Thanks to Joel O'Brien for sending me this link to a 1985 interview with Bill Gaines, the original publisher of MAD. There are a few errors in it. Alfred E. Neuman's usual name before he was named Alfred E. Neuman was Melvin Cowznofski, not Melvin Paslovsky. Harvey Kurtzman is mentioned in passing but not in the section which describes how MAD was created. Somehow, Al Feldstein who became editor a few years later gets the credit. Gaines did not sell MAD to Warner Communications in 1960, etc.
I get asked a lot of questions about the history of MAD and often, the answer includes, "You have to know a lot about Bill Gaines to understand why things were the way they were." Gaines was an eccentric who wanted to keep his company small enough so that he could preside over most of the business matters himself, not work too hard and not have a lot of strangers around him. He didn't write or draw for the magazine but had an undeniable influence on its creative content.
His business practices were not much different from any comic book publisher and in that sense, somewhat unfair to the talent. And yet at the same time, he loved the writers and artists who contributed to MAD, treated them as a family, took them on expensive trips and treated them to swank dinners and so forth. You could work for DC and Marvel for decades and never meet the publisher or be granted an audience if you requested one…but Gaines' door was always open and if you dropped in at the proper hour, he'd take you to lunch. A very colorful, complex man.