From SFweekly.com
“It’s a neat trick for a once mild-mannered botanist and North Beach hipster who counted none other than Lawrence Ferlinghetti and the late Allen Ginsberg among his pals when he was still using his real name: Michael Weiner.
Few things about Savage’s pre-radio past could have presaged his rise as perhaps the far right’s most vocal on-air ambassador. Not his adulation of Ginsberg. Not the fact that he once trolled the streets of Greenwich Village and, later, North Beach, in a beret. Or that the staunch anti-abortionist’s first wife had two abortions during their marriage. And certainly not the fact that he was once Timothy Leary’s gatekeeper at the LSD experimenter’s farm.”
He wasn’t always Michael Savage. A native New Yorker, he was born in the Bronx and grew up in Queens as Michael Alan Weiner, the son of Russian Jewish immigrants. His father, Ben, whom those who knew him describe as gruff and profane — and who died of a heart attack in his 50s — was a street vendor who worked his way up to owning a small antiques store on Manhattan’s Lower East Side and was socially conservative.
Benny Weiner verbally abused his son and didn’t hesitate to embarrass him in front of his teenage friends, Zaitz says. “Michael would have on tight black jeans and a boat-necked sweater and his dad would say, ‘I don’t like the way you’re dressed. You look like a fag,’ stuff like that,” he recalls.
The father would have surely disapproved of Weiner’s interest in beatnik culture once he enrolled at Queens College. Zaitz recalls weekends when he and Weiner slipped away to Greenwich Village to hang out in coffee houses, smoke pot, and troll for women. In those days, he says, the future Michael Savage kept a paperback copy of Jack Kerouac’s On the Road in his pants pocket.
http://www.sfweekly.com/2006-07-19/news/inside-the-savage-nation/full