Wink Martindale, the king of the television game show who hosted “Tic-Tac-Dough,” “Gambit,” “High Rollers” and a slew of other programs that became staples in living rooms across America, died Tuesday in Rancho Mirage. He was 91.
Martindale, a longtime voice of Los Angeles radio who had an unexpected hit record in the late 1950s, died surrounded by family and his wife of 49 years, Sandra Martindale, according to a news release from his publicity firm.
Throughout a long career in radio and television, Martindale was frequently asked how he came by his unusual first name.
As he would explain, one of his young friends in Jackson, Tenn., had trouble saying his given name, Winston, and it came out sounding like Winkie. The nickname, shortened to Wink after he got into radio, stuck — with one exception.
After Martindale signed to host his first national TV game show in 1964, NBC’s head of daytime programming felt that the name Wink sounded too juvenile. So, for its nearly one-year run, “What’s This Song?” was hosted by Win Martindale.
Not that he particularly minded having the “k” dropped from Wink.
“Not really, because I loved those checks [from NBC],” he said a 2017 interview for the Television Academy Foundation. “They can call me anything they want to call me: Winkie-dinkie-doo, the Winkmeister, the Winkman, you name it.”
The genial, dapper TV host with the gleaming smile and perfectly coiffed hair had hosted two local TV game shows in L.A. before going national with “What’s This Song?”
Over the decades, according to his website, Martindale either hosted or produced 21 game shows, including “Words and Music,” “Trivial Pursuit,” “The Last Word” and “Debt.”
“That’s a lot of shows,” he acknowledged in a 1996 interview with New York’s Daily News. “It either means everybody wants me to do their show or I can’t hold a job.”
Martindale was best known for hosting “Tic-Tac-Dough,” the revival of a late 1950s show, which aired on CBS for less than two months in 1978 but continued in syndication until 1986.
Unlike tic-tac-toe, in which two players simply try to get three Xs or three Os in a row in a nine-box grid, “Tic-Tac-Dough” required contestants to select a subject category in each of the nine boxes, everything from geography to song titles. Each correct answer earned the players their X or O in the chosen box.
“Tic-Tac-Dough” achieved its highest ratings in 1980 during the 88-game, 46-show run of Lt. Thom McKee, a handsome young Navy fighter pilot whose winning streak earned him $312,700 in cash and prizes and a spot in the Guinness Book of World Records.
“Our ratings were never as big until he came on and were never as big after he left,” Martindale said in his Television Academy Foundation interview.
As he saw it, the simplicity of “Tic-Tac-Dough” and other TV game shows helps explain their continued popularity.
People at home, he said, “gravitate to games that they know. They can sit there, and they say to themselves, ‘Man, I could have gotten that; I can play that game.’ And when you get that from a home viewer or a person in the audience, you’ve got them captured.”
Martindale left “Tic-Tac-Dough” in 1985, a year before it went off the air, to host a show that he had created. Alas, “Headline Chasers” lasted less than a year.
As Martindale told The Times in 2010, “There have been a lot of bombs between the hits.”
Born Winston Conrad Martindale on Dec. 4, 1933, in Jackson, Tenn., he was one of five children. His father was a lumber inspector and his mother a housewife.
While growing up, Martindale was a big fan of the popular radio shows of the day and early on dreamed of becoming a radio announcer. For years, he recalled in his Television Academy Foundation interview, he’d tear out advertisements from Life magazine and, behind a closed bedroom door, he’d adlib commercials as he pretended to be on the radio.
All that practice paid off. After repeatedly hounding the manager of a small, 250-watt local radio station in Jackson for a job, Martindale was offered an audition less than two months after graduating high school in 1951.
At 17, the former drugstore soda jerk was hired at $25-a-week to work the 4-11 p.m. shift at radio station WPLI.
On-air jobs at two increasingly higher-wattage local radio stations followed before he landed his “dream” job in 1953: hosting the popular morning show “Clockwatchers” at WHBQ Radio in Memphis, Tenn.
For Martindale, working at WHBQ was a matter of being in the right place at the right time.
One night in July 1954, he later recalled, he was showing some friends around the station when popular DJ Dewey Phillips played a demonstration disc of a recently recorded song that had been given to him by Sam Phillips (no relation), the founder of Sun Records in Memphis.
The song was “That’s All Right” and the singer was a young Memphis electric company truck driver named Elvis Presley.
“Dewey put it on the turntable and the switchboard lit up,” Martindale said in a 2010 interview with The Times. “He kept playing it over and over.”
The song caused so much excitement that a call was made to Presley’s home to have him come in for an on-air interview. Elvis wasn’t home, so Gladys and Vernon Presley drove to a movie theater, where their son was watching a western, and drove him to the radio station for his first interview.
“That was the beginning of Presley mania,” said Martindale. “I think of that as the night when the course of popular music changed forever.”
After WHBQ launched a television station in Memphis in 1953, Martindale branched into TV, first hosting a daily half-hour children’s show called “Wink Martindale of the Mars Patrol.” The live show featured a costumed Martindale, who would interview half a dozen kids in a cheaply built spaceship set, and segue to five- or six-minutes of old Flash Gordon movie serials.
Then, influenced by the success of Dick Clark’s still-local teenage dance show “Bandstand” in Philadelphia, Martindale began co-hosting WHBQ-TV’s “Top 10 Dance Party.”
He scored a coup in June 1956 when he landed Elvis, by then a show-business phenomenon, for an appearance and interview with Martindale on his live show — for free.
Colonel Tom Parker, Presley’s manager, “would never speak to me after that because he wanted to be paid for everything. We had no budget. They hardly paid me, for Pete’s sake,” Martindale told The Times in 2010.
Because of Martindale’s local popularity with his “Top 10 Dance Party,” a small Memphis record company, OJ Records, signed him to a recording contract.
His recording of “Thought It was Moonlove” led to his signing with Dot Records, for which he recorded well into the 1960s.
Martindale, who had a pleasant but not memorable singing voice, also played himself as the host of a teen TV dance show in the low-budget 1958 movie “Let’s Rock!,” in which he sang the mildly rocking “All Love Broke Loose.”
While working on radio and TV in Memphis, Martindale graduated from what is now the University of Memphis, where he majored in speech and drama.
In 1959, he moved to L.A. to become the morning DJ on radio station KHJ.
That same year, he scored a surprise hit in “Deck of Cards,” which reached No. 7 on the Billboard Hot 100 and No. 11 on its Hot Country Songs chart. Martindale, who received a gold record for the recording, performed the piece on Ed Sullivan’s popular Sunday-night variety show.
While working at KHJ Radio in 1959, he began hosting “The Wink Martindale Dance Party” on KHJ-TV on Saturdays. The popular show, broadcast from a studio, also began airing weekdays, live from Pacific Ocean Park in Santa Monica.
Over the years, in addition to KHJ, Martindale worked at L.A. radio stations KRLA, KFWB, KMPC and KGIL.
In 2006, he received a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. A year later, he became one of the first inductees into the American TV Game Show Hall of Fame in Las Vegas.
“I always loved games,” he said in his Television Academy Foundation interview. “Once I got into the world of games, I just seemed to glide from one to the other. … I never looked down upon the idea that I was branded as a game-show host, because most people like games.”
Martindale is survived by his wife Sandra; sister Geraldine; his daughters Lisa, Lyn and Laura; and several grandchildren and great grandchildren.
McLellan is a former Times staff writer.
