Chuck Woolery

Charles Herbert "Chuck" Woolery (born March 16, 1941 in Ashland, Kentucky) was the first Wheel of Fortune host, doing the 1973 pilot Shopper's Bazaar and the series itself from 1975-81.

Early Career
In 1963, following a two-year stint in the Navy, Chuck worked as a a sales representative for Pillsbury and a wine consultant for Wasserstrom Wine & Import Company in Columbus, Ohio. In 1968, he and Elkin "Bubba" Fowler scored a psychedelic rock hit with "Naturally Stoned" as The Avant-Garde, and in 1972 Woolery began a five-year run on the children's series New Zoo Revue as Mr. Dingle.

Chuck's first game show appearance, not counting the unaired Shopper's Bazaar, was when he and then-wife Jo Ann Pflug played on Tattletales the week of March 25, 1974; following the change to all-Quickies, they played another week against Mitzi McCall & Charlie Brill and Jim & Henny Backus.

Wheel of Fortune
In 1973, following an appearance on The Tonight Show, Woolery was selected by Merv Griffin to host a game show pilot he was working on with NBC boss Lin Bolen, called Shopper's Bazaar. After it failed to click with test audiences, he was replaced for the second and third pilots by Edd Byrnes (who was also deemed to not be a good host); Chuck turned down the now-refined Wheel two or three times, believing that country music was his calling.

Even after taking the job, Woolery continued to release songs and do performances through at least the end of 1980, finding minor success along the way. He released two singles for Warner Bros. Records in 1977 ("Painted Lady" and "Take 'er Down, Boys"), followed by "The Greatest Love Affair" in 1980 for Epic. Both "Painted Lady" and "The Greatest Love Affair" made the lower regions of the Billboard country music charts (78 and 94, respectively). In 1975 or 1980, he appeared on the long-running Rex Humbard Program (aka Cathedral of Tomorrow) on July 13.

Hosting Style
Chuck had a comparatively mellower style of hosting with several unique mannerisms, such as a play-by-play of the Wheel as wedges flew by during each spin ("Past the five and the two, coming up on the Free Spin Territory-can you make it, can you make it? Oh, so close!"), repeating the category name within the round, regularly referring to contestants as "sir" or "ma'am", counting off instances of letters ("One, two, three T's!"), informing home viewers of the Used Letter Board, hugging contestants, and licking his finger just before doing the Final Spin.

Woolery also tended to draw attention to his mistakes and preferred to leave them in the final cut, a statement he told director Jeff Goldstein following an early episode.

As an NBC game show host, Chuck appeared at least three times on Celebrity Sweepstakes in 1975:
 * The first was on March 17 to cap off the network's Shamrock Sweepstakes, providing moral support for the biggest Wheel winner of the previous week.
 * He then appeared as a panelist for the week of September 1; the Friday show is held on audio tape by Archival Television Audio, Inc.
 * Chuck's last known appearance was on November 7, playing against Susan Stafford as contestants (the only non-soap opera personalities to do so) during NBC's Daytime Gigantic Game Gala for home viewers chosen at random from various phone books and placed in a drum, then drawn to determine who played for who. In addition to in-show winnings, the winners received an extra $75,000 for first place, $20,000 for second, and $5,000 for third.

Departure
In late 1981, Woolery got into a salary dispute with Merv, wanting a raise in his annual pay from $65,000 to $500,000, in line with what other emcees made and because Wheel was drawing a 44 share; Merv offered $400,000, and NBC agreed to pay the remaining $100,000 until Merv threatened to move the show to CBS. NBC withdrew the offer, and Chuck left the show on December 25, 1981; Pat Sajak took over as host on December 28.

After Wheel
"Excuse me, I'd like to use my Freebie now! It gets rid of one contestant!"

Chuck later hosted other games including Love Connection (1983-94), Scrabble (1984-90/1993), California's The Big Spin (1985), an unsold Pyramid pilot (1997), The Dating Game (1997-99), Greed (1999-2000), Lingo (2002-07), Think Like a Cat (2008), and The Price Is Right Live! (played at casinos nationwide).

Aside from game shows, Woolery also hosted a self-titled, short-lived talk show in 1991 as well as co-host of The Home and Family Show from 1996-97. He also starred in GSN's 2003 documentary-reality series Chuck Woolery: Naturally Stoned, whose debut show mainly involved him relearning "Naturally Stoned" for a concert performance; the series was well-received by fans, far moreso than the network's later (but similar) Carnie Wilson: Unstapled.

Wheel References
During his post-Wheel career, Woolery has made reference to his tenure at least five times:
 * The first known instance was on the April 1, 1989 episode of Scrabble, when Chuck recited the shopping-era Wheel rules followed by the puzzle chimes.
 * The second was on the March 23, 1990 finale of Scrabble, when Chuck suggested that perhaps he was the only thing cancelled regarding the show. "I kept telling 'em, 'Look, find somebody else to do it, it'll be a huge hit. Look what happened to Wheel!'"
 * The third, easily the most infamous and telling, was a team's opening question on Greed asking to pick, of these four games (Love Connection, Scrabble, Wheel, and Singled Out), the one Chuck did not regularly host. The player claimed to have followed Woolery's career, then chose Wheel; the captain accepted this, rather than the correct answer of Singled Out.
 * The fourth was during the fourth game of a "College Greed" episode, when a question asked which of these four games was based on "Hangman" (Jeopardy!, The Price Is Right, Hollywood Squares, and Wheel); the player chose Squares, which the captain rejected, saying "Give me Wheel of Fortune, Pat." This prompted Chuck to remind him that he was the show's first host, to which the captain replied "That was before my time."
 * According to one recollection, during a break in taping on Greed, Chuck abruptly went into the shopping-era Wheel rules while talking with the audience. After he finished, he remarked that he didn't remember the rules of Scrabble.
 * The most recent was on the May 17, 2006 episode of Lingo when the word was VOWEL. Chuck briefly name-dropped Wheel, mentioning that it was "My old show!" and that he still remembered some of the rules.

Inversely, Wheel has rarely acknowledged Chuck's contributions and has only ever shown one clip from his tenure: the first eight seconds from January 18, 1978 on the ceremonial 3,000th and 4,000th nighttime shows, the latter giving it a caption of "1983". Also, on a Halloween episode circa 1998, Pat joked during his entrance from a "dungeon" that "It was nice visiting with Chuck and Susan, wasn't it?"

So far, Chuck has only returned to Wheel once, and even then not on the show itself: in December 2003, he hosted Wheel O' Fortune for Chumash Casino, a scaled-down play-for-cash version complete with his entering to "Big Wheels". This amusingly brought him full-circle, as the Wheel was a vertical design much like the Shopper's Bazaar pilot 30 years earlier.

Personal Life
Woolery married Margaret Hayes from 1961–71, having three children (Cary, Katherine, and Chad; Chad died at the age of 19 in a motorcycle accident during January 1986). He and Jo Ann Pflug got married on December 21, 1972, having one daughter (Melissa); the two divorced in 1980, likely around the time Fred Silverman retracted the cancellation of Wheel.

Chuck married Teri Nelson in 1985, having two children (Michael and Sean) before getting divorced in 2004; the circumstances of their marriage falling apart appears to have been related to the Naturally Stoned documentary series. Woolery has been married to Kim Barnes since 2006.

Chuck is a co-founder and member of Restart Congress, a political action committee that is dedicated to pointing out hypocrisy in Washington and passing an amendment to the Constitution that would establish term limits for members of Congress.