Bankrate: What kind of a kid were you growing up in Philadelphia?

Barris: I was a really nice kid, a good kid. I was kind of skinny and small. I grew up in a very Catholic neighborhood -- I'm Jewish and I had a lot of friends, I was very popular. My father was a not-very-good dentist. He wasn't very ambitious and he didn't really try to do much to become a star dentist in Philadelphia. My mother was very rich and her family lost their money in the Wall Street crash of 1929. I think she met my father shortly before the crash and I don't think she really cared that he wasn't a particularly great dentist; she just liked him. Then the crash came and my mother became a very embittered poor girl where she had once been a very happy rich girl.

Bankrate: You seem to have had career ambivalence early on.

Barris: Yeah, I went to a bunch of schools; St. Joseph's for a week, the University of Miami in Florida for a semester. I really wasn't much of a student and all of my family went to Penn and I couldn't get in. I finally got into Drexel, which was great. At least I got myself a college education, which now, in retrospect, I didn't really need. I should have gone right to New York and become a page at NBC. The horrible thing is that I was destined to go into my grandfather's cloak and suit factory. He made men's clothes in this horrible factory down in Philadelphia and that's where all the men in the family went, but I just rebelled and did something else.

Bankrate: How did you manage to rise so quickly from the lowly position of an NBC page?

Barris: I found out very quickly that they had a management-training program where you could apply, and I saw that they took six guys from about 2,000 applicants and they trained them in every facet of the National Broadcasting Co. for future executives. Everybody who got into the program was usually from an Ivy League school, so I went to the library and found out who was on the NBC board of directors and put three of them down as my references and I got right in. And I know that was the reason because at a Christmas party the first year I was there, some drunken personnel guy told me that. He said, "We thought you were going to be some really snotty kid but you turned out to be pretty nice."

Bankrate: How in the world did you wind up in standards and practices?

Barris: I graduated from the program and I picked daytime television sales, because I thought sales would lead me to the chairmanship of the National Broadcasting Co. About a month after I was there, the entire department was eliminated. I was out of work for six months and finally got hired at ABC to be Dick Clark's watchdog (on "American Bandstand") during the music industry payola scandals. I would take a train down every day (to Philadelphia) from New York and back and I would stay in the studio and watch him. I had no idea why I was watching him; he didn't do anything at all during the day. I mean, he could have done whatever nefarious things he wanted to when I left. They were really panic-stricken at the networks during the payola scandals and they really didn't know what to do.