January 04, 2008
Gotta Love it!
A nice hit in today's Boston Herald.
Posted by rickbeyer at 01:04 PM | Comments (0)
October 29, 2007
Review Alert!
A nice review of The Greatest Presidential Stories Never Told in the online magazine Blogcritics.org.
Posted by rickbeyer at 08:57 AM | Comments (0)
October 24, 2007
Live Chat
I am doing a live chat on Gather.com on Thursday October 245, 2007. Here's the link. Please check it out. I do think you have to join Gather.com to be able to ask questions, but it isn't that hard to do. People will be typing questions and I will be typing answers as fast as my fingers can make it happen.
Posted by rickbeyer at 12:31 PM | Comments (0)
Raidio Tour Day 3, Part I
Interviewed this morning by Mancow, the syndicated radio morning host. Among the questions asked:
• Do you have the story about Abraham Lincoln selling crack cocaine?
• Franklin D. Roosevelt: Did the D stand for Dick?
• Is it true that George Washington was 17 feet tall?
• Did Madison have feet?
(That last is the hands down winner for most unusual question I have ever received.)
Being on this show is sort of like being on the Colbert show , in that you are there to be on the receiving end of outrageous remarks and questions. But that's the shtick, and that's OK. In the midst of being a straight man for these ripostes, I managed to tell a couple of stories from the book, and he gave a nice plug for it at the end.
Posted by rickbeyer at 08:31 AM | Comments (0)
October 22, 2007
Radio Tour Day 1
This week I'm doing what is called a "satellite radio tour" for The Greatest Presidential Stories Never Told. That's a misleading name since it doesn't involve any satellites or any touring. It involves doing a lot of radio interviews, mostly by phone.
It kicked off last night with the Jordan Rich show on WBZ radio. I've been on Jordan's show three previous times, so we are old friends now, and have a good time. When we start talking about history stories it is a quick hour.
My wife Marilyn came along and snapped some pictures during the interview.
Even though we were on up against the Red Sox-Indians Game 7, we had a lot of callers, from Indiana, Virginia, West Virginia, North Carolina and elsewhere. WBZ is one of the old 50,000 Watt Clear Channel stations, and it still has some major reach at night.
As the week progresses, I'll update you on the various places I'm (virtually) going.
Posted by rickbeyer at 05:35 PM | Comments (1)
October 21, 2007
Media Week
Tonight at 10 PM I start a week of media interviews for The Greatest Presidential Stories Never Told by talking to Jordan Rich at WBZ Radio in Boston. An updated list of interviews is posted at
Several people have reported seeing storefront displays of the new book, which is very exciting. Onward and upward!
Posted by rickbeyer at 10:54 AM | Comments (0)
October 11, 2007
Gather.Com
Four days and Counting...there have been some book sitings, people who have seen the new book in stores, (before the pub date--shocking!) but I have not yet.
I am working with Harper Collins to promote the book on a social networking site called Gather.com, which bills itself as a social networking site for adults. Harper Collins has its own "group" on Gather, and for the next few weeks I am one of two featured authors. I have posted some materials, and other people have written reviews of the book You can check some of it out here: (if you want to see the reader reviews, the easiest way to do it is just search the title of the book on the upper left hand corner of the Gather page, and they should pop up.
I have a live chat coming up in a couple of weeks on Gather. As soon as I learn details, I'll do a post about it.
Posted by rickbeyer at 11:52 AM | Comments (0)
September 10, 2006
Animated Film
Got a call on Friday from my agent, Arielle Eckstutt. It seems that an animation company in Scotland, Red Kite Animation, is interested in making a short animated film based on my story "A Plate of Peas." It would be a low budget affair, probably little or no money for me, but how cool! What a howler it would be to have an animated version of that story. And the company does a lot of cool stuff, as you can see on their website. More on this as it happens.
Posted by rickbeyer at 02:54 PM | Comments (0)
May 19, 2006
Memorial Day Interviews
I have a bunch of radio and TV interviews scheduled to promote The Greatest War Stories Never Told book over the Memorial Day Holiday. The biggest one is a return to Fox and Friends on the Fox News Channel on Sunday, May 28th, at 8:50 AM Eastern.
The whole list of interviews can be found here.
Posted by rickbeyer at 08:46 PM | Comments (0)
April 22, 2006
KSFO Interview
I did an interview on Friday morning with KSFO Radio, a popular AM talk station in San Francisco. The interview was with Lee Rodgers, who does their morning show. We had a great time and they invited me back for Memorial Day.
The interview really spiked the Amazon ratings for a day or so. I’ve never seen a local market interview have that big an effect on Amazon sales.
The interview came about because I contacted Lee after not having talked to him for more than 25 years, and he was nice enough to have his producer me on the show. In the late 70’s I worked at a radio station in Chicago (WIND) where Lee hosted a mid-day talk show.
I particularly recall an incident in which he neatly tweaked my athletic vanity. I was about 23 at the time, rowing crew, running, biking, ski-racing, and pretty impressed with myself. We were in the lunchroom one morning, and I was going on to Lee about all the training I was doing. He professed to be very impressed. “Your leg muscles must be really developed,” he said, reaching down to feel my calf. “Wow, that’s amazing. I’ve done some working out too, feel mine.”
I reached down to feel his calf muscle. What I didn’t know is that Lee had a prosthetic leg, the result of a lumbering accident when he was a teenager. It was a total shock, and I pulled my hand away as he laughed. I’m sure the look on my face was priceless. I try to call up the memory any time my hubris starts to run away with me.
Posted by rickbeyer at 11:54 AM | Comments (0)
April 16, 2006
History's Champion
Chris Bergeron of The Metro West Daily News profiled me in the paper's Arts section this morning. The article refers to me, among other things, as "slim," so I feel really good about it.
Here's a link to the online version:
Posted by rickbeyer at 08:55 AM | Comments (0)
December 19, 2005
Big New York Media Day
The couple was clearly drunk. Not obnoxiously so, but enough to make their voices far louder than normal. It was 1:30 AM and they had woken me from a sound sleep, their conversation in the corridor carrying quite clearly into my room at the Omni Berkshire. They were locked out and awaiting assistance. By the time they got it I was wide-awake, and I never really got back to sleep.
Just a little less than four hours later, I was dressed in my best interview clothes and walking out the door of the hotel, stepping out from under the awning into the pouring rain. The time was 6:20 AM. Beth Mellow from HarperCollins and I were on our way to the day’s first interview, and in fact, the big fish of the last 8 weeks—a national TV interview on “Fox and Friends,” the popular morning show on Fox News Channel.
The walk from the hotel to the Fox studios on 6th Avenue was a short one, and with a borrowed umbrella from the hotel offering suitable protection from the elements, we were there in a few minutes. After a small hang-up at security, a producer named Tiffany ushered us into the green room. “This is Rick at 6:50” announced Tiffany, and Claudia, the make-up artist, said “Hello Rick at 6:50,” and I was into make-up.
Ten minutes later, just as Claudia was finishing up, Tiffany came back to escort us into the studio. All of a sudden time started speeding up like crazy. A soundman was putting a wireless mic on my lapel, and I heard someone saying: “Rick Beyer…is he here with us?” A floor director was calling out “30 seconds” as I was being escorted to the set. I barely had time to shake hands with hosts Julian Philips and Andy Napolitano (who turns out to be a law school classmate of Jerry Fritz) before Andy was reading the intro and we were into the segment.
The interview seemed to go by in a flash. Suddenly we were done, and I was being escorted out. To come into the building we had to go through security in the main lobby, but there is a second door by the studio, and about 30 seconds after I got off the air we were standing out on 6th Avenue in the rain! Hard to believe that in the three or four minutes between the green room and the street, the conversation I had in that small studio was beamed across the country and seen by hundreds of thousands of people! (And you could see the impact by watching the book shoot up on the Amazon rankings…hitting a high of 161.)
Later in the morning, a Mercdes limo driven by a jovial, white haired Lithuanian named Constantine took us to Port Washington, where I was to speak at the library. When we arrived, it turned out that the library was expecting me to talk about the first book, not the new one we were promoting. I, of course, was prepared to talk about the new book—but they were quite insistent that the talk be about the first book, since that is what they had promoted, and that was the book they were going to sell afterwards. After a momentary attack of fear and panic, I headed off a quiet corner where I took out a pad of yellow paper and fashioned a talk that focused on the old book while mentioning the new. I finished my notes with about ten minutes to spare.
The talk went amazingly well. Everything seemed to flow; the audience of fifty or so participated enthusiastically, laughed at my jokes, and bought plenty of books afterwards. It was hard to imagine a talk going better. Maybe it was the shot of adrenaline that the panic gave me.
The audience included my uncle, Ed Smith of Massapequa; my book editor, Mauro Dipreta, from Harper Collins, and a veteran of the Ghost Army, Tom Roche. Another audience member made a sketch of me that you can see here.
After I signed all the books they sold, it was back to town for one more interview at ABC News Now, a cable/online offshoot of ABC.(Once again we were met at the door by a producer named Tiffany--it was Tiffany kind of day!) Then I hit a few Barnes and Noble bookstores to sign books before heading back up to Boston by train. A long and profitable day!
Posted by rickbeyer at 02:45 PM | Comments (0)