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do it.

That was one of the things that was in the back of my mind. The other thing was that I didn't know a damn thing about running a company. I knew and had enough ideas from my experience with Kesten and research to know that I could probably come up with concepts and ideas. I had no backing in the legal side. I knew nothing about a balance sheet. I knew a P'L, but I didn't know anything about a balance sheet. I didn't know a lot about labor. Although I guess that's not fair, because I had labor contracts with all these nine stations and no two of them were the same. That was another thing that I introduced. Why somebody hadn't thought of it earlier, I don't know. No two of those stations had the same rate card. The rate card -- obviously they wouldn't have the same rate, but they should have the same principles of discounts and bracketing of time periods when you charge different rates and so forth. Boston was one. Chicago was different, so forth. None of the managers of those stations had ever met together as a group. In fact, when I told Kesten that I was calling the managers in, and I was expecting some flak from one of them who felt he was more equal than the others, he said, “I'd better give you a memo that says you're authorized to do anything you want to, in effect, do. Because if there's any trouble from the west coast man and the Chicago man, I'd like you to have a memo that you can lay on the table and say you have my authority, you're in charge of the company. And when I asked the men around the table about why they didn't have a rate card, well, nobody'd ever asked them about that before. So I knew that -- some of those cockeyed ideas didn't bother me but I wasn't sure that I knew anything about stockholder relations. I didn't even know about the stock of a company. I didn't own any stock at that point.

The company had gone public in '37.