In 1921, while William Samuel Paley was still a student at the University of Pennsylvania, Author Francis Scott Fitzgerald wrote a story called "The Diamond as Big as the Ritz," published it in his Tales of the Jazz Age. Buried on his remote estate a man found a massive diamond; he could buy anything he wanted by merely chipping off a sliver. He lived in super-Oriental luxury, owned hundreds of shirts, hundreds of neckties, socks, shoes. His house was fitted with every kind of comfort-giving device: buttons that brought soft music from an unseen orchestra, beds that tilted and slid a sleeper gently into a warm, perfumed bath, while violins played. . . . Critics agreed that Author Fitzgerald had imagination; many a college youth dreamed of finding a huge diamond. Last week Bill Paley sailed for the Bahamas with a $10,000,000 diamond in his pocket.
Pennsylvania's Wharton School graduated William Samuel Paley with a B. S. in economics in 1922. His father took him into the family cigar business. Bill Paley knew something about Congress Cigar Co. and about cigars. As a boy he had watched girls on high stools rolling rough tobacco into Java wrappers, shaping them, cutting off the ends. At 18, just out of the University of Chicago, where he spent one year, he had gone into his father's Philadelphia factory, had broken up a strike by taking these girls out to lunch. Still, he did not think much of the cigar business. Nevertheless, he set out to advertise La Palina cigars, traveled all over the U. S. and Europe introducing Java wrappers into respectable society. His campaign was successful and he supplemented newspaper advertising with radio. In 1928, partly with La Palina's profits, he bought Columbia Broadcasting System for $400,000.
Columbia had been founded by Publisher H. M. Newman of the Fourth Estate, was affiliated with Columbia Phonograph Co. and the Arthur Judson Concert Bureau. Broadcaster Newman got time on WOR and WABC. Then he sold control to a Philadelphia contractor, Jerome Louchheim. When Contractor Louchheim turned Columbia Broadcasting System over to young William Paley it consisted of WABC and 15 affiliated stations bound under loose contracts, and it was costing him more money every day.