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Frank StantonFrank Stanton
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Session:         Page of 755

don't think he cared about television. It wasn't the early days of television, it was before television really began after the war. It's true we had an experimental station. We had an engineering department that was abreast of television, and he knew those things. But Paul Kesten was interested in television, not Bill Paley. Bill was interested in our entertainment in radio. I think he was very much interested and would have loved to have been in the movie business. He didn't quite see the nexus between television and Hollywood, in the early days. It seems strange as you look back on it. A footnote that I would put in the records is that when I assembled the organization, to devote its exclusive interests and energies into television, I recognized that I had to have or they had to have a financial blueprint to know what they could spend and how they could grow. I brought one of the best operating men I had known, who ran our Chicago station and had at one time run our St. Louis property in radio. I brought him into New York and made him, in a sense, general manager of our television operations. There had been a man before that. There had been two who worried about television. Pretty much the word “worried” was the operative word, because they weren't pushing ahead. They were serving as operating head of something that I don't think they were really that excited about. I knew I had to have a forward-looking, tough-minded person to head the division. I brought this man. His name was Jack [John L.] van Volkenburg.

[END TAPE ONE, SIDE ONE; BEGIN TAPE ONE, SIDE TWO]

Stanton:

He was a very talented, basically sales-oriented person. But I think he could have run any one of a number of businesses. He came from the Middle West. He smiled. He was a very pleasant person to work with. He played a hell of a trombone. He was just a great individual. Jack and I would discuss the approach to a problem or, more frequently, the





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