Michael Savage was born Michael Alan Weiner to a Jewish family with Russian origins living in the Bronx.[3][1] As a child, he worked. He described his childhood as difficult, due to his father's "gruff and profane" personality.[1] His father died of a heart attack in his fifties.
After graduating from Jamaica High School[4], Savage attended Queens College, where he earned a bachelor's degree in education and sociology. After college Savage taught high school for several years in New York City. His first marriage to Carol Ely in 1964 ended in divorce, and he remarried after meeting his current wife Janet in 1967. His first wife says that she became pregnant twice and aborted both pregnancies.[1] During this time, Savage also worked for famous psychedelic drug advocate Timothy Leary as keeper of the stone gatehouse on Leary's Millbrook estate. Leary hired him to the post because Savage did not use LSD himself.[1] Savage then earned two master's degrees in ethnobotany and anthropology from the University of Hawaii. He obtained a Ph.D. in 1978 from the University of California, Berkeley, in nutritional ethnomedicine. His thesis was titled Nutritional Ethnomedicine in Fiji. Savage spent many years researching botany in the South Pacific and has a background in alternative medicine. While in the South Pacific, he became fascinated with the 19th-century sailor Charles Savage, who was believed to be the man that first brought firearms to Fiji.[5]
Savage and his second wife have two children, a daughter and a son; his son, Russell, is the founder of the company that produces the Rockstar energy drink, where Janet serves as chief financial officer.[1]
[edit] Shift in philosophy
Savage introduced himself to certain writers in the North Beach area of San Francisco in the early 1970s.[6] He befriended and traveled with Beat poets Allen Ginsberg and Lawrence Ferlinghetti. Stephen Schwartz, also an acquaintance of Savage from this time, reported Savage possessed a photograph of himself and Ginsberg swimming naked in Hawaii and used the photograph as sort of a "calling card."[1][6] Savage maintained a correspondence with Ginsberg consisting of ten letters and a trio of postcards across four years, which is maintained with Ginsberg's papers at Stanford University.[7][1] One letter asked for Ginsberg and Ferlinghetti to come do a poetry reading, so others could "hear and see and know why I adore your public image."[3] One postcard mentions his desire to photograph Ginsberg in a provocative way, though Savage states that this correspondence is actually a forgery created by gay detractors.[1] Another acquaintance was poet and author Neeli Cherkovski, who says Savage dreamed of becoming a stand-up comic in the mold of Lenny Bruce.[1] On his radio show, Savage confirmed this desire but contrasted this with his desire, as a child, to become a cowboy.
Around 1980, an acquaintance, Robert Cathcart, says in his private conversations with Savage he knew him to have conservative political views.[6] Schwartz stated Savage became alienated from the North Beach scene in the early 1980s. Savage had intense arguments with his liberal friends.[6] When asked about his shift in politics and other views, Savage replied, "I was once a child; I am now a man."[3] Savage has cited many occurrences in his life that helped shape his conservative views. Savage states that his opinions on welfare were partly shaped by his first job out of college as a social worker.[8] He described one incident in which his supervisor had him deliver a check to a welfare client to furnish their apartment, while his apartment was furnished with cardboard boxes.[9] Another turning point occurred for him as a writer of health and nutrition books in the 1980s, when he experienced political opposition after making the suggestion that the closure of gay bathhouses might be necessary in response to the emerging AIDS epidemic.[10] In 1994, in what he called "the last straw," his final health and nutrition manuscript, Immigrants and Epidemics, was rejected by publishers for being too politically sensitive.[11] In 1996, Savage applied to become the Dean of the Graduate School of Journalism at the University of California, Berkeley. The University instead selected award-winning journalist and Vietnam War protestor Orville Schell. Savage sued the University, contending he was discriminated against because he was a conservative.[12] Savage later dropped the lawsuit.[13]
Since finding his place in radio, Savage and his former friends and acquaintances from the North Beach area of San Francisco have traded barbs.[1] Savage now derides Ferlinghetti and calls Ferlinghetti's City Lights Bookstore "that once-famous communist bookstore."[6] Ferlinghetti claims that Weiner's "reincarnation" as Savage represents "total opportunism," and characterizes his former friend as "always looking to make a fast buck" and "always trying to think up new schemes to be famous."[6] Savage said, "I looked at [Ginsberg] almost like a rabbinic figure. Little did I know that he was the fucking devil."[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Savage_(commentator)#Early_life
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