The unlikely pairing has lasted thousands of episodes and given out hundreds of millions of dollars in prizes. Now Sajak is set to retire after the next season.
“He had great charm. And he was always playing practical jokes,” Griffin told thein 1988. “In California, how many cold fronts from Canada can we have? I remember once he came on with a bandage over his right eye. After a break, the bandage was over the left eye. Pat never said a word, just kept doing the weather.”
“No problem,” Griffin recounted saying to the executives. “I’ll just stop taping ‘Wheel of Fortune’ until Pat Sajak is the host.”“Please do not adjust your sets at home. Chuck Woolery has not shrunk,” Sajak said in his first episode. “I’ve been fortunate enough to wander onto the set of a very successful program.”There was a noticeable adjustment period for Sajak, who had used his humor to his advantage in previous stops on Armed Forces Radio in Vietnam and KNBC in Los Angeles.
The show would see more change in 1982, when Stafford left “Wheel of Fortune” and the entertainment business altogether to become a humanitarian worker. As Griffin returned to his desk, he saw a stack of 8 x 10 glossy photos of 200 candidates applying to take Stafford’s place to turn the letters on the board. As with Sajak, it didn’t take Griffin long to pick out who he liked.“I walked in and just went, ‘Her — get me some tape of her talking,’” Griffin said. “And it was Vanna.
“Vanna knows this,” Sajak told CBS in 2020. “Not that she wasn’t lovely and wonderful and personable and all that. But she was the most nervous, by far, of any of them.”
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