Barry Morton Farber was a radio host, journalist, and writer. He was born on May 5, 1930 in Baltimore, Maryland and raised in Greensboro, North Carolina. He studied journalism at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
He was a gifted at learning languages and spoke over 20. He volunteered for the draft in 1952 and was assigned to be a Russian translator. In 1957, he came to New York to find a job in journalism.
In 1960, his first talk show, "Barry Farber's Open Mike," aired on WINS in New York. He was later heard on WMCA and WOR in New York and on the ABC Radio Network in various time slots over the years. He interviewed a wide variety of people. His career in broadcasting lasted almost sixty years. In 2014, he was inducted into the Radio Hall of Fame.
He wrote two memoirs, Making People Talk: You Can Turn Every Conversation into a Magic Moment (1987) and Cocktails with Molotov: An Odyssey of Unlikely Detours (2012). He wrote articles that appeared in The New York Times, Reader's Digest, The Washington Post, and the Saturday Review.
Barry Farber died on May 6, 2020 in Manhattan at the age of 90.
030