page_title: CBS
section_title: CBS takes on the Red and the Blue (1930s)
hierarchical_section_title: CBS / History / Early radio years / CBS takes on the Red and the Blue (1930s)
caption_attribution_description: English: American singer Kate Smith (1907-1986)
context_page_description: CBS is an American commercial broadcast television and radio network that is the flagship property of the CBS Entertainment Group division of ViacomCBS. The company is headquartered at the CBS Building in New York City, with major production facilities and operations in New York City and Los Angeles.
  CBS is sometimes referred to as the Eye Network, in reference to the company's trademark symbol, in use since 1951. It has also been called the "Tiffany Network", alluding to the perceived high quality of CBS programming during the tenure of William S. Paley. It can also refer to some of CBS's first demonstrations of color television, which were held in a former Tiffany & Co. building in New York City in 1950.
  The network has its origins in United Independent Broadcasters Inc., a radio network created in January 1927 in Chicago by Arthur Judson, a New York City talent agent. It was later that year, in April, that the Columbia Phonograph Company, parent of the Columbia record label, invested in the network, resulting in its re-branding to the Columbia Phonographic Broadcasting System.
context_section_description: Since NBC was the broadcast arm of radio set manufacturer RCA, its chief David Sarnoff approached his decisions as both a broadcaster and as a hardware executive; NBC's affiliates had the latest RCA equipment, and were often the best-established stations, or were on "clear channel" frequencies. Yet Sarnoff's affiliates were mistrustful of him. Paley had no such split loyalties: his and his affiliates' success rose and fell with the quality of CBS programming.
  Paley had an innate sense of entertainment. David Halberstam wrote that he had "a gift of the gods, an ear totally pure", and that he "knew what was good and would sell, what was bad and would sell, and what was good and would not sell, and he never confused one with another." As the 1930s loomed closer, Paley set about building the CBS talent stable. The network became the home to many popular musical and comedy stars, among them Jack Benny ("Your Canada Dry Humorist"), Al Jolson, George Burns and Gracie Allen, and Kate Smith, whom Paley had personally selected for his family's La Palina Hour because she was not the type of woman to provoke jealousy in American wives. When, on a mid-ocean voyage, Paley heard a phonograph record of Bing Crosby, then a young unknown crooner, he rushed to the ship's radio room and cabled New York to sign Crosby immediately to a contract for a daily radio show.
  While the CBS primetime lineup featured music, comedy and variety shows, the daytime schedule was a direct conduit into American homes – and into the hearts and minds of American women; for many, it was the bulk of their adult human contact during the course of the day. CBS salesmen recognized early on that this intimate connection could be a bonanza for advertisers of female-interest products. Starting in 1930, astrologer Evangeline Adams would consult the heavens on behalf of listeners who sent in their birthdays, a description of their problems, and a boxtop from sponsor Forhan's toothpaste. The low-key murmuring of smooth-voiced Tony Wons, backed by a tender violin, "made him a soul mate to millions of women" on behalf of the R. J. Reynolds tobacco company, whose cellophane-wrapped Camel cigarettes were "as fresh as the dew that dawn spills on a field of clover". The most popular radio-friend of all was M. Sayle Taylor, The Voice Of Experience, though his name was never uttered on air. Women mailed descriptions of the most intimate of relationship problems to The Voice in the tens of thousands per week; sponsors Musterole ointment and Haley's M–O laxative enjoyed sales increases of several hundred percent in just the first month of The Voice Of Experience's run.
  As the decade progressed, a new genre joined the daytime lineup: serial dramas soap operas, so named for the products that sponsored them. These were usually in quarter-hour episodes and proliferated widely in the mid- and late 1930s. They all had the same basic premise, namely that characters "fell into two categories: 1) those in trouble and 2) those who helped people in trouble. The helping-hand figures were usually older." At CBS, Just Plain Bill brought human insight and Anacin pain reliever into households; Your Family and Mine came courtesy of Sealtest Dairy products; Bachelor's Children first hawked Old Dutch Cleanser, then Wonder Bread; Aunt Jenny's Real Life Stories was sponsored by Spry Vegetable Shortening. Our Gal Sunday (Anacin again), The Romance of Helen Trent (Angélus cosmetics), Big Sister (Rinso laundry soap), and many others filled the daytime ether.
  Thanks to its daytime and primetime schedules, CBS prospered in the 1930s. In 1935 gross sales were $19.3 million, yielding a profit of $2.27 million. By 1937 the network took in $28.7 million and had 114 affiliates, almost all of which cleared 100% of network-fed programming, thus keeping ratings, and revenue, high. In 1938 CBS even acquired the American Record Corporation, parent of its one-time investor Columbia Records. In 1938 NBC and CBS each opened studios on Sunset Boulevard in Hollywood to attract the entertainment industry's top talent to th
caption: Wholesome Kate Smith, Paley's choice for La Palina Hour, was unthreatening to home and hearth
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