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It was an image that Freddie, the son of a television repairman from Rego Park, Queens, seemed to rebuff every time he walked down the hall. He would argue IN A BIG VOICE for the shows he wanted, and rarely failed to point out the mistakes of those above him. CBS tolerated him, but did not like him. He never got the inflated title he might have expected —senior or executive vice president—and he was not on the limousine list. Says a friend: "Freddie's a blue-collar worker —he actually reads scripts and watches shows—and he doesn't do things in the white-collar CBS way."
Money has never mattered to Freddie," adds Mike Dann, Silverman's mentor and the man who preceded him as CBS's top programmer. "What he really wanted was respect for the tremendous role he was playing in the company. Freddie quit almost 250 times at CBS, but, far more important, during at least half his time there I can count three network presidents who wanted to fire him." Silverman's own explanation for his leave-taking is the most poignant: "I found I wasn't laughing any more."
Silverman is probably the first network programmer who grew up laughing —and crying—at TV. Since his father was a television repairman, his family started sitting around the tube earlier than most. After high school in Rego Park, a middleclass, largely Jewish neighborhood 20 minutes by subway from Manhattan, Freddie went to Syracuse University in upstate New York. He majored in broadcasting at Syracuse's School of Speech and Dramatic Arts and then went to graduate school at Ohio State. In 1959, with what now seems like inspired prescience, he wrote his master's thesis on ABC. "The phrase, 'a young, vitalic network,' is the key to the future for ABC," he wrote. "ABC should provide updated, youthful [programming], with a balance of all program types especially conceived and plotted for the younger, larger family groups, a 'something for everybody' schedule."
After graduation he found a job at Station WGN-TV in Chicago. His flair for promotion gave him two immediate successes. He bought up a string of kids' movies from the '50s, featuring Bomba, the Jungle Boy. He edited them down to an hour each, and added a dramatic opening of mysterious jungle drums. The kids loved them. He also bought old adventure films, such as Robin Hood and Tom Sawyer. Renaming them Family Classics, he dared to run them on Friday nights, usually the province of action and comedy. He had another smash, and Family Classics outdrew even Bob Hope. WON is still running the series.