So Mr. Barker did what any sensible job applicant would do. ''I put on my naval officer's uniform and my wings of gold and went in and talked about airplanes for about 30 or 45 minutes,'' he said recently, ''and I had my first job in radio.''
When he is hugging grandmothers or quizzing college students or consoling anguished overbidders on the set of ''The Price Is Right,'' it is hard to imagine that anything as crass as ambition is what motivates Bob Barker.
But nobody gets to do anything quite so public as be the host of television's most popular game show for 35 years without setting a few goals. How he achieved many of them will become clear starting on Wednesday, when CBS will broadcast two consecutive nights of prime-time specials celebrating Mr. Barker's retirement, the first a special edition of ''The Price Is Right'' and the second a retrospective of Mr. Barker's 50 years in television.
Few people in show business have come as far as Mr. Barker. When he was born, his parents were living in a tent in rural Washington. His father died when he was 6, and he grew up on the Rosebud Indian Reservation in South Dakota, where his mother was a schoolteacher.
He went on to train as a Navy fighter pilot during World War II, but the war ended before he was sent to battle. Then he got that job at the radio station, and everything changed.
Fast forward some 60 years, and Mr. Barker, 83, is now on the verge of retirement, having broken Johnny Carson's record -- five years ago -- for the longest continuous performance on the same network television show and having won 17 Emmy Awards as a host and producer.
He has received just about every honor the television industry has to offer, has been installed in the Television Academy Hall of Fame and works in the Bob Barker Studio at CBS Television City in Hollywood.
And sometime in the next few months, CBS will show the final episode of ''The Price Is Right,'' featuring Mr. Barker.
''I haven't regretted the fact that I've announced my retirement,'' Mr. Barker said in an interview recently in his home in the Hollywood Hills. ''I announced it in October, and I thought by November I'd be regretting it. Now, I don't know what it will be like when I wake up and find there's no show. I may just pull the covers over my head and stay there.''
It is unlikely, however, that even a retired Bob Barker could do anything so passive. From the moment he began working at that radio station in Springfield, Mo., he was looking for the next opportunity. Hired as a local news writer, he also began doing sportscasts. Then he filled a slot as a disc jockey. Then the host of one of the station's regular audience-participation shows was unexpectedly absent one day, and Mr. Barker stepped in.
When he arrived home that day, his wife, Dorothy Jo, who was also his high school sweetheart, told him that being the host of a show was what he should do.
''She said, 'You did that better than anything you've ever done,' '' he recalled. ''We set out from that moment forward to get a national show for me. She produced my shows, she helped me write them, she edited them, she did everything and anything to help me get a national show. And I've been doing a show for 62 years.''
While ''The Price Is Right'' has been his longest-running show, at 35 years, people of a certain age will remember that before that there was ''Truth or Consequences,'' which Mr. Barker was host of for 18 years. A sort of game show in which the contestant had to answer an almost unanswerable question or face the consequences, which usually involved participation in a wacky stunt, it also often featured a ''This Is Your Life'' component of a reunion with a long-lost relative.
Through those 50 years on television (the two shows overlapped for three years), Mr. Barker has made a specialty of giving contestants the chance to make a dream come true. His great strength, and certainly the key to his longevity, is that, whatever happens to the contestants, he is able to have them leave happy, feeling unjudged and appreciated.
Those 50 years have turned Mr. Barker into much the same person in private that he is on camera. He tells stories with the same measured cadence, mixing in a few self-deprecating jokes. And it does not take more than a couple of hours to begin to hear him repeat some lines or phrases that, deeper research shows, he has been saying in the same way and circumstances for decades.
It has not all been fun and games, of course. Most notably, there were the lawsuits, one from a former model on ''The Price Is Right'' with whom the widowed Mr. Barker had an affair, another from a model who charged that she had been fired because her age and weight had begun creeping up. The lawsuits were dropped or settled, and Mr. Barker makes regular jokes about them now.
Just about anyone who was born in the 20th century and spent a day home sick in bed has seen ''The Price Is Right,'' in which contestants ''Come on down!'' from the studio audience and try to guess the price of prizes, from banjos to snowmobiles to appliances, pop-up trailers and, of course, a new car.
Fiercer than the competition to win prizes, however, is the effort required to get on the show. On April 30 the first family in line for the studio audience arrived 29 hours before the taping was scheduled to begin. Because the audience fills up first come first served, more than 300 people had camped out overnight on Fairfax Avenue in Hollywood, wrapped in blankets purchased at a nearby Kmart.
The competition was not always so fierce, but with only a few shows remaining before Mr. Barker's retirement, few people are willing to leave the effort to chance.
Chance sometimes wins, however. On the same day that one family waited 29 hours, the day's showcase winner, Paula Bond, showed up with her sister and mother just a few hours before the taping and were put on a standby list. Two hours before the show, they were told that they would be getting in, and Ms. Bond left as the day's big winner, with $36,388 in cash and prizes.
The specific air date for the final episode with Mr. Barker as host of ''The Price Is Right'' has not been revealed, as that installment could be used to help promote the premiere of the show under a new host next fall.
Who will replace Mr. Barker has been the subject of widespread speculation, though he insists he does not know the answer and will not be involved in the decision. Rosie O'Donnell is said to have expressed interest, and several potential replacements have been auditioned, including the actor Mario Lopez and Mark Steines, a host of ''Entertainment Tonight.''
Many observers doubted whether anyone would be able to replace Johnny Carson, whose longevity streak Mr. Barker surpassed. This retiring host, however, said he believed that the show would survive without him. While people's looks might have changed over the years, he said, people ''haven't changed in any of the ways that are important.''
