After going to Warner Brothers about five times in 1976 to try out as a contestant on You Don't Say!, a contestant coordinator read off the names of those who were to stay. It turns out he read every name except mine and one other guy's. I drove home feeling pretty low. However, about a month later I got a phone call from Ralph Andrews Productions saying that they had bought back Celebrity Sweepstakes from Burt Sugarman, and NBC wanted to revive the ratings, and could I go right to the NBC studios in Burbank day-after-tomorrow? You bet!
Each member of the studio audience had a box with six buttons so they could vote on the celebrities' abilities to answer the questions. This supposedly determined the odds that appeared. Ralph Andrews himself "instructed" the audience about voting, and this education resulted in the odds going much higher, the contestants winning more money, and the ratings climbing. That was the official story, but I would bet some software "adjustments" were involved, also.
The contestant coordinators told us that Carol Wayne had been "prompted" so as to gain a persona of a "dumb blonde" who is "actually smart." Ralph Andrews made a huge point that under his new management, there would be no more prompting. So, the CC told us, Carol Wayne was going back to being "dumb" again—except for show biz questions, where she wasn't bad.
I went on for the second show of the week. The celebrities were Bill Cullen, Elaine Joyce, Carol Wayne, Alan Sues, Norm Crosby and Pat Carroll. I lost on Elaine not being able to spell "mayonnaise" and Pat Carroll not knowing that a humming bird is the only bird that can fly backwards, but for the most part I called on Bill Cullen, and he didn't let me down! For the final "bet," you could either bet "none," or bet it all. During the commercial break, Ralph Andrews would come up on the set and take a peek at how we bet. I bet it all twice on Bill Cullen and ended up with $25,000. A year later I was a contestant on Ralph Edwards' Knockout, created by Mark Maxwell-Smith and hosted by Arte Johnson. Won $10,000 on this one, for $35,000 in two years total. To put this in perspective, a few years earlier we bought our house for $42,500—worth about 20 times that now.