• Wink Martindale, a broadcasting legend with a 70+ year career, died on April 15 at 91.
• He achieved national fame hosting game shows like “Tic-Tac-Dough” and “Gambit.”
• Martindale maintained his passion for radio, working on syndicated programs even in his later years.

Square-jawed, fresh-faced and well-coiffed, with a sunbeam smile to match his sunny disposition, Wink Martindale was a fixture of American broadcasting during a career that spanned more than 70 years.

Martindale died April 15 at the age of 91. A publicist confirmed his passing in Rancho Mirage, California, noting that Martindale was surrounded by family and his wife of 49 years, Sandra Martindale.

A native of West Tennessee, Martindale launched his radio and television career in Memphis in the early-‘50s — becoming a key part of the early history of Elvis Presley — before moving to Los Angeles in 1959, where he continued to grow his national reputation as a disc jockey and game-show host.

One of the more familiar American television personalities of the 1970s, ’80s and ’90s, Martindale hosted a succession of network and syndicated game shows, including “Tic-Tac-Dough,” “Gambit,” “High Rollers” and “Debt.”

On social media, the Game Show network eulogized Martindale as “a true legend…his charm and presence lit up the screen for generations of viewers and he will never be forgotten.”

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Launching his career in Memphis

Born in Jackson, Tennessee, in 1933, Winston Conrad “Wink” Martindale — his nickname “Wink” came from a playmate’s mispronunciation of his first name as a child — found local fame as a young broadcaster in Memphis in the early 1950s. 

“I consider Memphis home,” Martindale noted in a 2020 interview with The Commercial Appeal. “I always said I was born and raised in Jackson but I spent my first real years as a professional in Memphis. My dream was to work at WHBQ radio, and that’s just what I did. All the kids in Jackson listened to it.”

A handsome gung-ho public personality, Martindale first impressed television viewers as the college-age host of “Mars Patrol,” a mid-1950s WHBQ-TV weekday-morning children’s program that presented Wink as — in his words — “the Flash Gordon of Memphis.”

On “Mars Patrol,” Wink wore a turtleneck complemented with large, almost jet-propelled epaulets and invited kids to visit a tinfoil-and-plywood spaceship set decorated with various ray guns. “I had six little ‘Mars Guards’ between the ages of 6 and 10 each day,” Martindale recalled. “We’d drink our Bosco and milk and then we’d blast off, and we’d segue into those old ‘Flash Gordon’ serials, and then we’d talk some more.

“We called viewers of the show ‘Star Dodgers.’ I was 19 when I started doing it, but I looked a lot younger than I was. It taught me how to ad-lib, because when you’re talking to kids, you never know what they’re going to say.”

It was as host of “Mars Patrol” that Martindale made his first public appearance, riding a kiddie choo-choo train at the old Downtown Goldsmith’s department store and greeting starstruck young “Star Dodgers.”

Because he stuck the “Mars” landing, Martindale was promoted to host the teen-oriented “Top 10 Dance Party” on WHBQ-TV, the precursor to WHBQ’s long-running “Talent Party” with George Klein. 

In Martindale’s words, he went from being “the Flash Gordon of Memphis” to “the Dick Clark of Memphis.” In 1956, Elvis appeared on the show, for free, “much to the chagrin of [Presley’s manager] Colonel Parker,” who “never spoke to me again,” Martindale said.

For much of the time, Martindale also was the daily host of the 5-9 a.m. “Clock Watcher’s” show on WHBQ-AM 56; then he would “drive like a maniac” to attend class at Memphis State University, and then rush to the WHBQ television station for afternoon telecasts. “It was like an out-of-body experience,” Martindale noted of those hectic early days.

“Dance Party” ran from 1955 to 1959, when Martindale decided to try to “spread my wings in a larger market,” after seven years in Memphis and a previous couple of years in his hometown of Jackson, where he started doing radio when he was 17. Martindale’s mentor at WHBQ, general manager William H. Grumbles, knew of jobs at other RKO-owned radio stations in Oakland and New York, but “going to New York kind of scared this country boy and I said, ‘I think palm trees sound kind of good.'”

Fame follows a move out West

Moving to California at the end of the ’50s, Martindale’s career took off. He had lengthy stints as a disc jockey on several popular Los Angeles radio stations, and in 1959 he had a Top 10 hit on the Billboard pop charts with “Deck of Cards,” a spoken-word song on the Dot Records label in which a soldier-narrator character — a Christian, like Martindale — relates the cards in a deck to various stories and figures from the Bible. 

But his real fame came with television, most notably “Tic-Tac-Dough,” a Jack Barry-Dan Enright production that Martindale hosted from 1978 to 1985 on NBC. He also formed his own production company and developed his own game shows, often in association with such veterans as Merv Griffin. As a host or producer, Martindale was involved with more than 20 different game shows, concluding with the Lifetime network’s “Debt” in the 1990s.

Whatever his TV fame, arguably Martindale’s greatest pop-culture significance is tied to a large extent to Elvis Presley. On July 10, 1954, when Dewey Phillips first spun Presley’s debut single for Sun, “That’s All Right” over and over again on the air, Martindale was in the studio, showing some old high-school football buddies where he worked. 

The listener response to the song was so great that Martindale was corralled into duty and given the job of tracking down Presley, to get the singer to the studio for a live interview. Martindale knew Elvis’ phone number, so he called the home where Presley and his parents, Gladys and Vernon, lived.

“I said, ‘Mrs. Presley, where is Elvis?’ She said, well, he was so nervous about his record being played on the air, he went to see a Western double feature at the Suzore. So Gladys and Vernon went there and walked up and down the dark aisles, and there he was all by himself.” Elvis’ parents persuaded the future King of Rock ‘n’ Roll to leave the Main Street movie theater (the Renasant Convention Center now occupies that piece of land) and then brought him to WHBQ for his first radio interview. 

“That was the beginning of rock ‘n’ roll,” Martindale said, “and Memphis was the home of it. Roy Orbison, Warren Smith. It was a hotbed of music. Everybody knew everybody.”

The Elvis connection re-emerged when Martindale married Sandy Ferra in 1975. Elvis’ former girlfriend, Ferra. Martindale’s first marriage to childhood sweetheart Madelyn Leech, which resulted in four children, had ended in an amicable divorce in 1971.

Final years found Wink Martindale’s love of radio undiminished

Martindale returned to Memphis in recent years, visiting and speaking as part of some Elvis-themed events at Graceland. His most recent appearance came during a panel event where he was honored with Beale Street Brass Note, the largely music-centric Memphis equivalent of the Hollywood Walk of Fame — where he’d had a star since 2006, located in the same block as such heavy-hitters as Louis Armstrong, Johnny Depp and Samuel L. Jackson.

Even in his final years, Martindale still worked on various syndicated radio programs, usually focusing on the so-called Golden Age of Rock and Roll. A true broadcaster at heart, Martindale never lost his love for radio.

“I found it fascinating that you could speak into one of those microphones and someone could hear you on the other end, so from the time I was 7 or 8 years old I knew what I wanted to do with my life,” he said. “My dad had a subscription to Life magazine, and I would cut out the advertisement pages, go in the back bedroom, close the door, and pretend I was reading those advertisements on the air.

“So many kids grow up and they don’t know what they want to do and they flounder around, but I graduated to radio right from my paper route, so it was the answer to a dream. I realized my dream early in life, and it has served me well.”