Fresh chances to savor a near-eternal TV host

TV viewers will have several chances to see Bob Barker, the game-show host who died Saturday at 99. That includes:
— Thursday (Aug. 31): CBS airs “The Price is Right: A Tribute to Bob Barker,” at 8 p.m. Drew Carey – who took over “Price” when Barker retired –will host the hour, with clips that will include Barker’s first and last episodes (in 1972 and 2007) and a return visit on his 90th birthday.
— Saturday (Sept. 2): The Game Show Network will have an eight-hour marathon of “Match Game” episodes with Barker as a panelist, from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m.
— Monday (Sept. 4): The CBS special will rerun in the daytime slot of “Price”; for most stations, that’s 11 a.m. ET, but on the West Coast it’s 10 a.m.
That special will trace a life that seemed eternal. Barker attributed his longevity partly to food habits.
“I became a vegetarian out of concern for animals,” he told the Television Critics Association in 2007. “But I wasn’t a vegetarian long before I realized there’s something to that …. I don’t think I would have worked for the past five years, were it not for my vegetarian diet.”
At the time of the TCA session he was 83, preparing for the final “Price” episodes and admitting to a few ailments. (“I’ve had arthroscopic surgery on my knee. I have a torn tendon in my rotator cuff. I have a tlted disc in my back. But I feel great.”) As always, he seemed lean, fit and tan.
The outdoor life was key to Barker, who spent much of his childhood on the Rosebud reservation in South Dakota. (He was one-eight Sioux, on his father’s side, and was an enrolled member of the Sioux tribe.) His dad was an electrical lineman foreman and his mom taught at Rosebud.
“As a kid, it was wonderful,” Barker said, recalling a years of baseball, basketball, football and track. “We got a great education there. It was a great place to grow up, until the dust storms started.”
The dust hammered South Dakota in the mid-30s,, when he was entering his teens. The family moved and he went to high school in Missouri, then received a basketball scholarship to Drury College. He left school to train as a fighter pilot, but the war ended before he reached the front.
After the war (and married to his high school sweetheart), Barker graduated from Drury while working at a radio station in Springfield, Mo.
“I heard about the manager of a radio station who was crazy about airplanes,” he recalled. “I had never even been in a radio station, but I thought that might be fun …. So I put on my Naval officer’s uniform and my wings of gold and (we) talked about airplanes for about half an hour and I had a job in radio.”
He did sportscasts, wrote local news and then did an audience-participation show. Afterward, he said, his wife “said, ‘You did that better than you’ve ever done anything else.’ She didn’t say I was good.”
They moved west, where he worked for stations in Burbank and Los Angeles. That’s when producer Ralph Edwards was looking for a new host for the “Truth or Consequences” TV show.
He “hadn’t found just the man he wanted,” Barker said. “And as he was driving one day, he turned on his radio and he heard my show …. He called me and I went in for a series of auditions.”
Barker would host “Truth or Consequences” for 18 years and “The Price is Right” for 35, with three of them overlapping.
“Price” kept adding new games and giving Barker leeway to toy with contestants, letting funny moments stretch on. “I may (extend) the thing for three minutes, but I’ll make it up before the show is over, because we do ‘The Price is Right’ as if it were a live show.”
Nothing was predictable, except that he would end the show by telling viewers to have their pets spayed and neutered. That became the focus of his foundation, which he continued after retirement. Barker pushed for animal-rights causes … and remained a symbol of vegetarian health.