Pete!

My name is Pete. I was born in Chicago, Illinois on October 26, 1946. I spent all of my young life in that city, attending both Goethe and Gary Elementary Schools, Farragut High School and Columbia College. My first chance to broadcast came in 1965 when his name was drawn on WLS Radio’s “Dick Biondi Show” to be a “Guest Teen Deejay.” Biondi was ill the night I was to appear, so I went on with Dick’s replacement, Art Roberts, for a full hour that Saturday night, reading commercials, announcing records and trying to sound professional. I was hooked. While attending Columbia College in Chicago, (and working nights as a desk clerk at the Palmer House Hotel) one of my broadcasting instructors, a local announcer named Al Parker (who passed away recently after an incredible 50-plus years at Columbia) told me that they might be looking for an newsman at a little local radio station called WEDC. I went in, read a few things for the Program Director, and was hired to work from midnight until 6 a.m. doing an hourly five-minute “rip and read” newscast (you ripped it off the newswires and read it as was). In 1968, I left Columbia after only three years, joined the U.S. Army, and was promptly sent to Vietnam. After a few months as a finance clerk, I was transferred into Armed Forces Radio and given the morning show on AFVN in Saigon where I yelled, “Good Morning, Vietnam!” for a year and a half. I finished my military career at the Pentagon in 1970. After my discharge in late 1970, I stayed in Washington trying to find radio or TV work. With no success on the broadcasting front, I again found myself working as a desk clerk, this time at the Madison Hotel in downtown D.C. Finally, a friend told me that he knew someone who owned a radio station in Murray, Kentucky, and maybe he would hire me. So, in 1971, I became the nighttime disc jockey at a 250-watt station in Southeastern Kentucky. It took about a year for this 25-year-old to look around and come to the conclusion that my career was not exactly “taking off”. So I packed up my belongings and headed to the nearest big city, which happened to be Nashville, Tennessee. Despite interviewing at virtually every radio and television station in town, I found myself (again!) as a desk clerk at a local motel. I continued to visit the local broadcasting outlets and was finally hired by the local NBC television affiliate, WSM. I spent five years at Channel 4 as everything from an anonymous staff announcer to a talk-show host, to a disc jockey at their sister radio station, but it was as a weatherman that I was getting the most on-air exposure. In Los Angeles, KNBC-TV was looking for a weatherman in 1977, and they spotted me in Nashville and hired me to be their full-time weatherman. I worked both the early and late newscasts, as well as a local weekend talk show called “The Sunday Show”. One of those who sat home and watched was Merv Griffin. He called in 1981 and asked whether I would be interested in taking over for Chuck Woolery, who was leaving “Wheel of Fortune” a daytime game show on NBC, after seven years as host. While I had done a few other game show pilots, most notably for Ralph Edwards and Mark Goodson, I never felt completely comfortable in the role. Assuming that “Wheel” probably had a year or two left in it, I agreed to step in. My assessment of its longevity proved to be off by a couple of decades. The nighttime version of the show went on the air in September 1983, and it has been the Number One program in syndicated television ever since. In 1989, I began doing a late-night talk show on CBS. While it ran less than a year and a half, I call it the most enjoyable 18 months of my career. It was during the run of that show that I met Lesly Brown, who became my wife on New Year’s Eve of 1989. We have two children. I have three Emmys, a Peoples’ Choice Award and a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame.
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