He Won a Jeep on TV, but a $154 Ceramic Dog Became the Heirloom

Terry Eldridge was hunkered down in a windowless college rec room his dorm mates called the bomb shelter. It was a winter afternoon, and a crowd of friends had gathered around the television because Terry's father, Roy, a retired Denver police officer, had called with instructions to watch.

What they saw was surreal. Roy, who was then working as chief of physical security for a government facility, was standing on the set of Wheel of Fortune, the television game where contestants guess letters to solve word puzzles and spin a giant wheel for money. He was good. He finished the day as the biggest earner and made the bonus round, where he won a red Jeep Wrangler valued at $12,765.

Terry, then 19 or 20 and in college in Iowa, was already claiming the keys in his head. His father did not need a Jeep, he reasoned, but a college kid certainly did.

That is the story of a game show win. What happened next is the story of why a family kept the consolation prize instead.

In those years, winners on the show could not take their cash home. Players had to spend it on the spot in a shopping round, picking from the cars, trips, and jewelry displayed on stage. Roy bought gold plated sunglasses priced at $300, which Terry thought looked like something from Elvis's wardrobe, and other prizes. When players were down to their last $150 or so, there was almost nothing left they could afford except one thing.

It was a ceramic Dalmatian, a black and white spotted dog made of baked clay, priced at $154. Host Pat Sajak called it the favorite mascot. Terry described it as kind of a consolation prize, the thing you ended up with when you did not have enough left for anything else. Roy took one home.

Roy kept the dog for years. After Terry finished school, married, and bought a house of his own, his father told him, "Hey, take the dog home with you." For more than 20 years since, the Dalmatian has sat at the top of Terry's stairs, standing watch over the hallway.

The dog outlasted almost everything else. By the time Roy died, his belongings had grown smaller with every move after what Terry Eldridge described as years in "a medical facility for dementia and some physical ailments." The Dalmatian remained as a physical reminder, and Terry jokes that having a dog guard the upstairs hallway is fitting because his father was in law enforcement.

Asked whether he was happy to have ended up with the dog instead of the beautiful red Jeep, Terry answered, "Heck no. I would have loved to have the Jeep." But he added that the dog means more to him now. They call it Sajak, after Pat Sajak, and Terry says he plans to keep it for good.