Radio: Old Blue’s New Blue

RCA’s orphan, the Blue Network (TIME, Jan. 11), left the orphanage last week. Edward John Noble (Life Savers) took the foundling away for $8,000,000 cash. For a year and a half the No. 3 U.S. chain had been up for sale because FCC decided that no broadcasting corporation should own two networks.

For his money, Owner Noble got a going concern of 155 affiliated stations, three owned stations (Manhattan’s WJZ, Chicago’s WENR (half-owned), San Francisco’s KGO). After the war he will have to shell out more millions for his own studios and equipment. For the duration the Blue will continue to lease NBC’s facilities.

The Blue’s new owner is a ruddy, genial, voluble Old Blue (Yale, ’05) who bought the idea for Life Savers from a Cleveland candymaker in 1913 and, with Partner Roy Allen, boomed it into a fortune. He calls it “a happy, whimsical little business.” It gave him time to become the first chairman of Franklin Roosevelt’s Civil Aeronautics Authority in 1938, and to serve as his Under Secretary of Commerce. A better-than-average public administrator, he quit the Government in 1940 to support Wendell Willkie.

Rich, happy, dollarwise, Ed Noble knows a good deal about radio. Since 1941 he has owned and operated Manhattan station WMCA a 5,000-watter. If FCC approves his purchase of the Blue (it will probably have no objection), he will have to sell WMCA (no one can own two radio stations in a city). Ed Noble says he views radio broadcasting as a public-service enterprise (“I’d be perfectly happy with meager profits”). He believes that it can do “tremendous good or bad in the direction of teaching people government, education, private enterprise, and democracy as I understand it.” He would like to make the Blue “a sort of New York Times of the industry.”