Barry Farber: "Like any deft interviewer, he was never at a loss for questions that might evoke an unforgettable rejoinder."

From a New York Times obit, by Sam Roberts, headlined “Barry Farber, Longtime Talk Radio Host With a Barbed Wit”:

Barry Farber, a popular talk radio host whose winsome Southern burr, insatiable curiosity and barbed wit sustained a nearly continuous six-decade career in broadcasting, died on Wednesday in Manhattan. He was 90. . . .

Mr. Farber inaugurated his first solo radio program in 1960 after arriving in New York from North Carolina with journalistic ambitions and remarkable multilingual talents. . . .

Over the decades Mr. Farber interviewed celebrities, political figures and flying saucer buffs. He staged debates between adversaries on issues ranging from the rights of Palestinians to abortion. And he welcomed skeptics like Mark Lane, the lawyer who challenged official accounts of President John F. Kennedy’s assassination. . . .

In 1977 he ran for mayor of New York, writing in The New York Times that the city had “declined in some sort of hideous direct proportion to the amount of money wasted on liberal illusions.”

“Let’s take our town back from terror, trash, taxation,” he declared. . . .

He became an enthusiastic linguist when he was about 14, learning Mandarin Chinese in school and, on his own, Italian, Spanish and French before the 10th grade. In high school he took French and Spanish classes and, again on his own, learned Norwegian. He eventually “adventured,” as he put it, into more than 20 foreign languages, including Finnish and Korean.

He studied journalism at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. . . .

He had arrived in New York in 1957 looking for work in journalism when by chance he struck up a conversation with William Safire — the future presidential speechwriter, author and New York Times columnist — at the scene of a bus crash in Midtown Manhattan. At the time, Mr. Safire was working for a radio show in town hosted by the husband-wife team of Tex McCrary and Jinx Falkenburg.

If Mr. Farber lacked experience in broadcasting, he was brimming with self-confidence. Here was a former campus newspaper editor, college wrestling champ and Army translator who had done some world traveling and, perhaps most impressively, could speak nearly two dozen languages.

“Do you speak Korean, too?” a dazzled Mr. Safire asked him.

“Sorry,” Mr. Farber replied. “I was absent the day we had Korean.”. . .

Mr. Farber was not always a winning host. Among those who walked off his show was the actress Shelley Winters, who left after he asked her if she had personally vetted some of the left-wing groups he said she supported. Another who stormed off was the conservative author Ayn Rand. . . .

But like any deft interviewer, he was never at a loss for questions that might evoke an unforgettable rejoinder. As he told The Times in 1963:

“I was once interviewing Alfred Hitchcock and I asked him to figure out a way in which a radio interviewer might murder a famous film director of mysteries with only the two of them in a studio. Hitchcock looked about the studio and said, meaningfully, ‘He might be bored to death.’”

Barry Farber: “Like any deft interviewer, he was never at a loss for questions that might evoke an unforgettable rejoinder.”

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