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be happy about it, because it gave them a leg up on a new piece of the future. I don't think that all of our directors were entirely happy with it. The chairman [William S. Paley] favored selling the properties, and putting the money into our capital funds. I guess that was the only contrary position to mine.

At any rate, I persuaded those who didn't go along with me that this was a good thing for the stockholders, so that's the way we went. And the name that was selected for it was Viacom. We were sitting around one day, saying, “Well, what are we going to call this new company?” and one of the people who was going to be identified with the operation of it, said: “What about Viacom--Via Communications?” Well, it was as good as any, and nobody else had the name, so we grabbed it.

The people that went with that company were the people who were operating those functions within CBS, so that the unit of manpower devoted to cable and to syndication simply moved into a new building. I set up a board of directors for them, and they were off and running. They had some start-up problems, but that was when Viacom began. Viacom had two legs: one, the syndication leg and one the cable leg.

Interestingly enough, I had drinks last night--yesterday afternoon with Clark George, who was one of the executives at CBS that I peeled off to go with this new company. He was reminiscing last night about Viacom as he knew it when we started it twenty years ago. Maybe twenty-two years ago.

It was a success from the very first day, because we had good people in it and we had good product to sell in the way of syndicated product, and cable was beginning to take off. It was