Everyone who has ever watched the long-running television game show Wheel of Fortune has had this experience: You stare at the screen with baffled rage, unable to understand why a simple puzzle is giving the contestants so much trouble.

“How could you not know this?” you shout at the screen, as a contestant stares slack-jawed and confused at the arrangement of lit-up letters that could spell only one thing. “What is wrong with this country?” you scream to no one in particular, as it dawns on you that BOOK TITLE: CR_ME AND P_N_ _ _ MEN_ has actually stymied three adult Americans.

“I’d like to buy a vowel,” one of the contestants says. “Is there an ‘O’?”

“It’s not Crome and Ponishment, you idiot!” you bellow. “Where do they get these people?” If you’re watching at home you’ll turn away from the screen in disgust. And if you’re not, someone else — often, the bartender — will tell you to pipe down because you’re annoying the other customers.

And through it all, on the screen, Pat Sajak — the gentleman impresario and host of Wheel of Fortune — remains implacably upbeat and encouraging. If a contestant wants to buy a vowel, he cheerfully sells him a vowel. Even if it’s an “O.”

“Sorry,” he says to the moron who bought the vowel, “there is no ‘O.’” And the game continues until the ageless hostess of Wheel of Fortune, Vanna White, turns over the remaining letters to spell out the complete title of Fyodor Dostoevsky’s second novel.

“Do you ever just want to scream at them?” I asked Pat Sajak once, “when the answer is obvious and they’re just not getting it?”

“Scream at them?” he asked.

“Yeah,” I said. “When they buy a vowel instead of solving the puzzle. I yell at the screen all the time.”

“You yell at my show?”

“Sometimes I find your contestants frustrating,” I said.

He looked at me with a disappointed expression. “They’re nice people, Rob,” he said, “and they’re not used to being on a TV set, and there’s an audience there, all kinds of pressure. It’s harder than it looks.”

You could say that about a lot of things, of course, but especially being a game-show host. When Pat Sajak took the helm of Wheel of Fortune in December 1981, America was a very different place. Ronald Reagan was eleven months into his two-term presidency; Warren Burger was the chief justice of the United States; the Best Picture Oscar that year went to the maudlin, over-the-top drama Ordinary People; and the top television comedy was The Jeffersons, followed closely by Three’s Company.

The world, I don’t need to tell you, has gotten a lot more lurid since then. In almost every way, we’ve become a louder and coarser culture. Social media have encouraged us to gush and spill every passing thought or half-baked opinion that comes into our heads, and as a result we’re all rubbing each other the wrong way. For four decades, as America has gotten noisier and weirder, Pat Sajak has provided an oasis of civil, low-key gamesmanship, which is harder than it looks.

Pat has retired from his regular duties on Wheel of Fortune, but he will remain the host — along with Vanna White — of Celebrity Wheel of Fortune, at least for another year. Show business has a hard time letting go of someone with Pat’s audience appeal. The oasis is still open for (limited) business.

Wheel of Fortune is a simple show, basically a game of Hangman on television — Pat Sajak likes to point that out as often as possible — and it was never a program for brainiacs and show-offs like, say, Jeopardy! On that show, host Alex Trebek always seemed to be implying that he knew the answers to every question. When a contestant got it wrong, Trebek would correct him with a touch of attitude in his voice: No, the answer is, of course, “What is the atmosphere of Neptune?” Alex Trebek, in other words, was a quiz-show host. Pat Sajak is a broadcaster. And there’s a difference.

A successful broadcaster needs to preside over a ceremony with enough personality and wit to keep it lively and fun, but not too much to turn people off. A truly great broadcaster is a natural-born host: generous and charming and quick to overlook humiliations like not seeing Crime and Punishment when it’s practically laid out in front of you. The great American broadcasters — and I put Pat Sajak in that category — have a dressed-up Midwestern quality that is a complicated blend of local bank president, country-club cut-up, and popular Presbyterian minister. Johnny Carson, for instance, went from small-town Nebraska to radio star to game-show host to the king of the Tonight show. Ronald Reagan, too, began his career on the radio, calling baseball games, and then moved through nearly every show-business category — television host, nightclub entertainer, governor — before moving to the really Big Time. And if you close your eyes, you can easily imagine Ronald Reagan hosting the Tonight show or Johnny Carson spinning the Wheel of Fortune. There’s something smart and decent about all of those men, but there is also a touch of the wiseass — Carson with his arch looks into the camera, Reagan with his slightly naughty eye twinkle, and Pat Sajak with the wry spin he would put on “Sorry, there is no ‘O,’” letting us know that he knew that we knew that he knew there is no such book as Crome and Ponishment. It’s a classic American-broadcaster type. You don’t see it much on television — or anywhere, unfortunately — these days.

Pat Sajak’s story is also classically American. Born in Chicago, in very tough economic circumstances, Pat joined the Army and headed off to Vietnam, where he served as a popular disc jockey on the Armed Forces Network. When he returned stateside, he restarted his radio career, moved into television, and eventually started playing Hangman and selling vowels for a living. Since then, he has hosted his own talk show, appeared in movies and television shows, and served on the boards of Hillsdale College, Eagle Publishing, and the Claremont Institute.

Yeah, you heard me. Pat’s a conservative. (You probably knew that.) But it is a testament to Pat’s charm and broadcasting skills that he has never hidden his political leanings from a business that’s overwhelmingly progressive, and he has never felt he had to. There are, of course, many conservatives in Hollywood — some keep it under wraps, others can’t wait to shout it from the rooftops — but Pat is one of the few center-right figures in show business who elected to do something practical and useful to support the ideas that he believes in — by serving institutions he cares about — rather than shouting on cable news or, worse, bringing his politics into the blissful simplicity of Wheel of Fortune.

The trick to being a legendary broadcaster, in other words, isn’t that much different from being a good neighbor or decent citizen — you need a light touch, a sense of humor, and a willingness to remind jerks like me that most things are harder than they look.