BOB BARKER 1923-2023 FAREWELL TO a TV.Legend

AMERICA'S FAVORITE GAME SHOW HOST WAS ALSO DEEPLY DEDICATED TO MAKING THE WORLD BETTER

- LOUISE A. BARILE

The Price Is Right’s long time host, Bob Barker, wasn’t above taking matters into his own hands. In1984, when a contestant’s key became jammed in a prize box’s lock, Bob gave it a swift kick, breaking it in two. “I learned that kick from Chuck Norris,” he said with a mischievous grin.

The unflappable and dapper TV icon, who passed away on Aug. 26, just a few months shy of his 100th birthday, once estimated that more than 40,000 contestants answered the call to “Come on down!” during his 35-year reign on The Price Is Right. Yet the 18-time Daytime Emmy winner’s proudest achievement had little to do with show business. “When he started signing off the show by urging people to spay or neuter their pets, he had no idea he was opening up the floodgates,” Bob’s companion of 40 years, Nancy Burnet, tells Closer. Since the 1990s, the number of shelter pets euthanized in America has dramatically decreased. “That made him very happy,” says Nancy.

A TELEVISION NATURAL

Bob spent much of his childhood in Mission, S.D., where his mother taught at a Native American reservation. (Bob was one-eighth Sioux from his father’s side.) “It was like I was growing up in the Old West,” said Bob, who received a college basketball scholarship, which he took advantage of after serving in the Navy during WW II.