Vanna White Reveals She Almost Retired With Pat Sajak

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Vanna White almost spun the wheel on her career.

Vanna White, the co-host of Wheel of Fortune, recently shared that she considered leaving the show around the same time as Pat Sajak announced his retirement in 2024 after hosting for 41 years.

Vanna told TopMob News that when Pat announced his retirement, she started considering retiring too. After working with him for so many years, she felt like it might be the right time for her to step down as well.

The 68-year-old woman said she felt conflicted about continuing the show with a new partner after being on it for over forty years.

She realized she wasn’t ready to retire. ‘I’m still enjoying myself, feeling good, and staying healthy,’ she explained. For now, she’s planning to take things one year at a time.

She doesn’t plan on retiring from Wheel of Fortune anytime soon, and she’s currently unsure what she’ll do with her career after the show, including whether she’ll pursue other television opportunities.

After spending so much time on Wheel of Fortune, she said she doesn’t feel like watching anything else on TV. She’s really looking forward to retiring and just playing golf.

Vanna, a part of the show since 1982, understands that life is full of surprises – you can’t predict what will happen next.

I’m currently happy with my work and enjoying my time on Wheel of Fortune. I’m taking things one year at a time and seeing how it goes. You never know what opportunities might come up, so I’m just focusing on the present and taking each day as it comes.

Vanna shares two children, Nicholas, 31, and Giovanna, 28, with her former husband, George Santo Pietro. She’s enjoying working with her new co-host, Ryan Seacrest, who began hosting in 2024.

She told TopMob that they have a great connection and work really well together. She described him as kind, professional, and dedicated, saying they just click. They’ve been working together for two years, and it feels like much longer.

Plus, it helped that she and Ryan had known each other for over 20 years before he joined the show.

“We do have some background friendship,” she added. “It all worked out just perfect.”

I’ve always loved how close she is with Pat, and she’s shared that they really only disagreed about one thing during all their years working together – whether or not ketchup belongs on a hot dog! It’s so funny to think that after everything, that’s what they argued about.

“I do,” she laughed. “He does not. He said that’s wrong.”

You can watch Wheel of Fortune every weeknight on ABC. Episodes become available to stream on Peacock and Hulu the following day. Plus, there’s a special holiday edition of Celebrity Wheel of Fortune on December 18th at 8 p.m.

For a look at some behind-the-scenes facts from Wheel of Fortune, keep reading. 

As a lifestyle expert, I’ve always been fascinated by enduring classics, and Wheel of Fortune is definitely one of those! Did you know it all started back in 1975? Merv Griffin created the show, originally a daytime program on NBC, and it was cleverly based on the classic game Hangman. It wasn’t long before it became a household name!

Now, most of us can’t imagine Wheel of Fortune without Pat Sajak and Vanna White. Pat took the hosting reins in 1981, and Vanna joined him as his wonderful co-host the following year. By 1983, the show had expanded into syndication, reaching even more viewers! And recently, in 2021, we got a fun spin-off with Celebrity Wheel of Fortune on ABC.

Pat’s journey to becoming a game show icon is pretty interesting too. He’s originally from Chicago and started his career in broadcasting, even serving in the Army and working with Armed Forces Radio in Vietnam. He wore many hats – staff announcer, talk show host, even a weatherman! Can you believe he was a star weatherman in Los Angeles when Merv Griffin called with the opportunity to host Wheel of Fortune? He actually joked to his daughter, Maggie Sajak, in a recent interview that he initially thought the job wouldn’t be much of a challenge – just saying a few letters! Shows you how much he underestimated its impact, right? It’s a testament to the show’s lasting appeal and the charm of its hosts!

Vanna grew up in South Carolina and initially studied fashion design in Atlanta. She then moved to Los Angeles to pursue acting, where she was discovered and auditioned for Wheel of Fortune. In a 2019 interview with CBS 58, she recalled being incredibly nervous, as she was the last of 200 hopefuls to audition.

Interestingly, Wheel of Fortune has shared that the first letter Vanna ever turned on the puzzle board was T.

Jim Thornton became the show’s announcer in 2011. Before that, he had a successful career doing voice-over work for various movies, TV shows, and commercials, including Monsters, Inc., Rugrats, and Celebrity Deathmatch.

Pat Sajak and Vanna White worked together on Wheel of Fortune for over 8,000 episodes and 41 seasons before Pat’s retirement in June 2024. Pat earned a Guinness World Record in 2019 for being a game show host for the longest career. Vanna also holds a record – in 2013, Guinness World Records recognized her as the “most frequent clapper,” estimating she clapped over 3.4 million times in 30 seasons. Considering her occasional absences, this averages to about 606 claps per show.

With over 20 million weekly viewers (according to a 2023 announcement), Wheel of Fortune is a hugely popular game show. Over its 41 seasons, the show has given away almost 600 cars and nearly 5,000 vacations. As of 2024, Wheel of Fortune has awarded over $324 million in cash and prizes to lucky contestants.

Vanna White has walked the equivalent of two marathons (around 52 miles!) while assisting contestants on the show. Over the years, she’s worn over 7,000 dresses, but doesn’t get to take them home. Remarkably, for almost four decades, she never wore the same dress twice! She even shared a video on social media in 2020, jokingly lamenting that she’d worn a particular blue dress for a second time, calling it a sign of the times.

No game of Wheel of Fortune would be complete without its iconic wheel! It’s massive, weighing in at 2,400 pounds, according to ABC News. The wheel is also uniquely portable; the show disassembles and rebuilds it at each location, traveling with over a million pounds of equipment overall. And the Bonus Wheel itself contains more than 24 prize envelopes, as reported by ABC News.

If you’re ever confused about how the show operates, Vanna White can explain it. She revealed in a 2015 interview that filming takes just four days, but they record six episodes each day.

In 2022, Wheel of Fortune updated its puzzle board with one large screen. Vanna explained in a YouTube video that she doesn’t even need to touch the new board; she simply holds her hand near it.

Interestingly, the cost to buy a vowel has remained consistent at $250 for the last forty years, despite changes in other prices.

Have you ever wondered how Pat Sajak instantly knows the number of letters in a puzzle after a contestant guesses? He shared in a 2021 video that a team listens to ensure the correct letter is called, then displays the number of letters on a screen only he can see from his hosting position.

Contestants on Wheel of Fortune have a helpful tool viewers don’t see: a letter board that lights up when a consonant or vowel is called, and turns off once it’s been used. This helps them avoid calling out the same letter twice, though Pat Sajak jokes that they sometimes do anyway, understanding the pressure they’re under.

Pat is also responsible for the popular Toss-Up puzzles. The show needed more content without adding a lot of time, so he created them. The producer later added the Triple Toss-Up, and Pat suggested a $10,000 prize for solving all three, jokingly saying it wasn’t his money to worry about!

A 2015 analysis by The Washington Post examined over 1,500 bonus puzzles from 2007-2015. It found that the letters H, G, P, and O were most common (after accounting for the letters R, S, T, L, N, and E already provided). Surprisingly, players tended to choose letters like C, D, M, and A more often, even though those letters appeared less frequently in the puzzles according to the analysis.

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2025-12-11 00:23