No, that happened when I watched it too (I live in Kansas City).
Thanks for pointing out that the producers knew about it! My misake! 
It would have been a great one hour show, but it was a plodding two hour show. I was struck by how easy it was to pull off. He kept landing on the same square over and over again. Once the other contestant found out the secret he was able to do the same thing very easily in the re-creation. The manic glee of Larson as he got more and more money was just fascinating to watch. It was like he was finally proving to the world that he was smarter than people thought he was. CBS was lucky that he finally passed those spins, he could have won a quarter of a million easily.
This site gives the briefest of updates; it appears he’s alive and doin’ fine.
Boy, I’d like a chance to see those episodes again. Thom was one of the first game show contestants I remember following.
-M
Don’t you think P.T. Barnum would’ve absolutely loved this?
I posted that? I thought that I hadn’t. Oh well, thanks for answering it, The Man Who.
I dunno, sooner or later he would have screwed up and hit too early or too late. On his very last spin, in fact, he missed a whammy by about half a second. That would have been a dramatic ending.
GSN ran the last two episodes of Lt. Thom’s run during their “Festival of Favorites” marathon last Thanksgiving. They also ran the last two episodes of the “Joker’s Wild” $1,000,000 tournament from about the same time (1981-82) in which one player won $250,000 (his purse was $500,000 but half went to a charity).