Beloved Game Show Host Bob Barker Dies at 99

But initially, Barker balked, telling Bud Grant, then vice-president of daytime programming, that he wasn’t interested. “I almost fell off the chair,” Grant told EW. “He said he’d do Joker’s Wild or Gambit, but not Price. He thought the show could be better produced. I said, ‘Barker, you will do Price because those other two shows are good, solid game shows that require a traffic cop to run them. And you’re not a cop. You have far more talent!’”

Born Robert William Barker on Dec. 12, 1923, in Darrington, Washington, he spent his early childhood on the Rosebud Reservation in Mission, South Dakota, where his mother, Matilda (Tillie), was a teacher. His father, Byron John Barker, a foreman on electrical highlines, was one-quarter Sioux. “Cowboys tied up their horses at hitching rails,” he recalled to People magazine in 1999. “It was like I was growing up in the Old West.”

He lost his father when was 6, the elder Barker falling to his death from a tower, and Barker’s mother remarried. The family relocated to Missouri.

He was 15 and in high school when he met his future wife, Dorothy Jo Gideon, at an Ella Fitzgerald concert.  They married after he earned a degree in economics at Drury College (working also in radio), and he trained as a fighter pilot in the U.S. Navy Reserve during World War II. It was an uncommonly close marriage.

“She gave me the confidence to even try to do what I set out to do,” Barker said in an interview with the Television Academy Foundation in 2008. “She didn’t just urge me on; she worked right at my side.” The couple had no children.

After becoming an announcer and news editor at a Palm Beach, Florida station, Barker moved to California, where his sonorous baritone earned him his own show at Burbank’s KWIK. From there, he transitioned from radio into television.

Barker’s wife stopping wear fur coats and championed animal rights before such awareness rose in the American consciousness, and after her death at 57 from lung cancer in 1981, Barker did the same. He quit his 20-year streak of helming Miss Universe and Miss USA pageants because officials awarded the winner a fur coat. He also stopped the same practice with game contestants and began ending episodes of Price with, “This is Bob Barker reminding you to help control the pet population — have your pets spayed or neutered.”

In 1995, he founded the DJ&T Foundation, named after his wife and mother, to encourage animal neutering and in 2013, he donated $1 million to transport three elephants from a Canadian zoo to a sanctuary in California. He also funded animal law courses at various universities and fought for legislation barring mistreatment of circus animals.

The host found himself mired in controversy in 1994, when model Dian Parkinson sued him, accusing him of sexual harassment. (He insisted their two-year relationship was consensual.) The following year, model Holly Hallstrom left the show and subsequently sued for wrongful termination and malicious persecution.

In 1996, Barker made a cameo appearance in the film Happy Gilmore, memorable for the scene in which he punches Adam Sandler. The scuffle won for “Best Fight” later that year at the MTV Movie Awards.

He had suffered myriad health problems since 1999, including a blocked carotid artery, a stroke and several serious falls.

Barker won 14 Daytime Emmy Awards for outstanding game show host, and with cowriter Digby Diehl, penned his 2009 autobiography, Priceless Memories. But he considered activism his legacy. “How would I like to be remembered?” he replied during the television academy interview. “As the man who said, ‘Have your pets spayed or neutered.’ ”