By Donna M. Perry,Staff Writer

WILTON – Spinning the “Wheel of Fortune” isn’t as easy as it looks.

“It’s a very, heavy wheel,” Carol Ross said Tuesday.

Anyone watching the taped episode of the Wheel of Fortune at 7 p.m., Monday, May 23, on ABC’s Channels 7 and 8 will get to see how she handled the wheel and her game.

Ross will be the one standing closest to Pat Sajak.

“I did better than the consolation prize, but I’m still keeping my day job,” Ross said.

That’s the answer she gives to anyone who asks how she did, she said, since she’s sworn to secrecy until the show is broadcast.

Ross, who works as a secretary at the University of Maine Cooperative Extension in Farmington, has kept the results of her game secret for months. The only ones that know how she did are family members who went to California with her.

Ross, who has watched the game show for years, is good at solving puzzles. When she heard the show’s “Wheelmobile” would be in Bangor last August, she knew she had to go. She kept her trip secret, except for her youngest daughter, Elizabeth, who questioned why she wasn’t going to church that Sunday.

“I just had to do this,” Ross said. “I just had to find out.”

Once in Bangor, Ross waited in line with hundreds of others hoping to get a chance to spin that wheel. She didn’t get on stage that day, but did fill out a card with her name and other pertinent information. It was another chance to get on the show.

She wanted her card to stand out, she said, so she wrote across the top of it in purple ink, “I’m ready to play!!!”

She dropped it in a large drum, which was already about three-quarters full. Then she went home and waited.

When mid-September went by and she hadn’t been contacted, she told her husband, Joe, what she’d done. She thought it was over.

“He was impressed I had the courage to try,” Ross said.

Then, on Sept. 28, she got an e-mail congratulating her. She had an audition on Oct. 6 in Bar Harbor. The couple was to be vacationing in Bethel that week, but still made the trip.

“I was very nervous but I was not alone,” she said. There were about 60 people in her group. They practiced calling out letters and took a written test with about 20 puzzles on it.

Ross waited to see if she’d get another audition.

“I really wanted them to call my name,” Ross said. “I really wanted to know if they thought I had any potential. I didn’t have to wait long. I was the sixth or seventh person called.”

Sitting at the table in the Extension’s conference room Tuesday, Ross pulled her elbows in, arms bent, in quick motion close to her sides as she demonstrated her “Yes!” reaction when her name was called.

During that audition, she solved a puzzle.

“Gettysburg and e-mail address,” she said.

Thirteen days later, she received her letter. She was going to Sony Studios in California.

“I felt I was right to follow my intuition that I had to do this,” Ross said.

She learned soon after she also won a prize package after sending in two correctly solved puzzles in another Wheel of Fortune contest.

“I thought this is just an omen of things to come,” Ross said.

Five months later, she taped a show on March 18.

“I was pretty focused,” Ross said. “I knew what I wanted to do. I was probably a little nervous but not as much as I thought I would be.”

She still doesn’t know how her spins looked because contestants are told to not look at the wheel. “Spinning time is solving time,” she said. “I only looked once.”