The NBC Tour & Best Seat At CBS…The Desk Of William S. Paley
The NBC Tour & Best Seat At CBS…The Desk Of William S. Paley
Yesterday I finally saw ALL of NBC…top to bottom. It was an incredible six hour stroll through history that ended at The Paley Center For Media which is where the photos below were taken.
This is the desk of CBS founder William S. Paley; a leather topped card table with numbers that marked the place of each player. Paley sat at the #1 position (seen below left), Frank Stanton sat at the #2 position. It’s likely that Fred Friendly of CBS News spent a lot of time at the #3 position.
Who else sat at this table? You name them…Jackie Gleason was probably lured from Dumont at this table. Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz, Edward R. Murrow, Don Hewitt, Walter Cronkite, Dan Rather, Douglas Edwards, Mike Wallace, Red Skelton, Ed Sullivan and most of the names that are synonymous with CBS have probably sat here at one time or another. This is the true “catbird seat”.
We were able to end our day here because television history’s true protector and conservator was with us. It was a pleasure and honor to have Ron Simon join us for the NBC tour. Ron is the Curator of The Paley Center and since around 1988, has been archiving and collecting kinescopes and video tape of programs that would have otherwise been lost. Thanks to his efforts, thousands and thousands of hours of rare recordings are alive and well…safe for future generations. We all owe Ron and The Paley Center a debt of gratitude for their efforts.
I spent several hours there Saturday watching some of these rare videos, including the fist ever ‘Honyemooners’ episode in which Art Carney played a policeman. His ‘Norton’ character had yet to be created.
While I am on the sad subject of lost footage, here is a story SNL cameraman John Pinto told me at lunch Friday. John had worked at ABC and was hired for SNL’s debut a few months before it started. To keep him occupied till that October 1975 debut, John was assigned a job he still regrets having had to do.
For three months straight, it was his job to bulk erase tapes, most of which happened to be from ‘The Tonight Show’. To quote the announcer at the Hindenburg crash, “Oh, The Humanity!”
I might also mention that 3M, to help eliminate audio drop-outs, added a layer of foam to the upper reel of their tapes. This foam and the cement would break down, further cementing the tape to itself and the reel.
Erasability was a blessing and a curse. The ability to re-use a tape promoted the further research to perfect it, while the non re-use-abilty of kinescopes contributed to it’s demise. At the time, almost no one, including me, thought the erasure was a bad idea. After all, 2″ Quad tape took up a great deal of space, wayed a lot, and needed climate controlled storage. At this date, those tapes that were retained are not easily playable, due to the seepage of oxide binder to the edges of the tape. Even if they were kept, they might not be playable.