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be at the desk side of the manager when the offer came in from NBC and CBS. And we carried the day.

But that's the kind of warfare or competitiveness, if you will, that took place in those early days.

Now, it wasn't money per se that got the stations to do this. That was a very strong program. And they recognized that -- although I don't think they knew, and neither did we, how good “Lucy” was going to be -- She had been good in radio and potentially, because she was the kind of comedienne she was, you could count on something big happening there. And so the stations, with our encouragement, locked in with us instead of NBC. And we did that on a number of shows.

I mention this only because what Paley was devoting his attention to in programming made a big difference in our strength when we didn't have any stations to offer. It wasn't that we didn't own our own. We didn't have affiliates.

I understand that. You were in trouble.

So, we had to work with NBC's affiliates in order to put a network together.

How many of those affiliates were you able to persuade?

I've forgotten but those we didn't get on that first round, we got very quickly when they saw what was happening with the program.