get airtime for his musician clients on the pioneering NBC radio network, he began cobbling together his own radio network to give them exposure, radio historian John F. Schneider said. He eventually called the network the Columbia Broadcasting System.

"It was underfunded and failing when William Paley acquired the company in 1928," Schneider said. "The Columbia name stuck, even though Paley had nothing to do with that. But he had the business acumen to put together what became, almost overnight, a very important broadcast network."

Paley also saw the value of reaching West Coast audiences and teamed up with Don Lee, who owned Cadillac car dealerships and two stations in California: KHJ in Los Angeles and KFRC in San Francisco, Schneider said. "That was the beginning of the West Coastbeing established as a national radio program distribution center," he said.

In the 1930s, CBS became a leader in radio dramas and boasted such talent as Orson Welles and Norman Corwin, said Ron Simon, curator for TV and radio at the Paley Center for Media in New York.

"They created dramas that lived on in listeners' minds," Simon said.

CBS would boast some of the most popular entertainers, such as Eddie Cantor, Al Jolson and eventually Bing Crosby, Jack Benny and Red Skelton. Some of those comedians came over in Paley's raids on NBC for entertainers, Simon said, and eventually would help launch the CBS television network.

"That talent would become trailblazers in television," Simon said.

CBS Radio's most important contribution, according to the historians, was its vaunted news operation.

"From the beginning of