'Wheel of Fortune' win: Long Island siblings Tom Krisa and Valerie Reynolds net $126G

A Long Island Rail Road conductor and his social-worker sister won a fortune on “Wheel of Fortune” in the episode that aired Friday, splitting $126,714 before taxes.

“It wasn't really until we were driving home from the studio that we kind of just took it in,” Krisa, 31, who grew up in South Setauket with sis Valerie Reynolds, 27, told Newsday by phone Tuesday. “Like, ‘What the heck just happened?’”

Making the events even more memorable was that the episode shot at the syndicated game show’s Sony Pictures Studios in Culver City, California, on Sept. 27 — the birth date of their mother, P.J. Gelinas Junior High School Spanish teacher Antonieta "Toni" Krisa, who died Dec. 31, 2018 at 51 years old.

“We used to watch the show with Mom every day, and just being there, it was something she would've loved for us to be doing,” Krisa says. “Through every audition and while Valerie and I played the game, each of us always had her funeral Mass card on us.”

When he receives his winnings in March, Krisa says, some of the money will go toward an education fund for his and his wife Catherine’s 2-year-old son, Tommy. As well, says the Stony Brook-born Krisa, who now lives in Port Jefferson, “I’m going to make a small donation to the Long Island chapter of the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention in my mother's memory.”

The process of getting on the show — which receives about 1 million applications annually for 600 spots, according to the trade magazine Backstage — began for Krisa in February 2022. As one part of the process, “I sent a video of myself at home, and I'm a die-hard Rangers fan,” he says of the New York City NHL team, “so I filmed my audition in a sports bar I built in my house. And I explained it’s on my bucket list to go watch the Rangers play in every arena” in North America. “And one of the producers was originally from Long Island, I believe, so she saw the Rangers logos and I think that's what stood out.”

In July, Krisa recounts, “They said that they were considering me for a family episode and they asked if I had anybody I would want to play with and I said, ‘My sister, without a doubt.’” The Port Jefferson-born Reynolds, who lives in Salisbury, Maryland — and that same month married her fiancee, Garrett Reynolds — jumped at the chance.

“It was just surreal,” remembers SUNY Albany alumnus Krisa, who like his sister had graduated from Ward Melville High School in East Setauket. “We actually did hair and makeup in the ‘Jeopardy!’ studio, so we got to see ‘Jeopardy!’ behind the scenes a little bit. And then seeing the actual wheel and the board and meeting [the show’s] Vanna [White] and Pat [Sajak] was just something out of a dream.”

At the studio, he says, “We played a bunch of mock games to make sure that the lights, cameras, everything was working. So we had a whole day's worth of practice before we filmed.” The day of shooting, “We had to get there at 6:30 in the morning and they taped the whole week's worth of episodes.” The contestants “practice spinning the wheel” and the crew adjusts the platform where the guest stand “so that nobody looks too short or,” says the 6’7” Krisa, “too tall.”

The experience reinforced in him, he says, the notion that "nothing should stop you from trying to go for what you want. The odds of getting on were 0.0006%, but you have to be in it to win it, and it can happen to anybody.”