Pat Sajak | Biography, Wheel of Fortune, & Family
Pat Sajak encyclopedia encyclopeadia britannica article
Adam Zeidan
Pat Sajak is an American television personality best known as the four-decade-long host of the television game show Wheel of Fortune.
/favicon.png
Encyclopedia Britannica
Early life and career

Can you solve this puzzle? (Category: Person).

P A _ R _ _ K

_ A _ _ A K

You might be thrown off by the extra letter in Sajak, but it was no mistake! Sajak’s last name was once Sajdak, a Polish surname that reflects his family background. He grew up on the west side of Chicago with two Polish American parents, although he was not particularly close to his father, Leonard Sajdak, or his paternal grandparents. His parents divorced when he was young, and his mother, Joyce (née Brandecki) Sajdak, married Walter Backal in 1956. After Sajak’s father died in 1961, he lost contact with his father’s side of the family.

Sajak’s interest in broadcast entertainment began in his childhood, when he watched Jack Paar on The Tonight Show. “I would sneak out of bed at night not to go out with the guys or grab a beer but it was to turn on The Tonight Show and see what Jack was up to,” Sajak recalled in a 2012 interview with the Hoover Institution, a public policy think tank at Stanford University. Sajak’s early adulthood paralleled that of his idol: he began his career doing small jobs for a local radio station in 1966. He then enlisted in the U.S. Army in 1967, and, when he was deployed to Vietnam, he eventually became a disc jockey for the army’s radio station in Saigon (now Ho Chi Minh City).

After Sajak was discharged in 1970, he struggled to find a regular gig. He eventually joined NBC’s Nashville affiliate, WSM, where he worked as a disc jockey on its radio station and a staff announcer on its television channel. He often filled in as a substitute for regular newscasters, and so, when the weekend weatherman left the station, Sajak was an obvious choice to take his place. By then he had dropped the d from his stage name, since the Anglicized pronunciation of Sajdak did not include any d sound and had frequently caused people to stumble when reading his name aloud.

Sajak’s sense of humour caught the attention of Los Angeles’ NBC affiliate, KNBC, which in 1977 brought in Sajak as one of its weathermen. With Sajak presenting the weather report for the West Coast’s epicentre of television entertainment, his talent was noticed by industry heavyweights (including Paar, who sent him a letter of praise).

Host of Wheel of Fortune

Get a Britannica Premium subscription and gain access to exclusive content. Subscribe Now

Sajak was also noticed by Merv Griffin, the creator of Jeopardy! (original run, 1964–75) and Wheel of Fortune (1975– ). When in 1981 Wheel of Fortune needed a new host, Griffin persuaded NBC to hire Sajak. Despite some initial pushback because Sajak was not widely known, Sajak was offered the position. He hosted Wheel of Fortune for the first time on December 28. That same day a new gimmick—the Bonus Round—was introduced in which the winning contestant could supplement their prize by solving an additional puzzle.

In his role as the show’s host, Sajak, often off-camera, provided instructions to the game’s contestants and offered commentary for the audience. He joined a cohost, initially Susan Stafford, who appeared throughout the game next to the letter board, revealing each letter as they were announced by the contestants. After Stafford left the show in 1982 to pursue a career in clinical psychology, she was replaced by Vanna White. White became such an integral and iconic part of the program that, in 1988, The New York Times quipped that Sajak was “perhaps best-known as Vanna White’s sidekick.”

In September 1983 Wheel of Fortune went into nighttime syndication (while continuing its daytime run on NBC) in an attempt to broaden its viewership. But only a handful of local stations initially picked up the show; because it filled half of a one-hour time slot, stations were left to figure out how to fill the other half. To complement Wheel of Fortune in the slot, Griffin pushed a revival of Jeopardy! (with Canadian presenter Alex Trebek as its new host) and offered the show for syndication in 1984. The tactic worked: by 1986 the two shows had become the first and second most popular programs, respectively, in syndication.

Sajak’s fame across the country rose rapidly with Wheel of Fortune’s syndication, and he was tapped for appearances elsewhere. He cohosted the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade from 1984 to 1986. In 1989 he was offered The Pat Sajak Show, a late-night show on CBS that lasted until 1990; among the myriad of guests in the show’s short run was Jack Paar, who had retired from late-night television in 1965. In order to join CBS, however, Sajak had to leave NBC, ending Wheel of Fortune’s daytime run as well as Sajak’s affiliation with the network where he began his television career. Taking on a new show and leaving NBC were hardly the only major changes in Sajak’s life in 1989: he also adopted his stage name, Sajak, as his legal name and married Lesly Brown, with whom he later had two children.

In the 1990s Sajak ventured further into the business of broadcast entertainment, although he opted to invest in media that were more close to his heart than they were lucrative. In 1998 he purchased the broadcasting license for WNAV, an amplitude-modulated (AM) radio station in Annapolis, Maryland, and it became one of the central components of his company, Sajak Broadcasting Corporation. In 2005 the company also attained the license for another AM radio station, WTTR, in Westminster, Maryland. Several years after that purchase, Sajak moved to sell both licenses. The company ultimately sold WTTR’s license in 2013 for $325,000; WNAV’s license was sold in 2021 for a mere $1,000, with Sajak contributing $100,000 for the station to relocate from land that he was seeking to sell. Sajak also founded P.A.T. Productions and BoJak Records, small production companies that offer concepts and content for the television and music industries, respectively.

Much of Sajak’s activity outside of Wheel of Fortune has reflected his conservative values. He has spoken critically about the culture of the entertainment industry and has been notably vocal about his political stances. In 2015 he told the The Wall Street Journal: “[E]ven a game-show host has as much right as anyone to babble about anything he wants to. My only objection is the bait and switch. It just kills me when someone’s on a talk show to promote a movie, and I’ve got to sit through saving the whales first. I like whales as much as the next guy—especially filleted. They’re really tasty.” In 2003 he joined the board of trustees for Hillsdale College, a classical liberal arts institution that regards its complete financial independence from taxpayer subsidies as the hallmark of its reputation. In 2019 Sajak (who never completed an academic degree) became the board’s chair.

In 2023 Sajak announced that the 2023–24 season of Wheel of Fortune would be his last. Apart from holding the record for longest-serving game show host in American television, he has won numerous accolades for his work, including the People’s Choice Award (1987) as well as the Daytime Emmy Award for outstanding game show host (1993, 1997, and 1998) and the Daytime Emmy Lifetime Achievement Award (2011). He also received a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame in 1994.