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Frank StantonFrank Stanton
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Session:         Page of 755

Stanton:

-- not by anybody else. And I came back and laid out a strategy for lining up affiliates so that we could go back to Biow and say, “We've got more stations we can offer than NBC can offer.” Which meant I had to go to Buffalo -- I think I went personally on a plane up to Buffalo -- to get a handshake from the man who owned the Buffalo station, or ran it, that if we offered and NBC offered the same program, that he'd take it from us in preference to NBC. I had been wooing this man for quite some time because that station was owned -- and the call letters were WBEN, BEN stood for the Buffalo Evening News. The editor was one of the great journalists of his time -- a man by the name of [Alfred H.] Kirchhofer -- I won't spell it but it starts with a K.

Q:

What was his first name?

Stanton:

The first time I called on him, which was 1953 Kirk said to me, “You came all the way to Buffalo to see me?”

I said, “Yes. Why?”

“Well,” he said, “we've been on the original NBC network since the day it was born. And no one from New York has ever come to see me.”

Q:

Wow! There you go.

Stanton:

And it was a lucky break for me. And so when I went to see him about “Lucy”, I had Buffalo.

And I sent every man -- every key executive we had that weekend went out into the field to





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