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for thirty-five or thirty million dollars, and yet I think Bill felt I had gone too far out of line when I did it.

How about some of the other acquisitions during the early sixties?

The book business we did together. There weren't any other acquisitions of anything major. Sure we bought little things: a toy business, and things that we sort of hung on the Christmas tree because we thought they fit. Sometimes they did and sometimes they didn't. All those things are long since gone because they weren't nurtured. If you're going to make those things work, they have to have some leadership and they have to have some money. If I had acquired some of the properties that we did acquire and if I were acquiring them today -- forget the economy we're in -- if I were acquiring them, I think I would have insisted on the person who sold me the business keeping, perhaps, as much as twenty percent of the stock and having a contract to operate the business. Twenty percent of the stock obviously so that his future has some tie to the business, and operating the business simply because these were businesses that we didn't know, and one way to learn them was to learn them from the people who ran them to the point where we thought they were worth buying. That kind of wisdom I didn't have. Paley didn't suggest it. I don't know whether it occurred to him. I should have figured it out for myself. I didn't. The tax people and the seller frequently wanted to get the capital gains tax, although selling eighty percent of the stock wouldn't have prevented the capital gains tax. From an operating point of view, it would have been a sub rather than a part of the company. There are a lot of tax considerations that make it desirable to have it inside the company.

We had the devil's own time with the building on Sixth Avenue. That was an unhappy period