The PIR

Today is the ending of an era. A turning of a page.
Bob Barker's final episode on the greatest game show in history, The Price is Right, just aired, and as I sit at my desk, only sadness grips me.
Barker has been with me from the beginning. I remember sitting in my living room on summer days as a child (when I should have been outside playing or working) watching fantacizing about one day being on The PIR, playing Plinko or the mountain climbing game or putting alongside the long miked man with the white hair.
In high school, though things changed often, there was always Barker. I remember my second-period journalism teacher at North Moore allowing me to watch it, and today, watching the final episode with Barker, I found myself back in that room...engulfed in the PIR when I should have been working on a paper.
That theme followed me in college, where I laid out of a many an Econ 10 class to watch the show. (But I still got an A- in that class by only the grace of God. I swear I think my professor got me mixed up with someone else.)
And I got pretty good at it, up to the very end. As four of us in the newsroom wwatched this morning, I came the closest to the final showcase and guessed the correct price of a car on the Any Number game.
So where does the show go from here? The best thing about the show with Barker was that it never changed, even though the whole world around it did. It was the one constant in my life. The car prices got hirer, but the games rarely changed. No digital dials or computer graphics. Just plain old wheel-spinning and price guessing.
The putts kept falling. The spay and neuter calls did, too. And the Barker Beauties stayed beautiful, although plastic surgery and implants didn't hurt, either.
Whomever takes over for Barker (God help us if it is Mario Lopez) there is no way the show will ever recapture what Barker had. They'll probably dress it up with fancy camera angles, new spins on old games and savvy marketing ploys.
But it won't be the same.
God bless you, Bob. Have a nice retirement. You will be missed.