By Sean Sullivan Lagniappe columnist

Ohh the passing of time, the landmarks of pop culture fall like giant hollow, plastic redwoods leaving space for a new generation of pop icons to do their best to grow the fastest and take their rightful place in the verdant canopy of the American psyche.

One of those redwoods fell last week when on a very poignant Bob Barker-hosted “Price is Right” finale, he said “come on down” for his last time and took off his game show captain’s hat and abandoned ship, sexy first mates and all.

The genesis of this plank of American game show culture started in the mid ‘50s and it began to look and sound like the ””Price is Right”” we know today in 1972, the year I was born. So for my whole life there has been a Bob Barker-hosted “Price is Right” on television. Through my childhood and most of my teenage years I was not much of a game show watcher, but the omnipresence of the show made me, while an extremely casual viewer of the program, familiar with its games, music and nuances by the time I left for college.

There in college, where watching ridiculous “old people programming” was a badge of honor, I consummated what had long been just a distant and flirtatious relationship with America’s favorite television pricing game.

It was under the constructs of some sort of epic joke that I started watching the “Price,” but over a short honeymoon I was hitched to the show. What began as a goof turned into a real passion. I started caring how much a motor home, Buick Skylark and hot tub were “actually” worth and felt good about myself if I out guess the contestants.

The blip, blip, blip of the wheel on the “Showcase Showdown,” the incessant whir of bells ringing when someone guessed the actual retail price of a treadmill are the soundtrack to many a college memory of mine. I studied to the sound of “come on down!” There was a time I watched split screen coverage of a tornado’s path through neighboring Northport and was grateful they didn’t completely pre-empt the “Showcase Showdown” for something as temporary as a tornado.

And I remember breaking up with a girlfriend, there in my rental house living room, while watching in my periphery some lucky contestant play “Cliffhanger” for a trip to Cozumel. The way smells and sounds are linked to many of our most vivid lifetime memories, some of mine are linked to the stimulus of America’s favorite pricing game.

Early on, the sight of lovely showcase models helped me recruit friends and roommates into watching the show until they were hooked as well and it became unspoken that at 10 on weekday mornings we stopped for the “Price.” I worked for a morning radio show for the bulk of my time in school and used the “Price is Right” to transition from my broadcast life to my academic life in the afternoons.

My intimate knowledge of a game show that is targeted to homemakers and not smart ass college punks, made me uncharacteristically hip to the stage on which the lawsuit of Dian Parkinson took place. Do you remember Ms. Parkinson, one of the first showcase models to sue Barker? She opened the Pandora’s Showcase of lawsuits that alleged sexual harassment, racial discrimination and wrongful termination against the loveable long-mic-toting Barker.

Most of the cases were settled out of court so who knows what really happened, but the image of Bob as a long-suffering widower might have gotten a bit tarnished in the wake of the allegations.

As with every great hero Barker had a trusty sidekick, for many years this was in the form of the portly and gold lame-jacketed Rod Roddy. While Rod wasn’t Barker’s first announcer or his last, he was his best.

In one of my very few lifetime brushes with naiveté I used to wonder why Rod Roddy traveled to Thailand on vacation so much. The official explanation of Roddy’s Thai trips was to get more of his trademark flamboyant sports coats made and I’m sure Barker was busy enough with his own distractions to not really give much thought to what a single Rod was doing in southeast Asia a couple of times a year, so I’ll give Barker a pass on that one.

Other than his questionable safaris to Bangkok, Roddy seemed to be a pretty solid Tennille to Barker’s Captain. While the years passed so did the showcase models and Buick Skylarks, but the pricing game double team of Barker and Roddy was a constant until Roddy’s death in 2003. Although I had parted ways with the show in the mid-’90s, I was upset when I heard that my favorite daytime couple had been separated by death.

The other timeless mantra of the Bob Barker was to have your pets spayed or neutered. The hosts’ call to limit the pet population is heartfelt, of course. I think it is an icing on a larger cake of spaying and neutering humans. After all his years dealing with contestants who’s I.Q. barely qualified them to stand upright, I imagine he would like to see a smaller population of humans as well.

So here we are at one of those watershed moments in American pop culture, sometime soon when CBS hires their new host, the showcases of old will become history and not pop culture and all of us, along with Barker will begin our descent into history.

Sean Sullivan is Lagniappe lagniappe columnist. Contact him at ssullivan@lagniappemobile.com.

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