RIP Chuck "2 and 2" Woolery

I don’t know why we always called Chuck Woolery “Chuck Wildebeest.” It must have just been a family joke. After all, what else are you going to do but make up a nickname for someone who seems to always be in the same room with you?

At one point in our nation’s history, you couldn’t escape Woolery. His handsome visage was around every bend and every corner. The original daytime host of Wheel of Fortune and Love Connection has passed away at the age of 83.

If you take a look at the opening graphics in this clip from how I would have been watching Love Connection on a local St. Louis affiliate in 1988, the tagline of “where old-fashioned romance meets modern-day technology” is primitively hilarious (not to mention the women’s hairstyles).

But from that amateurish opening, Woolery would suavely guide his guests through dating nightmares, true sparks, and a ton of innuendo that may have floated back in the Richard Dawson days of TV game shows but would be chopped on the editing-room floor these days.

After starting his career as a singer, he signed on to Wheel of Fortune but left after six years due to a contract dispute and was replaced by Pat Sajak. Then from 1983 to 1994, Woolery made his biggest mark with Love Connection. He also hosted Scrabble and The Dating Game.

In his later years, he still worked, with a podcast, and called himself a "conservative libertarian and constitutionalist.” He was not a Donald Trump fan at first but then came out vocally in favor of Trump in order to help the country from “going down this hypersocialist road.” He soon went full MAGA, saying COVID-19 was a hoax by the CDC, the media, doctors, and Democrats. He later backtracked but maintained that people were somehow misled.

Despite that bit of ugliness, those images from decades’ before are what are likely to stick in our memories. Anybody who has ever watched Woolery offer his patented saying—“We’ll be back in two minutes and two seconds”—won’t forget him.