Priceless Memories

by Bob Barker; Digby Diehl

  • • •

  The Price Is Right set many records—for longevity, for ratings, and for prizes—and I am naturally proud of the show’s many accomplishments. Over the years, CBS did many nice things for me. One that made me particularly happy was that in celebration of our 5,000th show, CBS named Studio 33 the Bob Barker Studio. I did thirty-five years of Price in that same CBS studio. So many entertainment legends and people I admired worked and performed and produced shows in Studio 33. Danny Kaye did his show there. Jack Benny, Ed Sullivan, and Red Skelton had their shows there. Carol Burnett and Mary Tyler Moore produced their programs at that studio, and Elvis Presley sang on television for the first time there. But CBS still named it the Bob Barker Studio. That means a lot to me. And it’s also a tribute to the show. The Price Is Right really took on a life of its own. It became more than a television show. It became a piece of Americana.

  4

  Dorothy Jo: Wife and Partner

  About two years ago I received an honorary doctorate from my alma mater, Drury University in Springfield, Missouri, and I was asked to give the commencement address. Some of Dorothy Jo’s relatives and friends were in the audience. I explained to the graduates and their families that I would not be up there receiving an honorary doctorate if Dorothy Jo Gideon had not become Mrs. Bob Barker. She had graduated summa cum laude and had been the valedictorian of her class. She had also been immediately accepted into George Washington University medical school, which is one of the better medical schools in the Midwest. She threw it all away and married me.

  • • •

  From the age of fifteen, Dorothy Jo was a part of everything in my life. She certainly deserves a lot of credit for any success I may have had. It was seventy years ago, but I remember it vividly without even closing my eyes: We had our first date on November 17, 1939. Dorothy Jo was also fifteen years old, and we were together from then until she passed away at age fifty-seven in 1981. She was my wife, my partner, my greatest supporter, and she had more to do with my happiness in life than any other person. She was not just encouraging me from the background. She was right there in the trenches with me in the early years—writing, producing, working alongside me in radio, advertising, and broadcasting. She was by my side throughout my career. She used to say I was a lucky man. She was right. And the best luck of all was having her by my side for so many years.

  We met at Central High School in Springfield, Missouri. Jim Lowe, who has remained a loyal friend for all these years, is the one who introduced us. He and I were pals, and in those years he lived just a few blocks from Dorothy Jo. They had grown up together and were good friends. He was going to take someone to see an Ella Fitzgerald concert, and he suggested I ask Dorothy Jo to be my date. I had not met her, but I had seen her, and she was exceptionally pretty and popular. I didn’t think she would be interested in going out with me, but Jim said that she would. So I asked her to be my date for the Ella Fitzgerald concert, and she said yes. I was surprised and flattered and proud to be seen with her. We were together from that moment forward. And how about going to hear the great Ella Fitzgerald as a way to start a romance?

  Dorothy Jo used to say if Bob Barker has anything, it is tenacity, because I did all those shows, pageants, bake-offs, and parades for so many years. But she was tenacious, too. Also bright, loyal, and loving. My brother Kent surprised me once. He was talking with someone else, and he said he thought Dorothy Jo was the smartest woman he had ever known. I didn’t realize that he had figured that out. I knew that she was smarter than I was before the Ella Fitzgerald concert was over.

  • • •

  I remember another concert we attended back in those days at the Shrine Mosque in Springfield. The band was Tommy Dorsey and his swinging crew. There was a big dance floor and bleachers for sitting. Dorothy Jo and I were sitting up in the bleachers listening to the band when Dorsey announced: “I have a young singer singing with the band for the first time tonight. I hope you all enjoy Mr. Frank Sinatra.” And out comes Sinatra. He sang a song called “Indian Summer.”

  Now, I am tone-deaf. I don’t know good from bad, so I turned to Dorothy Jo, and I said, “How is he?”

  And she said, “He’s pretty good.” She was right, wasn’t she?

  Little did I know that in 1980 I would talk about this very evening with Frank Sinatra himself. I was one of the CBS anchors for the famous Pasadena Tournament of Roses Parade for twenty-one years and I always pretaped an interview with the grand marshal of the parade. The pretape was shown as the grand marshal rode by during the live telecast of the parade on New Year’s Day.

  Frank Sinatra was grand marshal of the Rose Parade in 1980. As usual, we did our pretaped interview, and afterward we sat and chatted for a few minutes. I told Frank that Dorothy Jo and I had the pleasure of being in the audience that evening at the Shrine Mosque in Springfield, Missouri.

  “Frank, was that really the first time you sang with the Tommy Dorsey band?” I asked.

  Frank said, “Could’ve been. Could’ve been.”

  Frankly, I have a hunch that Tommy Dorsey did the same introduction for Frank in every city on that series of one-nighters across Missouri. For years, folks my age in Joplin, St. Joseph, Kansas City, St. Louis, et cetera, et cetera—into Oklahoma and points west—have probably been telling their grandchildren and anyone else who would listen that they heard Frank Sinatra the very first time he sang with the Tommy Dorsey band. When quizzed, Frank chose to say, “Could’ve been. Could’ve been.” Very nice of Frank—not to disillusion us, I mean.

  • • •

  In high school, I played on the Central High School basketball team and Dorothy Jo was a cheerleader. In my junior year (1939–1940), our basketball team went to Lebanon, Missouri, to play in a regional tournament. It was the highlight of my basketball-playing days. Not only was I the high point man for our 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 in Ozark before we got back to Springfield. Friends of Oliver’s in Ozark tipped him off. He was happy, but he was not surprised. Dorothy Jo’s parents said they would have a nice wedding for us in Springfield, one with our friends and all the trimmings, if we wanted. Or, they said, they would just give us that money.

  “Which do you want?” they asked.

  And Dorothy Jo and I said in unison, “We want the money.”

  We got on the train and headed to St. Louis. I had a hotel reservation in that city, and when we arrived, we went through the yellow pages, found a minister, and went to his home to be married. A friend of mine, a pilot named Howard Hessick, lived just outside St. Louis. He had also gotten married. So he and his wife came and stood up with us at our wedding. It was January 12, 1945, and Dorothy Jo wore a red dress. I still have it. She looked great, and both of us were ecstatically happy.

  A coincidence of some magnitude regarding that minister occurred five years later. In 1950, Dorothy Jo and I moved out to Hollywood. We had an apartment on Las Palmas, just below Hollywood Boulevard, and we wanted to go to church one Sunday. We walked up to this Methodist church at the corner of Highland and Franklin, and there was the minister who had married us five years earlier. We were amazed. I’m not sure he remembered us; there were so many young couples who had quick and modest weddings during World War II.

  • • •

  After we were married, I was stationed in DeLand, Florida, and Dorothy Jo loved it there. We both loved the climate and the sunshine. It was just one of our many shared enjoyments. It was in Florida that Dorothy Jo and I began one of our rituals that would last the entire duration of our thirty-seven years of marriage. It was always difficult to find a place to live during World War II, and when we first went to DeLand, we lived at a hotel. We ate in the singularly unromantic hotel dining room or, worse, in a restaurant. Do not ask me how, but as I might have expected, Dorothy Jo quickly found a charming place for us to live—a three-room apartment in a house—and we moved immediately. I was at the base flying all day, and when I returned, Dorothy Jo had cooked her first meal for us as husband and wife and was all prepared to serve. She brought out a candle and turned out the lights before she called me to dinner. We ate our first home-cooked meal together as man and wife, and it was dinner by candlelight. I remember that dinner vividly—and her face in the candlelight.

  As wonderful and romantic as it turned out to be, there was a practical reason she had arranged the candlelight. In addition to cooking dinner, she had also baked an apple pie. The pie was delicious, but the oven was an old one, and for some reason it had made parts of the pie look very black and burned. It was not a burned pie, but it looked burned in a few places, and Dorothy Jo had used the candlelight so I would not see the color of the pie. And that’s how our candlelight ritual was born. From that day forward, whenever we were at home dining together, we would dine by candlelight. And that prevailed for thirty-seven years. Even if we just had a sandwich and a bottle of beer, we had it by candlelight.

  When I got out of the navy, Dorothy Jo and I went back to Springfield so that I could finish my last two years of college. She promptly got a job teaching biology at Central High School, and almost as promptly she had the reputation of being one of the most, if not the most, popular teacher in the school.

  Dorothy Jo was just twenty-one when she became a teacher. She was so young and pretty she looked more like a student than a teacher. Sometimes I would go by the high school to pick her up at the end of the day, and as she walked among the students out to the car, I would think how lucky I was to have her as my wife.

  After I got enrolled at Drury, I set about getting a job myself. At first I thought I might try to get a job as a flight instructor at the local airport—all naval aviators qualified as flight instructors upon discharge—but I had no real desire to instruct. I had loved flying, but instructing didn’t particularly appeal to me. On the other hand, it seemed wasteful not to use the education and experience I had received in the navy.

  Then I heard about the manager of a radio station there in Springfield who was described as “crazy about airplanes,” and it occurred to me that such a man just might be interested in having a former navy fighter pilot on his payroll. The station manager’s name was G. Pearson Ward, and the station was KTTS. Although I had never even been inside a radio station, I thought it might be fun and interesting to work in one.

  I promptly made an appointment with Mr. Ward, and I left nothing to chance. I put on my naval officer’s uniform, pinned my wings of gold over my heart, and headed for KTTS. For some reason I’ve always remembered that Mr. Ward was nicely dressed, wearing a gray glen plaid suit, white shirt, and what appeared to be a silk tie, dark blue. He invited me to sit down in a comfortable chair near his desk and said, “So you were a navy fighter pilot?” During my telephone conversation with Mr. Ward when I made my appointment he had established that I had just been discharged from the navy and that I had flown fighters.

  “Yes, sir,” I replied.

  “What did you fly?”

  I told him that most of my time was in the FM-2. It was the original F4F Wildcat with a larger tail and more powerful engine. However, as I explained to Mr. Ward, I had checked out in the F4U Corsair, been placed in a fighter pilot pool, and had the war not ended, I would have joined a seagoing squadron flying Corsairs.

  Mr. Ward listened so intently to everything I said about airplanes that I got the distinct feeling that if he had been younger, he would have loved to have been at the controls of a Corsair himself during World War II.

  After about thirty minutes of talking about dogfighting, dive-bombing, and carrier landings, I had my first job in radio. Mr. Ward did take me into a studio and have me read about one minute of sports copy, but that seemed almost secondary. I went home and told Dorothy Jo that I was going to work at radio station KTTS, and she asked a perfectly sensible question: “What do you know about radio?”

  I answered honestly: “Absolutely nothing.”

  • • •

  I started out writing local news for news editor Bill Bowers, a former vaudeville hoofer who had become a really dedicated newsman. Also, I did a five-minute sportscast. It was sponsored by Hires Root Beer, and I opened it by saying, “Hire’s to ya,” in a cheery, happy voice, as if I were saying hello
to a friend. The sportscast didn’t last long. But over a period of a year or so, I did news on the air; I became a staff announcer; I had a disc jockey show; I did anything and everything that I had a chance to do at the station.

  As I have admitted, I’m tone-deaf. I was probably the only tone-deaf disc jockey they ever had in Missouri. Oh, probably not! But I faked it. I always had a copy of Down Beat magazine at my fingertips and told my listeners who was on drums, who was on the clarinet, who did this riff and who did that riff (by the way, what’s a riff?).

  I did my first remote broadcast at KTTS. I had all my classes at Drury in the morning so that I could work the afternoon shift as an announcer. One day Mr. Ward called me and told me to stay at Drury after my last class because they were going to lay the cornerstone for the new field house and he wanted me to do a live broadcast of the ceremony. Mr. Ward said he was sending Homer Hubbel, one of our engineers, over with all of the equipment and I should meet Homer at the site of the future field house.

  I said, “Yes, sir!” I was delighted. It was to be a live remote broadcast, my first one. Look out, Ed Murrow, here I come!

  After my last class, I went down where the cornerstone ceremony was to be held, and there was Homer, all ready to get it on. As promised, Homer had all the equipment in his car. He gave me a hand microphone that had the call letters KTTS across the top and told me that we would go on the air live in about five minutes.

  However, the crowd gathering for the ceremony was much larger than anyone had expected, and with about three minutes to go before airtime, I said, “Homer, I can’t see a thing.”