Chuck Woolery, host of ‘Wheel of Fortune’ and ‘Love Connection’, dies at 83

On November 24, 2024By Littum

Chuck Woolery, the charismatic host who started the long run of Wheel of Fortune before spending 11 years playing matchmaker at Love connectionis dead. He was 83.

His friend and podcast co-host Mark Young told TMZ that Woolery died Saturday at his home in Texas, and he wrote about it on X. No other details were immediately available.

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Woolery got his start in show business as a singer in the orchestral pop band The Avant-Garde, whose most famous song, “Naturally Stoned,” reached number 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 show series in 2003.

After the Kentucky native performed “Delta Dawn” on The Merv Griffin ShowGriffin offered him a chance to audition to host a new game show he had just developed called Shopper’s Bazaar. Woolen struck out earlier 77 Sunset Strip star Edd “Cookie” Byrnes for the job, and the renamed Wheel of Fortune premiered on NBC on January 6, 1975.

With the show at a 44 share in 1981, Woolery requested a raise from $65,000 a year to about $500,000, what other top game 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 this infuriated Griffin, who threatened to leave 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 mailman 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 until Griffin died of prostate cancer in 2007.

However, Woolery rebounded quite nicely with the syndicated Love connectionwho presided over more than 2,000 episodes of that program from 1983-94. By 1986, he was earning $1 million a year hosting it and NBC’s Scrabbleaccording to a 1986 article in People. (That year the magazine pointed out, Love connection grossed $25 million a year and drew 4.5 million viewers a day.)

Woolery also had his own daytime CBS morning show, which did not last long in competition with Live with Regis and Kathie Lee; was a co-host on the Familiekanalen Home and Family; and was the face of other game shows including Lingo on Game Show Network, Greed on Fox and a reboot The Dating game for syndication.

Charles Herbert Woolery was born on March 16, 1941 in Ashland, Kentucky. His father, Dan, owned a fountain supply company and his mother, Katherine, was a homemaker.

He briefly attended the University of Kentucky before dropping out to serve a few years in the U.S. Navy, then studied economics at Morehead State University while working a sales job at Pillsbury. Leaving school again, this time to pursue a career in music in Nashville, he and singer-guitarist Elkin “Bubba” Fowler founded The Avant-Garde in 1967 and signed to Columbia Records.

After The Avant-Garde fell apart, Woolery stuck around as a solo artist and, with an assist from comic Jonathan Winters, appeared on The Tonight Show in 1972. He also landed a gig as Mr. Dingle, an elderly postman and shopkeeper, on the syndicated children’s show New Zoo Revue and appeared as a guest Love, American style.

In 1974, he appeared together with his 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 received a Daytime Emmy in 1978 for his work with Wheel of Fortune.

On Love connectionwould a man or woman watch audition tapes of three potential mates and then choose 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 pair couldn’t talk to each other about their date until they were interviewed by Woolery on the show a few 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, these two were never going out again.

“This is really the only show I do that I want to see at home,” Woolery said in the paper People history. “I really like the unpredictability of it.”

For his Love connection trademark, Woolery told viewers that the program would return after the commercials on “two and two”—two minutes and two seconds, the length of the break at the time—and had a hand signal just for that.

In 1993, Weekly entertainment asked The wool is that 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, where did you meet 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, will identify with that? I don’t think that works at all.”

Recently, Woolery, an avid fisherman, co-hosted the right-wing podcast with Young Blunt Force Truth.

He was married four times – including to Pflug from 1972-80; to music director Teri Nelson Carpenter, granddaughter of Ozzie and Harriet Nelson, from 1985-2004; and to Kim Barnes, whom he married in 2006 – and had or raised eight children/stepchildren.

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