I'd been waiting to hear publicly again from Barker, but the entire time, I felt I had to give the chap some leeway as he'd already wrapped 35 years of near-daily TV appearances within a TV and film career that began decades before.

I had the chance to see him once in 2003, when it was still possible to visit as studio audience members while he hosted. Like much of the North American population, I'd grown up seeing him host The Price Is Right through childhood, and now that I think of it, it must have complemented, if not fuelled, my developing thoughts and mental exercises around math and numbers, and the design and flow of television shows. The "big wheel" might be among the likeliest of human things to begin to make basic sense even to a visiting extraterrestrial, and certainly to a child only just starting to work out what words and amounts are. The final showdown, the show's most bureaucratic segment, I referred to as "the flower game."

But those elements were peripheral to the host. His first day on, he appeared with the face of an average-looking man and the practiced cadence of what would now be called an "old-time" (if not "olde-tyme") radio announcer. The term "game show" was still forming, as "The New Price Is Right," actually a reboot of a prior show, was considered a new member in the existing space of "audience participation shows." The host needed to involve audience members in a way that made them feel welcome, excited and engaged, and Barker was the one for that.

Game show hosts have seemed friendly, boorish, irreverent, dopey, intellectual – whatever the executives think will strike up viewers, I suppose. What seemed irreplaceable about him was a certain fusion of a childlike whimsical and human side with the kind of crystallized personality of the time from which my own grandparents came; a sort of basic expectation of dignity and civility in everything that I grew up witnessing without knowing the day and age that would have shaped and formed it. This made his offhand jokes and improvisations particularly enjoyable and amusing. During a commercial break on our day in the studio, after a headache was reported by an audience member, Barker asked whether a stagehand could run down to the convenience store and get him something. Insincere, of course, but everything he came up with depended similarly on a sense of priority for the enjoyment of those he was hosting.

His latest surprise appearance on The Price Is Right for an April Fools episode in 2015, almost a decade after he retired with hair that had long been white, has come and gone from YouTube, but that final hosting of an opening segment deserves to be permanently restored by CBS. His conscious presentation was always the ready fusion of his personality and his age, and this data point fit the graph hearteningly. I doubt I've ever seen a recording of a more enthusiastic room of strangers.

Now, I'm here because I was selected by The Price Is Right to be their April Fool! And I know the world is full of fools, but I… am a carefully selected fool.

I listened through Barker's autobiography, Priceless Memories, a few years ago, taking in his thoughts on the war, the culture, his constant small decisions made to promote the well-being of animals, and of course, the intricacies and frustrations of his career. Perhaps most significant and unexpected were his words about his wife, "Dorothy Jo." I'm glad that today, "traditional marriage" is merely one expectable manifestation among many of individuals' choices around companionship, but this story reminded me how long it's been since I'd heard a heartfelt story of two people who came to support and rely on each other so steadfastly for so long. Dorothy knew she would die long before Bob did, and she advised him to embrace solitude, telling him there was great joy to be found in it. Bob relayed those words and said he found she was right. I can attest as well to fondness both for good company and good solitude.

I've never gravitated towards learning history. But when comparing today's society to "yesterday's," I'm left with the feeling there are many today who could benefit by watching and listening to Bob Barker, and trying to work out what it was about people with his "way" that perhaps even Bob wouldn't have thought to ramble about. Many full episodes of The Price Is Right from "The Barker Era," as CBS now calls it, are available on Pluto TV, streaming in "traditional" fashion with ad breaks. Quite an evolution with an appropriate similarity to the primitive.