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Frank StantonFrank Stanton
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Session:         Page of 755

Stanton:

Well, in the end I guess it was called National Cable. Just a modest name. But it was in West Palm Beach and some of the surrounding communities in that area. West Palm Beach is a good area for cable, because it's a high-income area; people have time on their hands and want to get services; and we were offering, I think, 36 channels of service, when I sold the company, just earlier this year.

What happened was that my partner died. It was agreed when I went in as half-owner that he would be the other half and he would live in the area and operate it, and I would be an absentee owner, so to speak. We were very close friends and that presented no problems. But his health began to fail, and I did not want to move to Florida and I didn't want to commute, so I began to urge him to sell, and we didn't sell in time.

We could have sold at a much higher price earlier, but he was in the final stages of his life and thought that he was going to pull out. It was quite clear that he obviously wasn't. I didn't want to press him, but when he died, I bought from his estate the other half of the company.

It got more complicated than that. Florida Power and Light decided that it was going to go into the cable business, and, in Florida, you don't have an exclusive franchise; you can have competition. Florida Power and Light, with its enormous resources, decided to start cable in a number of communities, and I think in the end, at that time, probably hoped to wire the entire state.

They came into the West Palm Beach area, with a big rotary excavating instrument, and





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