Birthday
Thirty years ago, over cornucopia-shaped Radiolas, Americans in 25 cities heard the first peep out of the National Broadcasting Co., created by RCA's David Sarnoff to sell more of what he first envisioned as a "radio music box." Last week, with a $350,000 birthday party in Miami, NBC proudly surveyed what Sarnoff had wrought. It had grown into a giant with 207 TV and 188 radio affiliates, yearly net revenue of $159 million, 5,500 employees and 35 vice presidents,*and the cachet of being sued by the U.S. as a monopoly.
And there are now two Sarnoffs: Founder David and his son Robert, who was eight when the first radio network was born.
Son Bobby played host in Miami last week as president of NBC.
Dinosaur's Ear. The first network broadcast was delivered through a microphone that looked like a dinosaur's hearing aid, but the talent added up to a four-hour 1926 spectacular: Dr. Walter Damrosch and the New York Symphony, Weber and Fields, the Met's Titta Ruffo, and the dance bands of Ben Bernie, George Olsen and Vincent Lopez. In the following years, while the unseen U.S. audience grew from 5 million radio sets to 127 million radios and 38 million TV sets, NBC kept the air buzzing with such big names and pioneering feats as the Clicquot Club Eskimos, Amos 'n' Andy, Graham MacNamee and the first short-wave relay from England (1929), Milton Berle, Howdy Doody, Arturo Toscanini, and the first coast-to-coast telecast of a World Series (1951). Last week, as part of the four-day birthday convention at the color-blinding new Americana Hotel, NBC presented TV shows by Perry Como, Dave Garroway and Steve Allen, with such guests as Gina, Groucho, Debbie and Eddie and the NBC staff chimpanzee, J. Fred Muggs.
To celebrate it all, NBC kept Cadillac motorcades flowing between the airport and the Americana until they filled its 475 rooms with some 700 guests, including so many celebrities that oglers hardly had eyes for the lobby's live orchids, alligators and waterfalls. By the time Robert Sarnoff got to the main business, his convention speech, the clock ticked toward midnight, Gina was distractingly cuddling with her husband at one of the main tables, and a spectator was heard to grumble, "Here comes the late late speech."
World in Color. But the NBC president had serious matters to discuss. He an nounced that next year NBC will produce, three times a week for 26 weeks, instructional programs in mathematics, the humanities and government, and feed them live--and free--to the nation's 22 edu cational TV stations. The programs will be kinescoped for repeat telecasts or classroom use. In producing them (cost: $300,000), NBC will work with leading educators and the Educational Television and Radio Center at Ann Arbor, Mich.
More pertinent to the future was the problem of color TV. NBC was now staking its future, and a combined RCA-NBC investment of possibly as much as $75 million, on the belief that the U.S public will switch to color television. To 500 station owners and executives affiliated with NBC and thus involved--not all of them happily--in its color plunge, Sarnoff insisted that black-and-white TV is slack ing off and color is "the booster charge for our fourth decade." With the kind of optimism that helped his immigrant father become one of the great U.S. success stories, Bobby Sarnoff professed to see a pleasant sight. "At our 60th anniversary convention," he said, "I expect to be talking about television signals which span the globe. My subject then will be: The World--in Color."