| Elaine Trebek Kares | |
| Birth Name: | Elaine Howard |
| Birth Place: | Columbus, Ohio, U.S. |
| Children: | Nicky Trebek[1] |
| Alma Mater: | Ohio State University |
| Occupation: | Broadcaster, businesswoman |
Elaine Trebek Kares (Howard, formerly Callei) is an American businesswoman and former broadcaster. She was a Playboy Bunny in the 1960s and a television broadcaster on the program Call Callei in the 1970s.
Originally from Columbus, Ohio, and a journalism graduate of the Ohio State University,[2] she was a Playboy Bunny in the 1960s under the pseudonym "Teddy Howard".[3] With her first husband, Louis Callei, she later moved to Toronto, Ontario, Canada, where she ran her own promotion and party planning business before joining CHCH-TV in Hamilton as host of a daily talk show, Call Callei. The show was noted particularly for Callei's boundary-pushing interest in sexual topics; her 1972 interview with Xaviera Hollander led to a reprimand from the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission in early 1973.[4]
She left CHCH to take over as cohost of CTV's Canada AM in February 1973,[5] after Carole Taylor left the program to join W5;[6] however, she lasted only a few months before leaving the program by mutual agreement that she was not a good fit for a morning show, and was succeeded by Helen Hutchinson.[7] She married Alex Trebek in 1974,[8] returning to the United States as he pursued career opportunities there. They divorced amicably in 1981.[9] [10] She had no children with Trebek,[10] although he became adoptive father to her daughter from her previous marriage.[11]
She later remarried to film producer Peter Kares, and launched her own businesses, including Scent Seal, which created a new system for packaging perfume and fragrance samples,[12] and Mag-a-Music, an early foray into multimedia music distribution.[13]