he recalled in 2007. Griffin offered him $400,000 and NBC said it would pony up the rest, but that somehow infuriated Griffin, who threatened to take Wheel of Fortune to CBS, according to Woolery.
Not wanting to lose the game show, NBC withdrew the offer, and Griffin proceeded to fire Woolery and hire Pat Sajak. Also let go: original letter-turner Susan Stafford, who was replaced by Vanna White.
Woolery noted that Griffin “wanted to get the best of me” and said the two never spoke again before Griffin died of prostate cancer in 2007.
Woolery, however, rebounded quite nicely with the syndicated Love Connection, presiding over more than 2,000 episodes of that show from 1983-94. In 1986, he was making $1 million a year hosting that and NBC’s Scrabble, according to a 1986 article in People. (That year, the magazine pointed out, Love Connection was grossing $25 million a year and drawing 4.5 million viewers a day.)
Woolery also had his own CBS daytime morning show, which didn’t last long in competition with Live With Regis and Kathie Lee; co-hosted the Family Channel’s Home and Family; and was the face of other game shows including Lingo on the Game Show Network, Greed on Fox and a rebooted The Dating Game for syndication.
Charles Herbert Woolery was born on March 16, 1941, in Ashland, Kentucky. His father, Dan, owned a fountain-supplies company, and his mother, Katherine, was a homemaker.
He briefly attended the University of Kentucky before dropping out to serve a couple of years in the U.S. Navy, then studied economics at Morehead State University while working a sales job at Pillsbury. He left school again, this time to pursue a career in music in Nashville, and he and singer-guitarist Elkin “Bubba” Fowler founded The Avant-Garde in 1967 and signed with Columbia Records.
After The Avant-Garde floundered, Woolery stuck with it as a solo artist, and with an assist from comic Jonathan Winters, he appeared on The Tonight Show in 1972. He also landed a gig as Mr. Dingle, an elderly postman and shopkeeper, on the syndicated kids show New Zoo Revue and guest-starred on Love, American Style.
In 1974, he appeared with then-wife Jo Ann Pflug in the short film Sonic Boom and with Cheryl Ladd and Rosey Grier in the feature The Treasure of Jamaica Reef and was a featured vocalist on a new version of Your Hit Parade.
He earned a Daytime Emmy in 1978 for his work on Wheel of Fortune.
On Love Connection, a man or woman would watch audition tapes of three potential mates, then select one for a blind date. The show would pick up the tab for their night out — $75 when the show first went on the air.
The couple couldn’t talk to each other about their date until they were interviewed by Woolery on the show a couple of weeks later to see how it went. The studio audience was asked to vote on which of the three people in the audition phase they thought would be the best match, and sometimes there would be a second date. Other times, no way were these two ever going out again.
“This is really the one show I do that I’ll watch at home,” Woolery said in the People story. “I really like its unpredictability.”
For his Love Connection trademark, Woolery told viewers that the program would return after the commercials in “two and two” — two minutes and two seconds, the length of the break back then — and had a hand signal just for that.
In 1993, Entertainment Weekly asked Woolery is he “would you ever have gay couples” on the show.
“No,” he replied. “You think it would work if a guy sat down and I said, ‘Well, so where did you meet and so and so?’ then I get to the end of the date and say, ‘Did you kiss?’ Give me a break. Do you think America by and large is gonna identify with that? I don’t think that works at all.”
More recently, Woolery, an avid fisherman, co-hosted with Young the right-wing podcast Blunt Force Truth.
He was married four times — including to Pflug from 1972-80; to music exec Teri Nelson Carpenter, granddaughter of Ozzie and Harriet Nelson, from 1985-2004; and to Kristen Barnes, whom he wed in 2006 — and had or raised eight children/stepchildren.
In addition to his wife, survivors include his sons, Michael and Sean, and his daughter, Melissa.
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