Wink Martinndale Dead: ‘Tic-Tac-Teig,’ ” Gambit ‘Game Show Host dies

Wink Martindale, the king of the television game show, the “Tic-Tac-Dough”, “Gambit”, “High Rollers” and a number of other programs, which to consolidate in living rooms throughout America, died in Rancho Mirage on Tuesday. He was 91.

Martinndale, a long -time voice of Los Angeles Radio, which had an unexpected hit record at the end of the 1950s, died of the family and his 49 -year -old Mrs. Sandra Martindale, Sandra Martindale, according to a press release.

During a long career on the radio and on television, Martindale was often asked how he came with his unusual first name.

As he would explain, one of his young friends in Jackson, Tennessee, had problems saying his given name Winston, and he sounded like Winkie. The nickname, shortened to wink after he had come on the radio, was stuck with one exception.

After Martindale held his first national TV game show in 1964, NBC’s head of the day programs of the day believed that the name Wink sounded too young. So for his almost one -year run, “What kind of song is that? “Win Martindale was moderated.

Not that he was particularly important that the “K” had fallen from Wink.

“Not really because I loved These reviews (from NBC), ”he said an interview for the television academy foundation from 2017.“ You can call me everything you want to call me: Winkie-Dinkie-Doo, The Winkmeister, The Winkman, as you call it. ”

In the brilliant, neat TV presenter with the shiny smile and the perfectly failed hair, two local television game shows had organized in LA before he became national with “What’s DH DH DH DH DH DH?

Over the decades, 21 game shows hosted or produced, including “words and music”, “trivial persecution”, “The Last Word” and “debts”.

“These are many shows,” he admitted in an interview with New York Daily News from 1996. “It either means that everyone is making their show or I can’t hold a job.”

Martindale was the best known for the orientation of “Tic-Tac-Deig”, the revival of a show from the late 1950s, which was broadcast on CBS for less than two months in 1978, but continued in syndication until 1986.

In contrast to Tic-Tac-TO, in which two players simply try to get three XS or three operating systems in a row in a nine box grid, the participants had to select a subject category in each of the nine boxes, from geography to song titles. Every correct answer brought the players their X or O in the chosen box.

“Tic-Tac-Dough” reached Lt. in 1980 during the 88-game 46 show run from Lt. Thom McKee, a pretty young navy fighter flotector, whose profit strips brought him $ 312,700 in cash and prices and a place in the Guinness Book of the World Records.

“Our reviews were never so big until it arrived and was never so big after his departure,” said Martindale in his interview with the television academy foundation.

As he saw it, the simplicity of “Tic Tac Dough” and other TV game shows contributes to the continuing popularity.

People at home, he said: And if you get it from a viewer or a person in the audience, you have hit them. “

Martindale left a show that he had created in 1985, a year before it went out of the air. Unfortunately, “Headline chaser” took less than a year.

As the Times said in 2010: “There were many bombs between the hits.”

He was born on December 4, 1933 in Jackson, Tennessee, in Winston Conrad Martindale and was one of five children. His father was a wood inspector and his mother a housewife.

As a martindale grew up, Martindale was a big fan of the popular radio programs of the day, and early dreamed of becoming a radio optierer.

For years he remembered in his interview with the television academy foundation that he would tear advertising out of the life magazine and behind a door closed bedroom he was commercial spots when he stated that he was on the radio.

The whole practice paid off. After Martindale repeatedly hid the manager of a small 250-watt bar radio station in Jackson in Jackson, he was offered an audition less than two months after graduating from high school in 1951.

At 17, the former drugstore soda pressure was hired for $ 25 a week to edit the layer at 4 p.m. to 11 a.m. on the radio station WPLI.

On-air jobs in two increasingly higher local radio stations followed before he received his “dream” job in 1953: the popular morning show “Clockwatchers” on WHBQ Radio in Memphis.

For Martinndale, working on WHBQ was a question of being in the right place at the right time.

One night in July 1954 he later showed some friends in the station when the popular DJ Dewey Phillips played a demonstration disc of a recently recorded song that was given to him by Sam Phillips (no relationship), the founder of Sun Records in Memphis.

The song was “that’s all right” and the singer was a truck driver of the young Memphis Electric Company named Elvis Presley.

“Dewey illuminated it on the turntable and the switching board,” said Martindale in an interview with the Times from 2010. “He played it over and over again.”

The song caused so much excitement that a call to Presley’s home was made to come in for an on-air interview. Elvis was not at home, so Gladys and Vernon Presley drove to a cinema in which her son saw a western and drove him to the radio station for his first interview.

“That was the beginning of Presley Mania,” said Martinndale. “I consider this to be the night when the course of popular music has changed forever.”

After WHBQ launched a television station in Memphis in 1953, Martinndale branched on television and for the first time organized a half -hour children’s show called “Wink Martindale and the Mars Patrol”. The live show showed a costumed martindale that interviewed half a dozen children in a cheap spaceship set and passed to five or six minutes old Flash Gordon Movie series.

Then Martinndale influences the success of Dick Clark’s still local teen dance show “Bandstand” in Philadelphia and started with the co-moderator of WHBQ TVs “Top 10 Dance Party”.

In June 1956 he scored a coup when he landed Elvis, until then a show business phenomenon for an appearance and an interview with Martindale in his live show for free.

Colonel Tom Parker, the manager of Presley, “would never speak to me afterwards because he wanted to be paid for everything. We had no budget. They hardly paid MeFor the sake of petes, ”Martindale told The Times in 2010.

Because of the local popularity of Martinndal with his “Top Ten Dance Party”, a small Memphis plate companyPresent OJ Records signed him for a recording contract.

His recording of “Think it is was moonlove” led to his signing with Dot records, for which he was recorded until the 1960s.

Martinndale, who had a pleasant but not memorable voice, also played as a moderator of a teen TV dance show in the low-budget film “Let’s Rock!”, In which he sang the mild rocky “All Love Breke loose”.

During his work on radio and on television in Memphis, Martinndale completed the University of Memphis, where he studied language and drama.

In 1959 he moved to Los Angeles to become the morning DJ in the radio station KHJ.

In the same year he achieved a surprise hit in “Deck of Cards”, which reached number 7 in Billboards Hot 100 chart and No. 11 in his Hot Country song charts. Martinndale, who received a gold record for the recording, performed the play on Ed Sullivan’s popular Sunday night variety show.

During his work in the KHJ radio in 1959, he began organizing KHJ TV “The Wink Martindale Dance Party” on KHJ TV on Saturdays. The popular show, which was broadcast from a studio, also started to radiate weekdays, live from the Pacific Ocean Park in Santa Monica.

Over the years, Martindale worked in addition to KHJ on the radio station Los Angeles, 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 introductions to the American TV game show Hall of Fame in Las Vegas.

“I always loved games, ”he said in his interview with the television academy foundation.“ When I got into the world of games, I only seemed to slide from one to another.

He is survived by his wife Sandra; Sister Geraldine; His daughters Lisa, Lyn and Laura; And several grandchildren and great -grandchildren.

McLellan is the former author of the staff author.