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Frank StantonFrank Stanton
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didn't know he was -- At that time he was in Congress, not in the Senate. Then he told me he had a station in Austin, Texas and he was anxious to get it on the network.

Now, I should not have talked with him. I shouldn't have talked with anybody, and he shouldn't have been where he was, behind the wall -- not behind the wall in my office, but in the secretarial pool outside. But, his questions were intelligent and I said that I thought we could use a station in Austin because we had an affiliate in San Antonio and an affiliate in Dallas, and they had coverage in radio that went out like that, and here was Austin sitting right here. At best it had to be a windy day to hear either San Antonio or Dallas in Austin, in the daytime particularly. At night it was a different story, because there are vagaries in the coverage characteristics of the signal. If he had a little station here that could cover this population cluster, so much the better for the job we were doing as a network.

Q:

Is this UHF we're talking about?

Stanton:

Oh, no, this is radio. Before you were born. There were three classes of radio stations in those days: The high-powered, clear channel, then the regional, 5,000-watt station that has maybe 5,000 watts in the daytime and is cut back to 1,000 watts at night so it doesn't interfere with others on the same frequency. Then there are the local stations, of which there are hundreds, on the same frequency, and they barely get out to the city limits; they're up in the 1,200-1,400 meter band. He had a low-powered station in this area and he was anxious, obviously, to get network programs, because if he had those he could sell station breaks at the half-hour and the hour.

Armed with my frank admission that maybe we could use a station there, with my having





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