I met Anna through her friendship with Bruce Logan, and she became my direct link to many stars of the older generation, including Douglas Fairbanks Jr., Lillian Gish, Ann Miller, Maureen O'Sullivan and Sammy Cahn. One phone call from Anna was enough to get me an appointment. The _TV Shopper_ interviews and restaurant reviews -- a total of four stories per week -- became my whole life, and I had little time for friendships, hobbies or anything else. By late 1979, I realized that New York City wasn't my natural element. It was too dog-eat-dog, too overwhelming, too impersonal. I had grown dissatisfied with working for the _TV Shopper_, and felt that I had squeezed the juice from the orange; I had interviewed everyone I wanted to meet who was willing to sit down with me. After interviewing my fifth or sixth broadcaster or dancer, things began to feel repetitive. I pondered what Tom Smothers had told me when I'd asked why the Smothers Brothers had split up as an act: "First you just do it, then you do it for fun, then you do it seriously, and then you're done." About this time I got an invitation from a friend in the San Francisco Bay Area to move out West and give it a try. I told Bruce I was quitting. When I gave the news to Anna, she said: "You might never come back." She was right. In my last couple of months as a New Yorker, I did as many interviews as I could fit it. I left for Maine on Christmas Eve of 1979, taking all my _TV Shopper_ stories with me, and flew to San Francisco on New Year's Day of 1980. Using my notes, I wrote up my final interviews during my early months on the West Coast, which accounts for some of the 1980 publication dates. Other stories dated 1980 were published first in 1979, then reused; I have no record of their original dates. When my parents moved in 1988, they threw away my entire _TV Shopper_ archive. Fortunately, Bruce Logan had saved copies of most of the stories, and at my request, he photocopied them and sent them to in 1990. About 10 stories were missing from his collection, and therefore cannot be included here. Among the lost interviews I remember are Soupy Sales, Dave Marash, Gael Greene, Janis Ian, Joe Franklin and Barnard Hughes. After 9/11, I began thinking a lot about New York, and started rereading some of my old stories. My eye caught this statement by Paul Goldberger, then the architecture critic for the _New York Times_: "This is probably the safest environment in the world to build a skyscraper." I realized that the New York of today is quite differently from that of the late 1970s, and thought that a collection of my interviews might be of interest to a new generation of readers.