Our Own Hall of Fame
FRANK STANTON
NO STAR AT SAX, TRACK HERE
NBC Rejected Stanton, Then Regretted It
DAYTON DAILY NEWS, FEB. 8, 1961
BY MARY ELLEN LYNCH
Daily News Staff Writer
In the mid-30’s, Daytonian Frank Stanton was brushed off with a form letter when he applied for a job with the National Broadcasting Co. Ten years ago he turned down a name-your-own-price offer from NBC
In between he had become, at 38, the youngest man ever to head a major network (CBS). And Stanton had given NBC plenty of reason to regret that form letter. Under his leadership Columbia had staged a giant 1948 talent raid on NBC which brought stars like Jack Benny into the fold, had been first with 331/3 RPM records and had seen its color TV system win out over NBC’s.
STANTON started his presidential ways in high school (the Steele class of 1926.) He never has stopped. The son of a Dayton manual training teacher, he got his first job as a stock boy at the Metropolitan Co. when he was a Ruskin school eighth grader.
Clad in white ducks and open-necked sport shirts winter and summer, he geared up his bear-for-work energies, became a window trimmer and show card artist, and was making a then-healthy $50 a week by the time he graduated from high school.
(AT STEELE, although a big-man-on-campus, he struck out a few times. Stanton went out for track and in his first meet was entered, through an error, both as Frank and F. N. Stanton. He finished in a last place tie with himself. He is also remembered as one of the three or four worst saxophone payers in the history of the school.)
AFTER GRADUATION he married the only girl he had ever dated, Daytonian Ruth Stephenson, took a graduate assistant’s job at Ohio State (“For $750 a year and all the laboratory pigeons I could eat”), and started work on his doctorate. Stanton sent his dissertation on radio listening behavior to the major networks, got a ho-hum from NBC and an offer of a $50-a-week job as a researcher from CBS.
In 1935 he arrived in New York with his wife, a flat wallet and a wire-haired terrier. The pipe-puffing six-footer spent 70 to 80 hours a week in his office, rose rapidly to the post of research director and then advertising director.
AT 34, he was a vice president and also commuted to Washington several days a week to serve as a wartime information consultant.
In 1946 he stepped up to the presidency of the network, a post he has held ever since.
After the TV quiz scandals, Stanton ruled all big-money quizzes off CBS and questioned the honesty of canned laughter and applause.
A long-time believer in the impact of the spoken work (as a boy he built a crystal set out of a cigar box so he could study the miracle of radio), Stanton’s is a voice that is listened to in the communications industry.
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