Obituary
Ralph Steetle, 91
Ralph W. Steetle Sr., a leader in the campaign for reserved educational TV channels and a father of Oregon Public Broadcasting, died in Newport, Ore., after a short illness on May 5, 2004. He was 91.
Steetle went into educational broadcasting after serving with the State Department and the Navy during World War II. He returned to his alma mater, Louisiana State University, and started WLSU-FM, one of the first FM stations run by a college.
From 1951 to 1960 Steetle served as director of what became known as the Joint Council on Educational Television, a Washington, D.C.-based coalition of education and broadcast groups that lobbied the FCC for reserved channels. Steetle became interested in winning reserved channels at the Allerton House conference at the University of Illinois in 1949 and later attended organizational meetings with key organizers such as Richard B. Hull of Iowa State University, executive director of the group at its start, and I. Keith Tyler of Ohio State University, its chairman.
JCET was able to marshal evidence at 1951 hearings and later by working with such major groups as the American Council on Education and the National Education Association, as well as the National Association of Educational Broadcasters. Challenged by the FCC in 1951 to show educators' interest in the new channels within a year, JCET aimed to win channels in 209 communities, coordinating with potential licensees, stimulating interest and asserting JCET's own interest where local activists could not be found, Steetle told James Robertson in an oral history. In April 1952, the FCC reserved channels in those communities and others, reaching a total of 242.
After the commission reserved the channels, Steetle worked tirelessly to protect them from challenges by commercial broadcasters, especially where the FCC had reserved valuable VHF channels for education, says David Stewart, who was Steetle's assistant in the mid-1950s.
Steetle traveled widely as an advocate for educational TV, speaking to civic leaders with an authority lent by JCET's member groups including NEA and ACE, recalls Jack McBride. McBride was then starting the channel in Lincoln, Neb., that grew into Nebraska ETV.
Steetle believed public TV should change periodically to suit the public's changing needs. "It ought not to be a permanent structure," he told Robertson. "Educational television, I thought, ought to be reinvented about every seven years."
"Educational television can't be framed under glass as a museum piece," he said. "It has to be a worried, striving, fretting force — subject to and hoping for change."
Steetle later became head of educational media for the Oregon state higher education system in 1960 and led the development of the state's public TV network. In 1974, he retired to Waldport, Ore.
He is survived by his wife of 64 years, Jo, and six children, five grandchildren and one great-grandson.
Date of death added, was missing in print edition.
Web page posted Aug. 11, 2008
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