William S. "Bill" Paley was the son of Samuel and Goldie Paley, Jewish immigrants from the Ukraine who founded a cigar manufacturing company in 1896 in Chicago; the company was later incorporated as the Congress Cigar Company and relocated to Philadelphia, where it became a thriving business. At the age of twelve, Paley impulsively added the middle initial "S" to his name. (Some people thought the "S" stood for Samuel.) Paley graduated from the Wharton School of Finance at the University of Pennsylvania in 1922. He had worked for his father's company while in college and joined the company upon graduation. Paley biographer Sally Bedell Smith writes in In All His Glory (1990) that while young Paley was vacationing, his father and uncle agreed to sponsor a radio program to advertise their La Palina cigars. This eventually led the company to become a radio sponsor...