Barry Farber
| Barry Farber | |
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Barry Farber
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| Born |
Barry M. Farber May 5, 1930 Baltimore, Maryland |
| Occupation | Radio talk show host, commentator, author, enthusiast |
| Children | 2 |
Barry M. Farber (born May 5, 1930) is an American conservative radio talk show host, author, commentator and language-learning enthusiast. In 2002, industry publication Talkers magazine ranked him the 9th greatest radio talk show host of all time. He has also written articles appearing in the New York Times, Reader's Digest, the Washington Post, and the Saturday Review. He is the father of journalist Celia Farber and singer-songwriter Bibi Farber.
Born in Baltimore, Maryland, Farber is Jewish and grew up in Greensboro, North Carolina.
After nearly failing Latin in the ninth grade, that summer Farber started reading a Mandarin Chinese language-learning book. A trip to Miami Beach, Florida, to see his grandparents, coincidentally put him in the midst of a large number of Chinese navy sailors in training there. His Chinese rapidly improved. Back in Greensboro, he took up Italian, Spanish, and French on his own before summer vacation was over. He started taking French and Spanish classes in his sophomore year and also learned Norwegian on his own while in high school. He graduated in 1948 from Greensboro Senior High School (see Grimsley High School).
He then attended the University of North Carolina, where he learned Russian. As a delegate from the National Student Association to what he later called a "Tito propaganda fiesta called the Zagreb Peace Conference", he found other Slavic languages were closely related to Russian. A 16-day boat trip back to the United States with Yugoslavs allowed him to practice his Serbo-Croatian. After covering the Olympic Games in Helsinki one year in the 1950s, he learned Indonesian on another boat trip back to the U.S.
As a newspaper reporter in 1956, Farber was invited by the United States Air Force to cover the airlift of Hungarian refugees from the uprising in Hungary that year. In an Austrian border village, Farber later wrote, he so impressed a Norwegian man, Thorvald Stoltenberg, with knowledge of the man's native tongue that he was allowed to go on one of the covert missions smuggling Hungarians into Austria.
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