COMMUNICATIONS: Corporate Counterpoint

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Corporate Counterpoint

Huge Radio Corp. of America not only makes music on the air through National Broadcasting Co. but also sells its patrons radio sets, tubes, phonographs, records. NBC's thriving rival, Columbia Broadcasting System, until last week had no such manufacturing interests. Then its debonair young President William S. Paley announced that CBS had purchased American Record Corp., was thus "broadening the base of its service along natural lines."

That CBS was out to rival RCA in every way, young Mr. Paley neither denied nor affirmed. Merely pointing out that record sales are currently booming, he preferred to relate a curious little chapter of corporate counterpoint: one of American Record Corp.'s subsidiaries is famed old Columbia Phonograph Co. which dipped CBS into the baptismal fount eleven years ago, sold the little starveling three months later.