The Rise of ABC: The Stars, Struggles, and Egos That Transformed Network Television (1991)
Leonard H. Goldenson (
December 7, 1905 --
December 27,
1999) was
President of the
U.S. television and radio broadcaster
ABC.
Goldenson was born in
Pennsylvania in 1905. He grew up in the town of
Scottdale, Pennsylvania and graduated from Scottdale
High School. He is arguably the most influential person from Scottdale. He was educated at
Harvard, and entered the entertainment industry in 1933 as an attorney for
Paramount Pictures after graduating from
Harvard Business School. Goldenson was hired to help reorganize
United Paramount Theatres,
Paramount's theater chain, which at the time was nearing bankruptcy. So skillful was his work at this assignment that Paramount's chief executive officer,
Barney Balaban, hired Goldenson to manage the entire chain.
Goldenson orchestrated the merger of United Paramount Theatres with ABC in
1953 (after Paramount was ordered to spin it off in the wake of
United States v. Paramount Pictures,
Inc., a 1948 decree of the U.S.
Supreme Court). ABC was originally formed in
1943 in the wake of an earlier Supreme Court decree effectively ordering the spinoff of the largely secondary-status
Blue Network from its then-parent,
NBC; its buyer, industrialist
Edward J. Noble, tried valiantly to build ABC into an innovative and competitive broadcaster, but by
1951 was rumored to be on the verge of selling the nearly bankrupt operation to
CBS, who apparently wanted
ABC's critically important owned-and-operated television stations.[
1][2]
Goldenson rescued ABC with a $25 million cash infusion, becoming the founding chairman of the merged company which was named
American Broadcasting-Paramount Theatres. The modern ABC dates its history from the effective date of the Goldenson transaction, and not the Blue Network spinoff.
Although he focused chiefly on
ABC Television, Goldenson oversaw all areas of
ABC-Paramount's entertainment/media operations for over thirty years, from 1951 to
1986, including the creation of the AmPar
Record Corporation in
1955 and the 'rebadging' of the ABC-Paramount group as the
American Broadcasting Company in
1968.[3] Goldenson also was instrumental in the sale of ABC to
Capital Cities Communications in 1986. Very early on in his tenure, Goldenson also hired the first African-American staff announcer in network television and radio history, Sid McCoy.
Goldenson, whose first-born daughter was born with cerebral palsy, co-founded
United Cerebral Palsy in
1949 and used station
WBKB (at the time owned by United Paramount Theatres) to be the flagship station for the inaugural
UCP telethon that year.
In
1974, Mr. Goldenson received The Hundred Year
Association of
New York's Gold Medal Award "in recognition of outstanding contributions to the
City of New York."
The Leonard H. Goldenson
Theater at the
Academy of
Television Arts & Sciences building in
North Hollywood, California is named in his honor.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leonard_Goldenson