Not many television personalities have worked in two different countries on a regular basis in their careers. One game show host trekked back and forth between the United States and Canada hosting television shows for almost 25 years. That man was Jim Perry, who became a household name in two different nations. Ironically, most viewers in Canada had no idea that Perry was American and many U.S. viewers had no clue that Perry also worked in Canada. In an unusual career path, Jim accomplished quite a bit over the span of three decades.

Born as James Edward Dooley on November 9, 1933, in Camden, New Jersey, Jim noted that his family had settled in Portugal Cove, Newfoundland in 1600 and that his immediate family was from Antigonish, Nova Scotia. In a 1977 interview with The Ottawa Journal, Jim stated that his father was a trumpet player and performed with several big bands during the 1930s and 1940s. His mother was a marathon dancer who competed in dancing competitions at many of these big band concerts. It was at one concert that Jim's parents met. However, Jim and his two sisters experienced an unhappy childhood growing up during the Depression. His parents divorced when he was young leaving Jim and his sisters with feelings of loneliness. “That kind of set a tone of wanting to be liked and wanting to have the world love me,” he said in a 2005 interview. “It’s the kind of thing that leads one toward becoming an entertainer. I find with a lot of entertainers that they start out with a neediness in finding, if you will, a surrogate family.” After his parents divorced, Jim was raised by his mother, but he was plagued by his rough and emotionally abusive childhood in the coming years.

What followed was a childhood of constantly moving from one place to another. During his high school years alone, Jim and his mother moved from Chester, Pennsylvania to Biloxi, Mississippi and finally to Pleasanton, California. “[I] was constantly meeting new people,” he said. “[I was] always having to meet new people, [to] make an impression, [to] try to be loved. I didn’t realize that, in many ways, I was attuning myself to the things that were going to be an aid to me later in life. Meeting new people has never bothered me.” As he grew up, Jim found that he had two real talents: a good singing voice and a good athletic ability. Jim eventually grew to 6 feet 4 inches in height. His tall slender frame quickly found its way onto the basketball court in high school where he excelled as an athlete. Jim credited basketball with getting him through his tough high school years. He told The Ottawa Journal in 1977 that basketball gave him a "sense of identity. I suspect that if I had not been successful in basketball, I would not have become a success at what I am doing now. Basketball made me realize that I could become successful." With college looming on the horizon, Jim received basketball scholarship offers to seven different schools.

“That Turned Out To Be the Best Thing That Ever Happened”

As much as he loved basketball, Jim felt that he needed to major in something else so he decided to study Psychology. He moved back east to live with his father while going to college at the University of Pennsylvania. He soon found himself frustrated with the courses and began gravitating more toward performing in the university's theatrical division. It was here that his singing talents began to shine. But after two years, Jim found himself in a tight spot. “I thought things were going to be better with my father, but they weren’t,” Jim said in 2005. Jim was unable to pay his bills and was forced to withdraw from college.

His fortunes finally turned around when he was drafted into the United States Army in 1955. “That turned out to be the best thing that ever happened,” Jim said. In the service, he was stationed in Germany and worked for Armed Forces Radio. “I toured with a couple of soldier shows, and I came to the conclusion that if I can sing, and have a bunch of guys applaud, I can do something with this.”

Upon his discharge in 1956, Jim worked as a singer for Grossingers in the Catskill Mountains in New York. It was there that he met June Wiatrak, a catalogue model who was making a name for herself. Jim and June married on June 29, 1959. "When we were first married, my [last] name was Dooley," Jim said. "She ironically became successful before I did and became quite well-known as a Ford photographer's model in New York as June Dooley. She was the top catalog model for a number of years. That's how we got our first house with the money she made while I was knocking on doors {trying to break into show business]." Jim and June had a daughter named Erin and a son named Sean, both of whom followed in their parents’ footsteps with careers in show business. " It's kind of flattering that they obviously liked what it was that dad and mom did that they would follow in our footsteps. Our daughter started working on Card Sharks and then went to The $25,000 Pyramid and worked her way up [to a rock singer in Germany]. My son started on Sale of the Century, became an assistant to my then-agent, and then became an agent and worked his way up."

Sid Caesar

One of the morning shows at Grossingers was an audience participation “Simon Says” game. Jim stood with a microphone outside the breakfast room to talk with the customers and lure them to the “Simon Says” game in the entertainment lounge. His ability to attract the customers caught the attention of Mort Curtis, who told Jim that comedian Sid Caesar was looking for a straight man for his nightclub act. However, Jim was not convinced that merely talking was a talent. “There are tangible talents where you say, ‘I think I can do something with this,’” he said. “It’s very difficult to say, ‘I think I’d like to talk for a living.’ I rather denigrated talking for quite some time. It was so natural to me.” But Jim met with Caesar and the two hit it off leading to a four-year stint of Perry working as the comic foil to Caesar.

In 1962 Perry moved to television when he joined Caesar as his announcer and side-kick on a series of monthly specials called As Caesar Sees It that aired on ABC-TV. A total of nine specials aired between October 1962 and June of 1963.

“Why Don’t You Try This?”

In 1963 Caesar left the act when he landed a role in a Broadway show called Little Me. On a lark, Jim tried his luck in game show hosting doing a run-through for a game produced by musician Harry Salter, which never even made it to the pilot stage. One of the people at the run-though was game show producer Howard Felsher, who later worked for Goodson-Todman Productions. Jim credited Felsher with helping him learn the ropes of game show hosting. “Howard [would say] ‘Now you did this well, but why don’t you try this.’ It was like having a school teacher all the way along the line. It was wonderful for me and I really learned the business with Howard Felsher.”

Jim was still working under his birth name Jim Dooley when he auditioned for an NBC pilot, Talking Pictures. The network confused him with another Jim Dooley, who was a commercial spokesman for Northeast Airlines. Taking his wife’s advice, Jim adopted his mother’s maiden name (Perry) and began performing under the stage name Jim Perry. NBC passed up the Talking Pictures pilot in favor of a new game show called Jeopardy!

Hello Canada

In the early 1960s, folk music quickly became a hot commodity with groups such as Peter Paul and Mary and The Kingston Trio. Jim decided to try his hand at folk music. "Hey, you gotta try and make a buck," Jim noted in 2005. "You got a family to support. I went to Canada to host a folk music special [called International Song Festival]." This led to his next break. In 1965 Art Baer and Ben Joleson created the game show Fractured Phrases. Jim was asked to host the pilot episode, which was taped in Canada. “They (Baer and Joleson) asked the Canadians if they could bring me up just to do the pilot because they wanted something to show down in the U.S.,” he said. The Canadian television executives remembered Perry from the folk music special he had recently hosted and gladly approved of him. Fractured Phrases was sold to NBC, but Art James landed the hosting gig. Baer and Joleson then sold another version of the game to CTV (The Canadian Television Network) and Jim had his first regular television job. Instead of moving to Canada, Jim commuted from his home in New York to tape the show in Montreal. The American version lasted only 14 weeks, but Fractured Phrases fared much better in Canada running for two years.

In 1966 CTV shifted production of Fractured Phrases to Toronto and kept Jim in Montreal to host a new game show called Words and Music. This complicated game called for players to identify a person, place, or thing through a series of musical clues and solve a crossword puzzle. Viewers were baffled by the complex rules and Words and Music failed after one season. In the fall of 1967, Jim landed two new television gigs. The first was the annual Miss Canada Pageant where he used his singing skills to serenade the contestants much in the same manner Bert Parks did with the Miss America Pageant. Jim hosted the pageant for 24 consecutive years. The second show was Jim's first American game show, It’s Your Move, a charade-based game that only lasted 13 weeks.

A Brief Radio Interlude

After spending a few months out of work, Perry won a job as a staff announcer at WABC-TV in New York with the help of Dirk Fredericks, who had served as Perry’s announcer on It’s Your Move. Perry was initially limited to doing station identifications. He soon moved to the station’s radio division delivering a five minute newscast every 30 minutes during the overnight hours.

Bingo!

During his radio years, Jim also landed two additional television roles for the 1968-1969 season. Jim became the announcer for That Show Starring Joan Rivers which only lasted one season and for 13 weeks in the spring of 1969, he hosted the game show Money Makers. Future game show producer Jay Wolpert also worked on this show. Similar to the popular game Bingo, Money Makers required contestants to answer questions and fill out a bingo card using the number of points they won on the question. The row of four numbers served as the last four digits to a home viewer’s telephone number that Jim called giving the person a chance to win cash.

Goodbye Radio, Hello Television…Again

Back at WABC, Perry was given an early Sunday morning disc jockey show that aired from 3 to 5 a.m. beginning in 1970. He continued to deliver the news during the week nights and would pinch hit for other announcers at the station when needed. After four years in radio, Perry was itching to get back into television. The problem was that by the early 1970s, New York was rapidly dying as a television production center because everything was moving to Los Angeles. With no television prospects in New York, Perry considered other options.

“We Left As Dooley and Arrived As Perry”

In 1972 during his annual excursion to Toronto to host the Miss Canada Pageant, Perry was approached by the head of station CFTO-TV about hosting a regular series. “I said, ‘If you find a show for me, we’ll move here,’” Jim said in 2005. “I was as good as my word and he was as good as his word.” Perry was offered the daytime game show Eye Bet, which was seen nationally over the CTV network. Jim quit his job at WABC and moved the family to Toronto, Canada where they remained for the next six years. At the time of his move, his legal name was still Jim Dooley. Since he was becoming well known in Canada as Jim Perry, he decided to legally adopt his professional name. “We literally left the U.S. as Dooley and arrived in Canada as Perry, and it’s been Perry ever since,” he said.

When CTV realized that Jim was serious about moving to Canada, the network also offered him a weekly primetime show. Headline Hunters was a game that required its contestants to keep abreast of current affairs in the news. While Eye Bet only lasted for two years, Headline Hunters, became a top ten hit and lasted for a decade. Jim also found time to host the annual Santa Claus Parade for CTV.

The Definition of Success

In September 1974 after Eye Bet was cancelled, Jim became the announcer on a new show that began his longest running series: the game show Definition. Similar in format to Wheel of Fortune, the show aired at 6:00 p.m. every weeknight. Two celebrity/contestant teams solved puzzles by calling out letters a la Wheel of Fortune except that the players did not spin a wheel. Contestants solved puns and correct guesses allowed them to call out letters. An example pun had a four-letter answer. The pun was, “What happens when the smog lifts in California?” The answer: U.C.L.A (You See LA).

At the start of the show's second season in 1975, Jim took over as the host from Bob McLean. Definition became a ratings hit in Canada attracting an average of 750,000 viewers each night. The show not only featured Canadian celebrities, but it also attracted a number of American television and movie stars. “We had a lot of celebrities who would not do game shows in [the United States],” Jim said in 2005. “For a trip to Toronto on a weekend and to get paid, a lot of people went up and did it.”

Although most Americans likely never saw Definition, many have heard the program’s iconic theme song. The opening music used in the popular movie Austin Powers was the same music from Definition. The catchy tune was written by musician Quincy Jones. “My son asked Mike Myers (the star of Austin Powers), ‘Was that [theme] from my father’s show?’” Jim said. Myers said that it was. “He (Myers) said he wanted to throw in a little homage to the Canadians that the Canadians would get and the Americans wouldn’t.”

Compared to American game shows where thousands of dollars in cash and new cars were given away daily, Definition only gave away modest prizes such as color television sets, washers and dryers, and encyclopedias. The show did not give away a car until 1982 when a contestant won a mid-size Chevrolet during the show’s annual tournament of champions. Jim felt that a show like Definition would never be a hit in the United States. He pointed out in a 2005 interview how Definition was a very literate game show. “The Canadians have a very English background and the English are very big on word play,” he said. “So too are the Canadians. The Canadian audience will watch a more literate game.”

Play Your Cards Right

Jim's career boomed through the 1970s with multiple successes in Canada. His newfound success allowed Jim and June to buy a two story 200 year old log home in the country outside of Toronto in 1974. Here the family had plenty of peace and privacy away from the big city. During their six years in Canada, June took her interest in pottery and opened a craft and antique shop and also craft gallery. She built a gas kiln and built her own pots while learning more of the craft at various workshops offered by the local colleges in Southern Ontario.

However, by 1977, Jim started thinking seriously about taking another crack at the larger U.S. television market. He had two good reasons for considering a return to the U.S. For one, he had gone about as far as he could go in Canadian television. As the host of two game shows , the annual Miss Canada Pageant, and numerous specials for the CTV, Jim really had done just about everything. Secondly, the money he made from doing all of those shows was still only about half of what he could make hosting game shows in the U.S.

In a 1981 article in the Auburn Journal Sun, Jim said that he held a family meeting with June, Sean, and Erin to discuss the possibility of moving back to the U.S. so that he could pursue television jobs. All agreed that he should give the U.S. another shot, and the family prepared to move to California since that was where most television shows were produced. But Jim also had something else to consider before making a move. Since he was doing well in Canada and because the CTV network had been so good to him, Jim ultimately decided to continue hosting his game shows in that country and would commute to Toronto from his new home in California to carry out his Canadian work.

Before he started auditioning in the United States, Jim took steps to update his appearance. His hair had turned gray in his 30s and while the Canadians had no problem with Jim's gray hair, the U.S. audiences would not be as kind. He began coloring his hair black which made him look several years younger even though he was still a young man at 43 years of age. Jim began hosting all of his Canadian shows with his new look. He then went to Los Angeles in early 1978 and hired an agent to help him find a job. He was told to see Jonathan Goodson at Goodson-Todman Productions. At the time, the company was developing a new NBC game show called Card Sharks.

Jim had an advantage because there were two people on the Goodson-Todman staff who already knew him: Howard Felsher and Jay Wolpert. With Felsher and Wolpert pulling for him, Perry was signed to host Card Sharks in short order. Jim was also able to adjust his work schedule with Goodson-Todman and the CTV to accomodate all of his TV shows allowing him to work in both countries. Jim and June purchased a home in the Northridge area of Los Angeles and brought their family back to the U.S. Card Sharks took to the air over NBC daytime at 10:00 a.m. (EDT) on April 24, 1978. While Jim was working in TV, June started a new pottery business operating out of a studio set up in their new home.

Card Sharks hit the ground running and became a solid hit. Jim was now a bonafide television star in both the United States and Canada. The icing on the cake was the fact that Jim now made far more money by hosting Card Sharks than he did with all of his Canadian projects combined. Jim and his family were also very happy being back in the United States. “When I started Card Sharks, as far as most of the American public was concerned, they didn’t know me,” he said in 2005. “The U.S. networks, most of them did not know me. I used to laughingly say to people, ‘I was the most experienced unknown in American television.’ They think, ‘How did somebody get that good who has never done a game show?’ Well, I had done about 5,000 [shows] up to that point.”

While hosting Card Sharks in the United States, Perry continued flying to Canada once or twice a month to tape episodes for Headline Hunters and Definition. He also continued hosting the annual Miss Canada Pageant each fall.

On June 20, 1980, NBC canceled three of their six daytime game shows: Hollywood Squares, High Rollers, and Chain Reaction to make room for a new 90 minute talk/variety show hosted by comedian David Letterman. NBC scheduled The David Letterman Show to air from 10:00-11:30 AM each weekday morning. However, Card Sharks was still pulling good ratings and was spared from the cancellation axe, so NBC decided to move the show to a new timeslot the following Monday, June 23, 1980. In turned out to be one of the worst time slots for a show to have: Card Sharks moved to 12:00 PM where it was pre-empted on several NBC stations in favor of local newscasts. NBC had not been able to keep a game show in the 12:00 PM slot since Jeopardy! had last occupied that slot in January 1974. Card Sharks was no exception. The show lasted for 16 months in the new slot, but the loss of several NBC affiliates but a huge dent in the ratings. Card Sharks played its last game on October 23, 1981.

Several weeks after Card Sharks ceased production, Jim was approached by Nancy Jones, the producer of NBC’s Wheel of Fortune, about taking over as host from Chuck Woolery, who was leaving the series. At the time, Wheel of Fortune aired as a daytime series on NBC and had been one of the network's highest rated game shows. However, NBC nixed the idea of Jim hosting because he had just gone off the air from the network and executives felt it was too soon to bring him back. Jim continued his Canadian commute hosting his two game shows and annual beauty pageant. In the fall of 1982 Headline Hunters stopped production leaving only Definition as Perry’s livelihood.

At some point during the early 1980s, Jim and June uprooted and moved the family again. This time, the family moved to Montecito, California, a town located just south of Santa Barbara which was about an hour and a half north of Los Angeles. June was given a permit by the town to continue her pottery business and she set up a new studio in their home.

Not giving up on his U.S. television career, Jim continued to audition for other game shows. In October 1982, producer Bob Stewart called Jim to host an NBC game show pilot called Twisters. The game was a combination of shuffleboard and answering riddles. Stewart was having a problem finding an emcee and was hurrying to beat a deadline to get the pilot episode recorded. Knowing that Jim had a knack for learning the rules of a game quickly, Stewart called him in, and in one single day, Jim learned the game and taped the pilot. While Twisters did not sell, it helped Jim land his next American game show.

Australian television producer Reg Grundy had just sold a version of the game show Sale of the Century to NBC. Sale of the Century had aired on that network from 1969-1973 but had only been a moderate hit. Grundy purchased the rights to the show in 1980 and made it a hit in Australia. After seeing how successful the show was in that country, NBC entertainment president Brandon Tartikoff bought back the American rights from Grundy and relaunched the series. Jim was well known to Reg Grundy since Grundy produced an Australian version of Perry’s show Definition. Reg Grundy wanted Jim to host the American version of Sale of the Century, but Brandon Tartikoff was not convinced that Jim was right for the show.

Jim explained in an interview that Card Sharks had been a very high energy show and Tartikoff was having trouble envisioning him hosting a lower energy series like Sale of the Century. However, when Tartikoff saw Jim hosting the Twisters pilot and realized that he could run a completely different type of game from Card Sharks, Tartikoff changed his mind and gave the thumbs up for Jim to take the reins of the new show. Sale of the Century opened its NBC run on January 3, 1983 leading off a two hour block of game shows.

Sale of the Century had a very simple format: three contestants answered a series of rapid-fire questions for the right to purchase merchandise. The players started the game with $20. Correct answers added $5 to the contestants’ scores while wrong answers cost them $5. The game was periodically interrupted with “Instant Bargains.” The player in the lead was offered the chance to buy a prize at a greatly reduced price. For example, a $400 television set could be purchased for $11. If the player bought the prize, the purchase price was subtracted from their score. Perry frequently sweetened the deal by offering additional cash to the contestant.

Another game played during the show was “The Fame Game.” Jim read a series of clues pertaining to a famous person. The first player to buzz in with the correct answer chose one of nine numbers on a board. Behind each number were prizes and also money cards, which were added to the contestant’s score if selected. The game ended with a 60-second speed round of questions and the contestant with the most money went on to shop in the “sale of the century.”

On the stage were large and extravagant prizes such as cars, boats, and trips that the player could purchase using his/her winnings from the main game. The shopping segment was later replaced by contestants selecting numbers from a 20 square board until matching two identical prizes. In the last year of the show’s run, budget cuts by NBC resulted in another bonus round where the winner solved four puzzles in 20 seconds for a cash jackpot.

Sale of the Century was popular enough to spawn a syndicated nighttime edition from January 1985 to September 1986 with Jim hosting both versions. When CBS brought back Card Sharks for its daytime schedule in January 1986, they asked Jim to return as the host. However, since Jim was hosting two versions of Sale along with Definition and The Miss Canada Pageant, he turned down the job offer. Through the 1980s, Jim continued to hopscotch between the U.S. and Canada, but his career was about to undergo a drastic change. In March 1989, NBC canceled Sale of the Century after six years on the air. Simultaneously, Definition, which had been running for 15 years in Canada, was given the axe by CTV. Now without a regular TV series, Perry hosted the annual Miss Canada Pageant for two more years with his last one airing in October 1990. After 25 straight years on radio and television, Perry was suddenly out of a job.

The year 1989 marked a turning point for Jim. He auditioned for another game show later in the year but Jim could not remember which show it was since he did not get the job. With the game show market drying up in the United States, Jim had a lot of time on his hands. Without the constant running back and forth between two countries carrying his regular workload, Jim was suddenly at a standstill and found himself feeling very nervous and uncomfortable. He was forced for the first time in his life to deal with emotional problems that he had largely buried in his mind for the past 40 years. His childhood had been filled with loneliness and neglect and despite a successful career and a long and happy marriage with June, Jim still felt hollow on the inside. No amount of money and success could fill the void that he felt within himself.

The problem was that Jim had been running nonstop for so long that he had never taken the time to find out what his life was all about. He knew who the Jim Perry was on television but he had no idea who the off-screen Jim Perry was. "I've always had self confidence," he told Philip Marchand of The Toronto Star in 1992. "I knew what I could do. What I did not have was self-love. I couldn't look into the dark corners of myself and say, 'That's okay, that's me too. I wanted to be totally the guy on television, with everything going right, going smoothly. I found it difficult to admit any kind of failures of self. And it's easy to keep it up in that situation with everybody saying, 'Aren't you wonderful.' You begin to believe it yourself."

Jim began exploring those dark corners of his life to reconcile the two different versions of Jim Perry. “It was kind of interesting that the shows went off the air at the time they did,” he said in 2005. “Suddenly I was looking at, ‘What am I, who am I, and what’s going on with my life?’” After deeply exploring and confronting the darker areas of his life, Jim was moved to write a self-help book called The Sleeper Awakes: A Journey To Self-Awareness, which was published by Summit Books in 1991. In the book, he talked in-depth about the emotional roller coaster he rode while putting his life back in order.

Jim gradually emerged as a different man and finally made peace with his past. He was finally able to put the successes and failures of his life into perspective. Now, having been out of the television business for a few years, Jim discovered that he had no desire to go back. “I bumped into some people and they asked me, ‘How can you be retired? How do you feel about it?’” he said. “I feel great. I feel very complete. I was fortunate in how things worked out for me when I was done [in television] and moved on to other things and wrote books. I look back, and the idea of walking out on a stage, and everybody starting to applaud, seems like the silliest thing in the world to me.”

“There’s Got To Be a Pony In There Somewhere”

In the 1990s as Jim focused more on his personal life, he did not give up on television completely. In 1991 Jim did a cameo appearance on the late-night syndicated game show Studs. The show's host, Mark DeCarlo, had been a big winner on Sale of the Century in 1985, so Jim was invited to make a guest appearance on Mark's show. In 1993 Jonathan Goodson, the son of famed game show producer Mark Goodson, called Jim and asked him for a favor: would he host the pilot for a new lottery show franchise that the company had created called Lottery Cash Explosion? Goodson wanted something to show to the individual states who would buy the rights to produce the show. Jim said, "Sure." The show taped at CBS Television City in July 1993 and incorporated a series of mini-games similar to The Price Is Right. The show even taped on the same stage where Price was produced. This pilot was later edited and re-titled Cash Tornado. The pilot was successful enough to sell the lottery show franchise to several stations across the United States although Jim elected not to participate in the actual series. Later in the 1990s, Jim hosted a late-night infomercial with his daughter Erin.

In 1995 Jim and June relocated to Oregon living on a ranch, and Jim wrote a sequel to The Sleeper Awakes called There’s Got To Be a Pony In There Somewhere. However, Jim was unable to find a publisher with a distribution deal that he liked. The manuscript sat on his shelf for the next 15 years until it was finally published as an e-book on Amazon.com in 2012 under the title There's Gotta Be a Pony: Considerations on a Journey of Mastery. The second book picks up where his first one left off and continues the story of Jim's experiences of making peace with himself and finding total fulfillment in his life.

He explained how that book title applies to his own life. “There’s something good that happens in everything,” he said. “There’s a joke about a group of psychologists taking two young boys and they put one young boy in a room full of all these wonderful toys. The little boy sits there. [The psychologists] say, ‘Why won’t you play with these toys?’ [The boy] says, ‘Well, if I play with this one, you’ll take it away from me. If I play with this one, it’ll break and I’ll be unhappy.’ It goes on and on.

“They put the other boy into a room that is empty except for a pile of horse manure and a shovel. He happily starts digging away at the pile of horse manure. The psychologists say, ‘Why are you so happy?’ And he says, ‘Because there’s got to be a pony in there somewhere.’” To Perry, that says it all. He feels that every part of his life had something good to offer. “I regret none of it,” he said. “It was all wonderful. I learned from all of it, and I had great experiences. I look back and there was a pony in all of it.”

In 2001 Jim and June moved to Cocoa, Florida to be near his two sisters. Their daughter Erin worked as a rock singer living in Germany while son Sean worked in Los Angeles as a talent agent and developed a number of reality-based shows. In 2004 Jim and June purchased a summer home in Bakersville, North Carolina as a mountain getaway from the hot summers in Florida. “June is a potter, and a very good one,” Perry said. “Bakersville, North Carolina is noted for crafts people and pottery. We’re building a new pottery studio for her up there and looking forward to another chapter of our lives.” June started a new business called Shambhala Pottery and operated out of her studio in Bakersville.

Jim and June eventually sold their house in Cocoa, Florida and lived year-round in North Carolina. Jim and June enjoyed relatively good health in their seventies, but in 2010, Jim suffered a bad fall at his home and injured his back. He slowly recovered but a series of tests later that year revealed that he had cancer. A second bad fall on a patch of ice in their driveway a couple of years later further weakened Jim. However, he continued to live his life as normally as possible while treating the cancer. In April 2012, with Jim's health slowly declining, he and June moved to Eagle Point, Oregon so that they could be closer to their son, Sean, who also lived in that state. In the spring of 2015, Jim and June downsized to a smaller house in nearby Ashland, Oregon but Jim's health rapidly declined during the summer and fall.

On November 20, 2015, Jim died peacefully at home of cancer surrounded by his family just eleven days after his 82nd birthday. Even though Jim is no longer with us, he can be seen almost daily through reruns of Card Sharks and Sale of the Century on Buzzr TV and at other times on Game Show Network. Jim left behind a legacy as an entertainer and self-help teacher through his huge body of work.