Game Show Host and Television Personality, best remembered as the MC of the television game show, “The Price is Right,” currently the longest-running game show in television history (it started in 1972).  In 1999, he received a Lifetime Achievement Award for Daytime Television, as the show’s executive producer. Born Robert William Barker in Darrington, Washington, he spent much of his youth on the Rosebud Indian Reservation in South Dakota, where his mother was a schoolteacher.  After the family moved to Springfield, Missouri, he finished high school and attended Drury College on a basketball scholarship.   During World War II, in 1942, he enlisted in the US Navy, and studied to become a fighter pilot, but the war ended just after he completed his pilot’s qualifications, and he never left the United States.  He was commissioned an Ensign in December 1944, and after his release from active duty in November 1945, he remained in the Navy Reserve until December 1960, when he was retired as a Lieutenant Junior Grade.  Returning to Drury College on the GI Bill, he graduated summa cum laude with a degree in economics.  Working at a radio station, he discovered he could make people laugh, and soon he moved to Los Angeles, where he became the host of his own radio program, “The Bob Barker Show.”  In 1956, he took over the popular television program, “Truth or Consequences,” for the next 18 years and has stayed with television ever since.  He has been awarded over 16 Emmys for his work on television, and has set two Guinness Book of World Records, as television’s most durable performer for having over 3,525 shows, and as most generous host in television history, for giving away over $55 million in prizes.  In the mid-1970s, he founded the DJ&T Foundation in Beverly Hills, California, to provide free or low-cost spaying/neutering clinics throughout the United States.  He named the foundation after his wife, Dorothy Jo, and his mother, Tilly, both of whom loved animals.  In the last several years, he ends his show with “Help Control the Pet Population, Have your Pets Spayed or Neutered.”  As well as being an animal rights activist, he is also a vegetarian. (bio by: Kit and Morgan Benson)  Family links:  Parents:  Byron John Barker (1887 – 1930)  Matilda Tarleton Valandra (1897 – 1989)