Meeting Stan Freberg
In 1980 or 1981, AdWeek  magazine contributing editor Edwin Diamond assigned Gary S. Paul (me) to profile Stan Freberg. We spent a lovely afternoon chatting. He gave me a signed copy of the sheet music of Take An Indian To  Lunch as a souvenir. I mentioned what an amazing coincidence it was, on his album Pay Radio, that Capitol Records had an attorney whose name rhymed with the word attorney: Mr. Irving P. Laverny. “Paul, to tell you the truth, I made that name up,” Freberg told me. Perhaps it should not have been a surprise.

He gave me his personal phone number. Eighteen years later, I was an editor at CMP’s TechWeb. I was payng Ian Shoales/Merle Kessler $100 a week for commentaries. I asked Freberg if he would record some commentaries. “I don’t leave the house for less than a thousand dollars,” he said, which is why he never appeared on TechWeb. A thousand dollars was my month’s editorial budget.

That same year, I interviewed the substantially less well-known Dick Orkin and Bert Berdis, beloved radio commercial voice talent.