Best Seat in the House

the long version

He was the inspired genius of early television, and his innovations endure to this day. While head of NBC, he created the Today show and Tonight show and they continue to thrive forty years later. He changed the way programs are owned, moving their proprietorship from the advertising agencies to the network. And he instituted the system of multiple sponsorship of programs, instead of having a single advertiser. Now Pat Weaver has written a fascinating and revealing memoir of his exciting and often stormy days at NBC during the 1950s, as well as his experiences in radio during the 1930s and '40s. He describes his relationships with many of the great figures of radio and television - the caustic comic genius Fred Allen; the wildly eccentric tobacco magnate George Washington Hill; the mass of insecurities that was funnyman Milton Berle; the cold and ruthless head of RCA (owner of NBC), David Sarnoff; and the incredibly imaginative first star of the new medium, Sid Caesar. The Best Seat in the House gives an inside view of the early days of broadcasting, from the perspective of a visionary who has never surrendered his belief that television has a superb potential for spreading throughout the world the important cultural hallmarks of civilization. Sylvester L. "Pat" Weaver, Jr., was born in Los Angeles in 1908 and graduated from Dartmouth College. In 1932 he was hired as a writer for the Don Lee regional radio network and was next in charge of programs and news at a San Francisco station. He soon left California for New York, where he went to work for the advertising agency Young & Rubicam. In 1938 Weaver joined the American Tobacco Company as advertising manager, under the legendary George Washington Hill. After a stint in government as head of radio for Nelson Rockefeller, the Coordinator of Inter-American Affairs, Weaver served in the navy with the Atlantic Fleet. In 1949 he was hired by NBC to be head of television programming, and later he became president of the network. Pat Weaver has won two Emmys and was inducted into the Television Academy Hall of Fame in 1985. He lives in Southern California with his wife, Elizabeth.