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But that wasn't the only way someone could make bank passively watching television. Many a housewife in the 1960s, and well into the mid-1970s, would be sitting at home eating Bon Bons when the phone rang and a familiar voice asked, "This is Charlie Harville from Channel Eight's Dialing for Dollars calling. Do you know the count and the amount?" If fair maiden was watching the morning or afternoon movie she would know that the "count" was the number spun on the wheel early in the program, and the "amount" (what she could win) would be the money accumulated since the last winner. Dialing for Dollars was a local production but a national concept, a weekday game played on the air live three or so times during a movie or a block of sitcom reruns. The host would start with an amount of money usually associated with the channel number (channel 8 would start with $8.00, for instance) and that number was added to the pot each day that someone failed to provide the correct answer when the host called. Then again, the chances of a station actually reaching someone that was watching and paying attention was small enough that the amounts often climbed into the hundreds of dollars. Rhode Island's WLNE's Dialing For Dollars Movie in October of 1987 had a $5,000 call one day. Must have been ratings week! Some family members would watch the movie just long enough to get the count and the amount during the first commercial break then post the numbers by the phone, just in case. We know this because it wasn't uncommon for a viewer to quote the numbers from the day before. Ouch! The day you didn't watch was the day they called. Because it was played live there aren't a lot of surviving Dialing for Dollars segments. Philadelphia's Jim O'Brien was so popular on Channel 6 the program had a studio audience.
KCOP in Los Angeles had their own version of Dialing for Dollars with host Johnny Gilbert. On their 1974 segments, guests would come on to plug their products or events. Oprah Winfrey even hosted Dialing for Dollars in 1979 on Chicago's Channel 13: George L. Davis "Dialing for Dollars" WFBM-TV Channel 6 Indianapolis 1970:
Host George Allen of DIALING for DOLLARS was a popular 4PM movie time spot on WLNE 6 out of Providence-New Bedford in the 70's into the 80's:
This was a bit of a rarity, by the eighties it became a liability putting someone you randomly called on the air live although the game continued in some places into the 1990s, smaller markets I'm guessing. In bigger cities, people were liable to say anything n live TV! And they did - cursing and making rude remarks because, after all, they had nothing better to do in the afternoons but watch television in an era of very few channels to chose from. MAKING MONEY WATCHING TV IN THE 60s: |
HORSE RACING & BINGO Making money watching TV?
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Grocery store sponsored Horse Racing and Bingo games were two ways to make some moolah watching TV shows in the 1960s, you did it by matching the scorecards you got for grocery purchases with the Bingo numbers called on a weekend television show - or the horse race results you tuned into on Saturday nights broadcast on your local station. 
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