Who Was Allen Ludden? All About Betty White's Emmy Award-Winning Husband

White called her husband "the love of my life" in a 2011 interview with CNN's Anderson Cooper

Published on January 3, 2022 01:42PM EST

With his trademark horn-rimmed glasses, Allen Ludden looked like a guy who was more at home in a college seminar on quantum physics than in a television studio.

Despite the bookish exterior, he had an infectious energy that made him one of TV's most popular game show hosts from the 1950s through the '70s. The secret to his personal charm? "It was his enthusiasm," Betty White said of her husband of 18 years during a 2012 interview with Piers Morgan on CNN. "He was interested in everything."

Hailing from Mineral Point, Wisconsin, and raised in San Antonio, Ludden, born Oct. 5, 1917, studied English at the University of Texas. He served as an Army officer during World War II and eventually found work with the CBS radio network. In that time he also married girlfriend Martha McGloin and began growing their family.

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Eager to develop educational ideas for students, Ludden began hosting the TV game show G.E. College Bowl in 1953. He followed that with the CBS series Password, which ran from 1961 to 1967, introducing the idea of celebrities teaming up with contestants. It also introduced him to White, who appeared in the first season.

McGloin died of cancer in 1961, leaving Ludden with three children, David, Martha and Sarah. Ludden soon became smitten with White, and after he proposed to her several times, in 1963, White, who had been married twice before, finally said yes.

"I just wasn't about to take another chance," White said in the 2012 CNN interview. "Then I thought, 'Am I going to live the rest of my life without this man?' Thank goodness we got married when we did."

In 1976 Ludden still seemed to have his winner's touch. He picked up his first Emmy as TV's top daytime announcer and subsequently began massaging celebrity egos on the NBC game show Stumpers. "He's the perfect host," raved producer Lin Bolen in a 1976 PEOPLE interview. "You can't write lines as good as the ones he keeps coming up with spontaneously."

But his luck did change. Ludden was diagnosed with terminal stomach cancer in the late 1970s. The disease progressed slowly, affording him and White time to build a dream getaway home in Carmel, California.

In his final days, "we took him back up to see the house finished," White recalled to PEOPLE in 1999. "He slept there two nights." Ludden died at 63 on June 9, 1981.

White remembered being home alone days after that: "I came upstairs, and our dogs were lying on his robe. I just fell apart, and we sat there together on the floor."

The actress never remarried, because, as she told Anderson Cooper in 2011, "I had the love of my life. If you've had the best, who needs the rest?"

Today, White's and Ludden's stars on the Hollywood Walk of Fame remain next to each other. "I cannot express what this day means to me," a teary White told the crowd at the unveiling of Ludden's star in 1988. "Don't be surprised if in the wee hours of the morning our stars are fooling around."

For more on White and Ludden's love story, pick up PEOPLE's Special Issue, America's Golden Girl: Betty White, available on Amazon.com now.