Tony Schwartz (1923-2008) created more than 20,000 radio and television spots for products, political candidates and non-profit public interest groups. “Documenting life in sound and pictures” is something Tony Schwartz began in 1945, when he bought his first Webcor wire recorder and began to record the people and sounds around him. From this hobby developed one of the world’s largest and most diverse collections of voices, both prominent and unknown, street sounds and music, a collection that resulted in nineteen phonograph albums for Folkways and Columbia Records. For thirty one years (1945-1976) he created and produced a weekly radio program of people and sounds of New York on WNYC (AM & FM). When Marshall McLuhan met Tony Schwartz, he said he met “a disciple with twenty years prior experience!” Later, McLuhan and Schwartz shared the Schweitzer Chair at Fordham University. The entire body of Tony Schwartz’s material is now housed in the archives of the Library of Congress. - Excerpted from tonyschwartz.org