NEW YORK — Chuck Woolery, the affable, smooth-talking game show host of “Wheel of Fortune,” “Love Connection” and “Scrabble” who later became a right-wing podcaster, skewering liberals and accusing the government of lying about COVID-19, has died. He was 83.

Mark Young, Woolery’s podcast co-host and friend, said in an email early Sunday that Woolery died at his home in Texas with his wife, Kristen, present. “Chuck was a dear friend and brother and a tremendous man of faith, life will not be the same without him,” Young wrote.

Woolery, with his matinee idol looks, coiffed hair and ease with witty banter, was inducted into the American TV Game Show Hall of Fame in 2007 and earned a daytime Emmy nomination in 1978.

In 1983, Woolery began an 11-year run as host of TV’s “Love Connection,” for which he coined the phrase, “We’ll be back in two minutes and two seconds,” a two-fingered signature dubbed the “2 and 2.” In 1984, he hosted TV’s “Scrabble,” simultaneously hosting two game shows on TV until 1990.

“Love Connection,” which aired long before the dawn of dating apps, had a premise that featured either a single man or single woman who would watch audition tapes of three potential mates and then pick one for a date.

A couple of weeks after the date, the guest would sit with Woolery in front of a studio audience and tell everybody about the date. The audience would vote on the three contestants, and if the audience agreed with the guest’s choice, “Love Connection” would offer to pay for a second date.

Woolery told The Philadelphia Inquirer in 2003 that his favorite set of lovebirds was a man aged 91 and a woman aged 87. “She had so much eye makeup on, she looked like a stolen Corvette. He was so old he said, ‘I remember wagon trains.’ The poor guy. She took him on a balloon ride.”

Other career highlights included hosting the shows “Lingo,” “Greed” and “The Chuck Woolery Show,” as well as hosting the short-lived syndicated revival of “The Dating Game” from 1998 to 2000 and an ill-fated 1991 talk show. In 1992, he played himself in two episodes of TV’s “Melrose Place.”

Woolery became the subject of the Game Show Network’s first attempt at a reality show, “Chuck Woolery: Naturally Stoned,” which premiered in 2003. It shared the title of the pop song in 1968 by Woolery and his rock group, the Avant-Garde. It lasted six episode and was panned by critics.

Woolery began his TV career at a show that has become a mainstay. Although most associated with Pat Sajak and Vanna White, “Wheel of Fortune” debuted Jan. 6, 1975, on NBC with Woolery welcoming contestants and the audience. Woolery, then 33, was trying to make it in Nashville as a singer.

“Wheel of Fortune” started life as “Shopper’s Bazaar,” incorporating Hangman-style puzzles and a roulette wheel. After Woolery appeared on “The Merv Griffin Show” singing “Delta Dawn,” Merv Griffin asked him to host the new show with Susan Stafford.

“I had an interview that stretched to 15, 20 minutes,” Woolery told The New York Times in 2003. “After the show, when Merv asked if I wanted to do a game show, I thought, ‘Great, a guy with a bad jacket and an equally bad mustache who doesn’t care what you have to say — that’s the guy I want to be.’”

NBC initially passed, but they retooled it as “Wheel of Fortune” and got the green light. After a few years, Woolery demanded a raise to $500,000 a year, or what host Peter Marshall was making on “Hollywood Squares.” Griffin balked and replaced Woolery with weather reporter Pat Sajak.

“Both Chuck and Susie did a fine job, and ‘Wheel’ did well enough on NBC, although it never approached the kind of ratings success that ‘Jeopardy!’ achieved in its heyday,” Griffin said in “Merv: Making the Good Life Last,” an autobiography from the 2000s co-written by David Bender. Woolery earned an Emmy nod as host.

Born in Ashland, Kentucky, Woolery served in the U.S. Navy before attending college. He played double bass in a folk trio, then formed the psychedelic rock duo The Avant-Garde in 1967 while working as a truck driver to support himself as a musician.

The Avant-Garde, which tourbed in a refitted Cadillac hearse, had the Top 40 hit “Naturally Stoned,” with Woolery singing, “When I put my mind on you alone/I can get a good sensation/Feel like I’m naturally stoned.”

After The Avant-Garde broke up, Woolery released his debut solo single “I’ve Been Wrong” in 1969 and several more singles with Columbia before transitioning to country music by the 1970s. He released two solo singles, “Forgive My Heart” and “Love Me, Love Me.”

Woolery wrote or co-wrote songs for himself and everyone from Pat Boone to Tammy Wynette. On Wynette’s 1971 album “We Sure Can Love Each Other,” Woolery wrote “The Joys of Being a Woman” with lyrics including “See our baby on the swing/Hear her laugh, hear her scream.”

After his TV career ended, Woolery went into podcasting. In an interview with The New York Times, he called himself a gun-rights activist and described himself as a conservative libertarian and constitutionalist. He said he hadn’t revealed his politics in liberal Hollywood for fear of retribution.

He teamed up with Mark Young in 2014 for the podcast “Blunt Force Truth” and soon became a full supporter of Donald Trump while arguing minorities don’t need civil rights and causing a firestorm by tweeting an antisemitic comment linking Soviet Communists to Judaism.

“President Obama’s popularity is a fantasy only held by him and his dwindling legion of juice-box-drinking, anxiety-dog-hugging, safe-space-hiding snowflakes,” he said.

Woolery also was active online, retweeting articles from Conservative Brief, insisting Democrats were trying to install a system of Marxism and spreading headlines such as “Impeach him! Devastating photo of Joe Biden leaks.”

During the early stages of the pandemic, Woolery initially accused medical professionals and Democrats of lying about the virus in an effort to hurt the economy and Trump’s chances for reelection to the presidency.

“The most outrageous lies are the ones about COVID-19. Everyone is lying. The CDC, media, Democrats, our doctors, not all but most, that we are told to trust. I think it’s all about the election and keeping the economy from coming back, which is about the election. I’m sick of it,” Woolery wrote in July 2020.

Trump retweeted that post to his 83 million followers. By the end of the month, nearly 4.5 million Americans had been infected with COVID-19 and more than 150,000 had died.

Just days later, Woolery changed his stance, announcing his son had contracted COVID-19. “To further clarify and add perspective, COVID-19 is real and it is here. My son tested positive for the virus, and I feel for of those suffering and especially for those who have lost loved ones,” Woolery posted before his account was deleted.

Woolery later explained on his podcast that he never called COVID-19 “a hoax” or said “it’s not real,” just that “we’ve been lied to.” Woolery also said it was “an honor to have your president retweet what your thoughts are and think it’s important enough to do that.”

In addition to his wife, Woolery is survived by his sons Michael and Sean and his daughter Melissa, Young said.

The morning I meet Michael Schneider at a quaint coffee shop in Glendale, it quickly becomes clear that he walked here. His sneakers are the first clue — worn, white Nike trainers smudged with dirt. It’s uncharacteristically warm out this morning and his sweat-speckled forehead offers the second clue. His lean, exercised frame cinches my suspicion.

“I’ve probably walked more than 10,000 steps already today,” he tells me proudly, checking the health data on his phone to be sure — and it’s only 10:30 a.m.

In a city built for cars, Schneider is committed to exploring the city on foot, often heading out from his Adams Hill home at 11 p.m., in the dark, to get his steps in after the day’s work is done. In fact, over the last two decades, Schneider, 51, has traversed the length of Los Angeles on foot 18 times, covering nearly 300 miles in all during those journeys. But he didn’t do it alone.

Schneider is the founder of the Great Los Angeles Walk, an annual citywide event he started in 2006 to mark his 10th anniversary of moving to the city from Chicago. What began as a DIY, mobile celebration of L.A. — with just his wife, a handful of friends and several dozen readers of his blog, Franklin Avenue — has morphed into a local tradition, drawing up to 500 participants every November on the Saturday before Thanksgiving. Each walk spans the length of an iconic L.A. boulevard, trekking about 14 to 16 miles and stopping along the way to explore its sun-scorched sidewalks and faded public murals, its high-end furniture boutiques, cheap motels and historic churches, its food carts piled high with fresh fruit and its buzzing freeway overpasses — from below.

The very first Great Walk, inspired by journalist Kevin Roderick’s 2005 book, “Wilshire Boulevard: Grand Concourse of Los Angeles,” had participants hoofing the entire 15-plus miles of Wilshire, from downtown L.A. to the ocean. The only marketing Schneider did for the event was a simple blog post announcing the trek. About 40 people attended.

“It was almost a lark,” says Schneider, the television editor at trade publication Variety. “I had no idea how many people would show up.”

The second walk, which drew 100 people, took place on Pico Boulevard, inspired by Times food critic Jonathan Gold, who famously ate his way down the street in his early 20s. Gold emailed Schneider food-stop recommendations at the time. The event has since tackled Santa Monica Boulevard, Beverly Boulevard, Melrose Avenue, Sunset Boulevard and Hollywood Boulevard, among many others.

On top of being a terrific pre-holiday workout, the Great Walk debunks the ever-persistent beliefs that L.A. is not a walking city and that its physical sprawl impedes the ability to build community. Scores of individuals have met during the Great Walk, including Westwood residents Cat and Steve Whalen, who ended up getting married in 2023. They still do the walk every year.

“I remember bonding over the architecture of this old Public Storage facility,” Cat Whalen said of meeting her husband in 2016. “It’s an event that combines our love of walking and urban landscapes and architecture — and, of course, there’s the social component.”

Over the years, participants have ranged from stroller-bound babies to residents in their late 80s. Attendees arrive alone or with a community group. Since 2017, long-distance swimmer Diana Nyad has come with members of her EverWalk nonprofit, which encourages walking for health and human connection. Walkers have traveled from as far as Amsterdam and Japan to join the festivities; one man journeys from Santa Fe, N.M., every year to participate — barefoot. He’s become part of the colorful fabric of the event.

“I always run into him about midway through the walk,” Schneider says. “He’s got his camera and he’s barefoot. That’s just what he does.”

Michael Schneider with his dog, Jacks. Schneider founded the Great Los Angeles Walk in 2006.

(Robert Hanashiro/For The Times)

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The Great Walk has been covered by local blogs, television stations and newspapers, including The Times. But less has been written about Schneider himself, who has amassed nearly 20 years’ worth of looky-loo knowledge while strolling through the peaks and valleys of the city.

Sitting at the coffee shop, Schneider looks every bit the suburban dad. He wears a trim salt-and-pepper goatee and a zip-up hoodie, and takes every opportunity to boast about his two sons, 19 and 15, who have joined the walk nearly every year of their lives. His eldest first took part at age 1½ and his youngest at 3 months old.

But Schneider’s normcore exterior belies an undercurrent of intensity: There’s a particular, obsessive mindset required to conceive of and execute such an ambitious public expedition every year over two decades. (The Great Walk even continued during the pandemic.) Not to mention chronicling those journeys in detailed blog posts, which are meticulously archived online. It requires a passion for cities, urban history and, perhaps, cartography; an affinity for architecture and urban design; a love of community; and a knack for numbers. During our interview, Schneider repeatedly referred to stats from his Noom weight-loss app, his cornflower blue eyes glimmering as he spoke of caloric intake versus exercise expenditure in steps and miles.

In sum, he’s a collector. Of miles and health stats, of vinyl records, of books about L.A. — and of people. He first developed the habit as an “Air Force brat” kid growing up, moving with his family between the Philippines, Oklahoma and Hawaii, when he began obsessively accumulating information about the television business.

“I was that kid, at 7, who knew who Ted Turner was,” Schneider says, chuckling. “I collected TV Guides from whatever city we’d travel through on vacation.”

After college at Northwestern and a year working between Chicago and Washington, D.C., Schneider moved to L.A. in 1996 with the TV trade publication Electronic Media. In ’99, he landed a job as a reporter at Variety and met his wife, Maria. He wasn’t much of an exerciser, but she liked to walk. Their early dates were spent exploring the city on foot, including taking Los Angeles Conservancy walking tours downtown and hiking in Griffith Park. Schneider fell in love with L.A. history and found that walking its concrete stretches helped him feel more rooted in the city.

“When I first came to L.A., I was like: Where is the core?” he says. “I didn’t understand why people didn’t know where to congregate. Now I get it. It’s all these different cores.”

Schneider also has collected handfuls of odd, serendipitous moments from the Great Walk. The event has passed weddings in progress, film crews shooting, even buildings on fire. Once, in 2009, the group streamed past the Nate Holden Performing Arts Center on Washington Boulevard and Magic Johnson appeared in the window to cheer them on. Two years earlier, on Pico Boulevard, a crane holding a billboard toppled over and chaos ensued.

“Traffic stopped, police were everywhere, no one could get through,” Schneider recalls. “But here we were, just walking on by.”

Schneider doesn’t make any money off of the Great Walk; it’s free to participants and he doesn’t pay to advertise the event. In recent years, there have been sponsors, including The Times, who might give him free ads, say, or pass out water in exchange for a mention on the blog.

“But there’s no business model,” Schneider says. “We’re not an official organization. This is just a grassroots group of people getting together to walk.”

Nineteen years of crisscrossing L.A. on foot has given Schneider a rare, bird’s-eye-view of the city, from a boots-on-the-ground perspective. And he’s had to alter the walk as the city around it has morphed.

“In recent years, obviously, there’s been a lot more homelessness on the streets, along with more trash,” he says. “So I’ve been mindful of trying to choose streets where it’s less of an issue.”

The city’s construction boom also has been particularly noticeable, he says.

“Just the amount of change that we’ve seen in recent years in development — that’s a positive. More housing, more buildings. But it’s also sad when you walk by and that historic building, like the Ambassador [Hotel], is no longer there — that’s a negative,” he says.

Schneider kicks off each Great Walk at a landmark, such as Walt Disney Concert Hall, the Shrine Auditorium or the Exposition Park Rose Garden, where there’s typically a guest speaker giving a pep talk. Roderick and Nyad have taken the megaphone, as have performer-urban explorer Charles Phoenix and journalist-historic preservationist Chris Nichols. And there’s always an “afterparty” at a venue near the finish line.

2023 photo of Michael Schneider with long-distance swimmer Diana Nyad.

(Michael Schneider)

This year’s walk will pay homage to Schneider’s family. He has one son at UCLA and a nephew at USC. So the walk will start downtown at the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum in Exposition Park near USC’s campus and end on UCLA’s campus at the Bruin Statue. Between those points, the 14.2-mile trek will traverse parts of Vermont Avenue, Washington Boulevard, Culver Boulevard, Overland Avenue, Pico Boulevard and Westwood Boulevard.

“It just so happens, in recent years, that Saturday before Thanksgiving is the day of the USC-UCLA game,” Schneider says. “I was like: OK, this is too good. We have to do it.”

Where will the Great Walk take place next year, for its milestone 20th anniversary?

“Back to Wilshire,” Schneider says without pause. “It’s gonna have to be the OG.”

While the Great L.A. Walk may be associated with exercise, Schnieder repeatedly reminds participants that the goal is to go slow.

“It’s about taking your time,” he says. “Go into a store you’ve never seen, take the time to look at a sculpture, stop at that church. The key is to feel like you’ve learned more about Los Angeles. I still learn things. I still see things I’ve never seen before.”

When our conversation ends, Schneider does what he’s always done. He heads out the door and starts walking.

On-air challenge: Every answer today is the name of a famous person in which the first two letters of the first name are the same as the last two letters of the last name. I’ll give you the repeated letters and categories of the people. You tell me who they are.
 

Ex. GE, Oscar winner for Best Actress  –>  Geraldine Page (winner for the 1985 movie “The Trip to Bountiful”)

1. RO, Oscar winner for Best Actor (in “Raging Bull”)
2. SA, Seven-time M.L.B. All-Star (primarily with the Chicago Cubs)
3. EL, Writer and Peace Nobelist (author of “Night” and other works on the Holocaust)
4. MA, Former White House daughter
5. AN, Woman who taught Helen Keller
6. [one name:] BA, queen consort in the Bible (wife of David, mother of Solomon)
7. LO, Comic actor of old Hollywood (partner of Bud Abbott)

Last week’s challenge: Last week’s challenge comes from listener Michael Schwartz, of Florence, Ore. Think of a classic American author, whose first and last names are each one syllable. The last name, when said aloud, sounds like part of the body. Insert the letters AS into the first name, and you’ll get the location of this body part. Who is the author?

Challenge answer: Bret Harte (breast, heart)

Winner: Stan Durey of Anacortes, Washington

This week’s challenge:  This week’s challenge comes from listener Greg VanMechelen, of  Berkeley, Calif. Name a state capital. Inside it in consecutive letters is the first name of a popular TV character of the past. Remove that name, and the remaining letters in order will spell the first name of a popular TV game show host of the past.  What is the capital and what are the names?

Submit Your Answer

If you know the answer to the challenge, submit it here by Wednesday, November 27th, 2024 at 3 p.m. ET. Listeners whose answers are selected win a chance to play the on-air puzzle. Important: include a phone number where we can reach you.