Before The Cheering Started with Budd Mishkin

Send us Fan Mail John Hodgman has made a wonderful career out of telling us things that are not true: as the “Resident Expert” and then “Deranged Millionaire” on The Daily Show and the author of three fun books of fake trivia.  His warm and clever wit are on display each week on the podcast Judge John Hodgman.  He is a thoughtful and compelling interview, especially when discussing his early influ...

Send us Fan Mail Barry Sonnenfeld is a storyteller.  In film.  And in conversation.   His journey has taken him from the streets of Washington Heights to the heights of Hollywood.  He tells hundreds of these stories in a new memoir, Best Possible Place, Worst Possible Time.”  He shared more than a few of them in our conversation.

Send us Fan Mail Talk to Harry Teinowitz for ten seconds and it’s easy to understand why he’s had a successful career in Chicago sports talk radio.  There’s a fun gift of gab, a solid sense of humor and a passionate love of sports.  He brought a lot of joy to Chicago sports fans.  But then came a DUI, rehab and a coming to terms with his alcohol problem.  The result? A play called “Another Shot” t...

Send us Fan Mail Many of us grow up in homes with high expectations, but perhaps not the burden of expectation that Ben Mankiewicz experienced.  His grandfather and great uncle were prominent in Hollywood, his father in the world of politics.  Ben long ago dreamed of being a baseball broadcaster.  Along the way, he worked in sports media, hosted an eclectic news broadcast in Miami and eventually m...

Send us Fan Mail You never know what job you have that will teach you lessons that you’ll use decades later.  Growing up as a theater loving kid, Frank Rich got a dream job as a ticket taker in a theater in his hometown of Washington, D.C.  And he watched as shows were changed, rewritten, shortened and lengthened from night to night in preparation for Broadway.  What he observed and the lessons he...

Send us Fan Mail For much of his adult life as an athlete and attorney, Len Elmore has balanced academics and athletics.  That work continues to this day as a Senior Lecturer at Columbia University in the Sports Management program.  The balancing act began long ago growing up in New York City, then attending Power Memorial Academy, the University of Maryland, playing in the NBA, going to Harvard L...

Send us Fan Mail LUCY KAPLANSKY Art + Science = Sweet Music   We’ve all come to crossroads in our lives and our careers.  Lucy Kaplansky initially chose music.  Then she chose school and a doctorate in clinical psychology.  She tried pursuing both passions, psychologist by day with a little music on the side.  But then came those crossroads.  Her many admirers are thankful that she chose a life in...

Send us Fan Mail I first met Sebastian Junger in 2011, only months after the death of his friend and war reporting colleague Tim Hetherington in Libya.  Junger was at a crossroads, searching for an experience as intense as war but an experience that doesn’t get you killed.   The passion he felt for war reporting has been replaced by the passion for his young family, and yet the opportunity to see...

Send us Fan Mail By 1975, Alan Zweibel had decided on a career in comedy writing. He’d written jokes for older borscht belt comics and become friendly with young comics like Billy Crystal. But then he faced a difficult career decision between a relatively sure thing and a leap into the unknown. The decision changed the rest of his life. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoice...

Send us Fan Mail “Some are born great, some achieve greatness and some have greatness thrust upon them.” Shakespeare forgot about this one: “some are nudged by the rejection of numerous law schools.” Alan Zweibel has written so many words that have made us laugh, through the voices of Gilda Radner, Billy Crystal, Garry Shandling and his own. He was one of the original writers and creators of Satur...

Send us Fan Mail Ruth Reichl never thought she’d make a career out of writing about food. But she has, defying expectations and obliterating boundaries at august publications along the way. She’s found joy and memory and escape in her writing about food: witness her latest book The Paris Novel. But there is also the theme that has stayed true to Reichl from Berkeley to the L.A. Times, The New York...

Send us Fan Mail I don’t think it violates some journalistic Edward R. Murrow code to say that some interviews are a labor of love. And if it does, so be it. This is one of them. Paul Shaffer and Will Lee have put a lot of joyful music into the world. They are best known for their work in the Letterman bands, first on NBC and then on CBS, 33 years in all. But their compelling stories begin long be...

Send us Fan Mail By 1963, Bill Persky had already worked as a lifeguard at Grossinger’s in the Catskill Mountains and watched the hotel’s standup comics make people laugh. He’d written a show at Syracuse University that won a national collegiate award. He’d worked at an advertising agency and radio station in New York before moving to California to write for television. And then in 1963, everythin...

Send us Fan Mail What is it like to create something early in your life and then watch as that creation has a tangible effect on people decades later? Musicians know the feeling. Actors and writers too. It’s a feeling Bill Persky knows well. He and his writing partner Sam Denoff wrote many of the classic episodes of The Dick Van Dyke Show, a 1960’s show that is timeless and often held up as TV com...

Send us Fan Mail It seems easy for former professional athletes to live in the past. They practiced their whole lives to play the game and now it’s gone. Fans are constantly reminding them of games long ago, occasionally waiting on long lines for a picture and an autograph at a card show. New York Rangers fans often remind Stephane Matteau of his Game 7 overtime goal against the New Jersey Devils...

Send us Fan Mail Jay Z once memorably rapped “if skills sold, truth be told, I’d probably be lyrically, Talib Kweli.”Many are the influences that have shaped Talib Kweli’s words and music for decades: the Brooklyn of his youth, the ubiquitous books and records in that Brooklyn home, the academic careers of his parents as professors and administrators. He once told me “if you combine sociology and...

Send us Fan Mail Adriana Trigiani has had a long love affair with the written word. And she’s pretty comfortable with the spoken word too.  She has quite a story to tell as a novelist/TV writer/film director/podcast host whose journey brought her from a small mining town in Virginia to New York. And she tells that story with insight and humor. Her thoughts on the lessons we learn growing up in our...

Send us Fan Mail Shawn Colvin has been making music, beautiful music, for a long time. She’s known the heights of winning Grammy Awards, including song of the year and record of the year for Sunny Came Home in 1998. She’s known the hills and valleys of the business, especially early on, playing in cover bands, dive bars, taking day jobs before her career took off in New York City in the late 80’s....

Send us Fan Mail Stan Fischler has been in the hockey world for 70 years, primarily as a writer and broadcaster.  His passion for the sport has never waned, even as a 92 year old who now covers and writes about hockey from a small village in northern Israel, where he lives with his son and family. He is the sport’s connection, from Richard to Howe to Orr to Gretzky to Crosby to Ovechkin. And that...

Send us Fan Mail I first met Maurice Ashley in New York in 1994. He was announcing a chess tournament with all of the fervor and excitement of Marv Albert and John Madden. 30 years later, his passion for the sport is the same, perhaps greater. He’s an historic figure in chess as the first African American grandmaster. But that’s only a small part of Maurice’s story. The game has brought him into s...

Send us Fan Mail It was the writer F. Scott Fitzgerald who famously wrote “there are no second acts in America.” Scott, meet Steve Hindy.  He’s had an amazing second act, made that much more compelling by his first act, covering wars and revolutions in the Middle East, the taking of the American hostages in Iran in 1979 and surviving the assassination of Anwar Sadat in 1981.  Less than a decade la...

Send us Fan Mail If we’re lucky, we find work that is our passion. In a sense, it doesn’t even feel like work. Long ago, Bill Raftery found that passion analyzing basketball games on TV. And we are the lucky ones. What we don’t see is the immense amount of preparation he puts into every game. What millions of us do see and hear and experience is the joy, the excitement and the great sense of humor...

Send us Fan Mail Growing up on Long Island, Bob Gruen’s parents wanted him to work 9-5. And for much of his life, he did. 9PM-5AM. He’s spent 60 years documenting rock ‘n roll through photographs. Bob wasn’t photographing the scene. He was part of the scene, earning the trust of musicians, hanging out with them, touring with them, befriending them and photographing them in human, unscripted moment...

Send us Fan Mail Former athletes have all kinds of second careers once their playing days are over. There are lawyers and doctors, business people and broadcasters, lots and lots of broadcasters. But I know of no other former great athlete who has pursued the world of green technology. Mike Richter was always one of my favorite interviews during my sports reporting days, so I really enjoyed catchi...

Send us Fan Mail In the world of downtown cabaret and theater, Justin Vivian Bond is nothing less than an icon.  For more than 30 years, their performances have compelled audiences, initially in small performance spaces and eventually at Carnegie Hall and beyond.  They created their most memorable character while still in their 20’s: a boozy, opinionated, aging lounge singer named Kiki Durane, one...