Wink Martindale, the king of the television show who welcomed “Tic-Tac-Dough”, “Gambit”, “High Rollers” and a multitude of other programs that have become basic products in the living room across America, died on Tuesday in Rancho Mirage. He was 91 years old.
Martindale, a long -standing voice of Los Angeles radio which had an unexpected successful record in the late 1950s, died surrounded by family and his 49 -year -old wife, Sandra Martindale, according to a press release from her advertising company.
Throughout a long career on radio and television, Martindale often asked how he had come by his unusual first name.
As he would explain, one of his young friends in Jackson, Tenn., Has struggled to say his first name, Winston, and he came out by sounding like Winkie. The nickname has shortened in the blink of an eye after entering the radio, stuck – with one exception.
After Martindale signed to organize its first national television game program in 1964, the NBC programming of the day programming estimated that the name Wink looked too juvenile. So, for his race for almost a year, “”What is this song? was organized by Win Martindale.
Not that he particularly took into account the fact that the “K” fell from Wink.
“Not really, because I adored These checks (from NBC), “he said in a 2017 interview for television from the Academy's foundation.” They can call me everything they want to call me: Winkie-Dinkie-Doo, The Winkmeister, The Winkman, you call it. »»
The brilliant and elegant television host with a sparkling smile and perfectly haeded hair had welcomed two local television shows before becoming national with “What is this song?”
Over the decades, according to its website, Martindale has welcomed or produced 21 game shows, notably “Words and Music”, “Trivial Pursuit”, “The Last Word” and “Debt”.
“It's a lot of shows,” he said in an interview from 1996 with the New York Daily News. “It means everyone wants me to do their show, I can't hold a job.”
Martindale was best known for welcoming “TIC-TAC-DOUGH”, the revival of a show from the late 1950s, broadcast 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 obtain three x or three bones in a row in a nine-box grid, “TIC-TAC-DOUGH” forced candidates to select a category of subject in each of the nine boxes, everything, from geography to song titles. Each good answer has earned players their x or o in the chosen box.
“TIC-TAC-DOUGH” obtained its highest notes in 1980 during the 88-year-old series of Lieutenant Thom McKee, a beautiful young naval fighter pilot whose victory sequence earned him $ 312,700 in cash and in prices and a place in the book Guinness of World Records.
“Our notes have never been so tall before his arrival and have never been so tall after his departure,” said Martindale in his interview with the Academy television.
As he saw, the simplicity of “tick-tac-tool” and other television programs help explain their popularity continues.
People at home, “he said,” gravitate to games they know. ” They can sit there, and they say to themselves: “Dude, I could have obtained it; I can play this game. ” And when you get this from a home spectator or a person in the audience, you have captured them. “”
Martindale left “Tic-Tac-Dough” in 1985, a year before leaving the air, to organize a show he had created. Alas, the “big hunters” lasted less than a year.
As Martindale said to Times in 2010, “there have been a lot of bombs between successes.”
Born Winston Conrad Martindale on December 4, 1933 in Jackson, tenn., He was one of the five children. His father was an inspector of wood and his mother a housewife.
While growing up, Martindale was a big fan of popular radio shows of the day and dreamed of becoming an advertiser from the radio. For years, he recalls in his interview with the Foundation of the television academy, he had torn the advertisements of Life magazine and, behind a closed chamber, he had ad-lib ads, pretending to be on the radio.
This whole practice has borne fruit. After having repeatedly changed the director of a small local radio station of 250 Watts in Jackson for a job, Martindale was offered a hearing less than two months after obtaining his graduate of secondary studies in 1951.
At 17, the former Soda Jerk drug was hired at $ 25 per week to work a quarter from 4 p.m. to 11 p.m. at WPLI radio station.
Altitude jobs at two increasingly high local radio stations followed before winning his job as “dream” in 1953: hosting the popular morning show “Clockwatchers” on WHBQ radio in Memphis, Tenn.
For Martindale, working at the WHBQ was a question of being in the right place at the right time.
One night in July 1954, he remembers later, he showed friends around the station when the popular DJ Dewey Phillips played a demonstration disc of a recently recorded song which had been given to him by Sam Phillips (no relationship), the founder of Sun Records in Memphis.
The song was “That's Tream” and the singer was a young truck driver from the Memphis electric company named Elvis Presley.
“Dewey put it on the plate and the standard has turned on,” said Martindale in a 2010 interview with The Times. “He continued to play again and again.”
The song caused so much excitement that a call was made to Presley's home to bring it for an interview in the air. Elvis was not at home, so Gladys and Vernon Presley went to a movie theater, where their son looked at a western, and led him to the radio station for his first interview.
“It was the start of Presley Mania,” said Martindale. “I think that like the night when the course of popular music has changed forever.”
After WHBQ launched a television station in Memphis in 1953, Martindale extended to television, first organizing a daily program for children entitled “Wink Martindale of the Mars Patrol”. The live show featured a costumed martindal, which interviewed half a dozen children in a set of spacecraft built at low prices, and would affect five or six minutes of old series of Flash Gordon films.
Then, influenced by the success of the still local teenage dance show by Dick Clark, “Bandstand”, in Philadelphia, Martindale began to co-organize the “Top 10 Dance Party” by WhBQ-TV.
He marked a coup in June 1956 when he landed Elvis, then a show business phenomenon, for an appearance and an interview with Martindale on his live program – free of charge.
Colonel Tom Parker, the director of Presley, “would never speak to me after that because he wanted to be paid for everything. We had no budget. They barely paid MeFor Pete's love, ”said Martindale to Times in 2010.
Due to Martindale's local popularity with its “Top 10 Dance Party”, a small record company in Memphis, OJ Records, signed it with a registration contract.
His recording of “Thought It was Moonlove” led to his signature with Dot Records, for which he recorded well in the 1960s.
Martindale, who had a pleasant but not memorable singing voice, was also played as the host of a television dance program for adolescents in the film on a low budget of 1958 “Let's Rock!,” In which he sang the “All Love in the process of raging slightly.”
While working on radio and television in Memphis, Martindale is a graduate of what is now the University of Memphis, where he specializes in speech and theater.
In 1959, he moved to Los Angeles to become a morning DJ on Khj radio station.
The same year, he marked a surprise success in “Deck of Cards”, which reached No. 7 on the Billboard Hot 100 and n ° 11 on his table of hot country songs. Martindale, who received a gold record for recording, interpreted the play in the popular Varieties show of Sunday-Soir by Ed Sullivan.
While working at KHJ Radio in 1959, he began to welcome “The Wink Martindale Dance Party” on KHJ-TV on Saturday. The popular show, broadcast from a studio, also started broadcasting on weekdays, live from the Pacific Ocean Park in Santa Monica.
Over the years, in addition to KHJ, Martindale has worked at the KRLA, KFWB, KMPC and KGIL radio stations.
In 2006, he received a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. A year later, he became one of the first inducted in the American television show Hall of Fame in Las Vegas.
“I have always loved the matches,” he said in his interview with the television foundation. “Once I entered the world of games, I seemed to slide from the other.
Martindale is survived by his wife, Sandra; Sister Geraldine; her daughters Lisa, Lyn and Laura; And several grandchildren and great grandchildren.
McLellan is a former Times staff editor.
