Who is Alan Stang
Welcome to alanstang.com, certainly one of the world’s most unusual bookstores, featuring suppressed books by me, Alan Stang, which you can get nowhere else, along with the Sting of Stang, my news commentaries and information about revolutionary products that are good for your health. We don’t know how or why you got here—maybe you heard about a commentary or are looking for a book; perhaps you’re just curious—so you may have a question.
I have been a journalist, an investigator, a magazine editor, a ghostwriter, a lecturer, an author, a nationally syndicated news commentator, a foreign correspondent for the Voice of America and a network radio talk-show host for almost half a century. Yes, I’m very old, so ancient that when I drove a taxicab in New York City while I went to graduate school at Columbia, all the other drivers spoke English, so old that when I was a ballroom dance teacher there the main step we taught was the Fox Trot, which men and women did actually holding on to each other--can you believe it?--while the band played “Begin the Beguine” or Tommy Dorsey’s “Song of India.”
I started out in communications as an editor for Prentice-Hall, in New Jersey. My first job in radio was at NBC in New York, where I wrote the Tex & Jinx Radio Show. At WOR, I worked with Barry Farber, who later became a talk-show host there. I was one of Mike Wallace’s first writers, before he went to CBS and Sixty Minutes. My job was to write the script for The Mike Wallace Interview at Channel 13.
What? You mean Mike Wallace uses a script? He doesn’t just make it up? Yes. No. Before Mike ever saw the guest, I had interviewed him or her and knew what he or she would say when Mike asked the same questions a couple of days later. The script I gave Mike included the questions typed all in caps and the answers typed in lower case below them. So, Mike knew not only what to ask but what the guest would answer. That’s why Mike is so smart.
For instance, once we booked George C. Scott and I went to see him at his house in Greenwich Village. Unfortunately, George was grumpy—he may have had words with wife Colleen Dewhurst who was elsewhere in the house—so I could not get a word out of him and when I returned to the studio we cancelled his appearance. Imagine canceling George C. Scott. Of course, this was before “Patton.” Mike Wallace went on to achieve the infamy he deserves, on the cover of my book, Scumbags I Have Known.
Later, I wrote a few hundred feature articles for national magazines, most of them in the late American Opinion, some for The Review of The News and others. Many were reprinted by the truckload. To see the commentaries on world events I do now, come back every few days.
For a few years, I was a radio talk-show host in Los Angeles, where I went head-to head with Larry King at the same time every evening. I came out of a station that started with less than 1000 watts. King was carried by KNX, a 50,000-watt clear channel monster. But, according to Arbitron, I had almost twice as many listeners, because they wanted red meat and Larry is a sissy. My daily radio news commentary aired on hundreds of stations.
I have covered stories around the world. I have interviewed everyone from Henry Kissinger to George C. Scott to Elizabeth Taylor and Trent Lott, and have guested on CNN’s Cross Fire, the Maury Povich Show, the Barry Farber Show, the Morton Downey Show and many other programs around the country. Twice, I was national election night color commentator on KTRH in Houston.
I have won the usual awards for journalistic excellence, from the American Academy of Public Affairs of Los Angeles, whose president, Loyd Wright, was chairman of the American Bar Association at the time, from the Pennsylvania House of Representatives, from the Congress of Freedom and so on. I served a couple of terms on the Board of the National Health Federation, which battles for your unalienable right to get the kind of medical treatment you want.
I have lectured in every American state and some other countries, to women's and service clubs (Rotary, Lions, Kiwanis, etc.) conventions, business groups, colleges and universities, civic and patriotic organizations, and so on, for many years.
I used to do a couple or three speaking tours a year, each three to five weeks long. That is the reason I have only five kids. If you would like me to address your group, please send an email to stangfeedback@gmail.com and let us know what you have in mind.
The main thing I do is write books and that is probably why you are here. I have written some fifteen; one is always in progress. I am writing one now. When it is ready, it will be published here.
My first book, It’s Very Simple, was a best seller. My first novel, The Highest Virtue, set in the Russian Revolution, won a smashing review in the Los Angeles Times and five stars—top rating—from the then West Coast Review of Books, which gave five stars in one per cent of its reviews.
Because my wife and I had the most American kids in Santo Domingo, the Dominican Republic, where we lived at the time, all of us were chosen to star in “Havana” with Robert Redford. If you are very alert, you can see the boys for a few seconds at the beginning of the movie, running around a Christmas tree while the credits roll. I am the man wearing makeup, the ridiculous, slicked-down hair full of greasy kid stuff and the preposterous Harry Truman shirt. You will have to take my word that I am still considerably more handsome than director Sydney Pollack made me. My wife is the gorgeous creature holding the baby.