Obituary
Nick Zapple, Senate aide with central role in pubcast history
Nicholas Robert Zapple, a key U.S. Senate lawyer who championed public broadcasting during its early years, died Feb. 8 in Falls Church, Va., succumbing to a sudden and acute infection at age 93.
“There’s probably no individual singly more important in bringing about the creation and survival of public broadcasting in the formative and following years than Nick,” said Mike Hobbs, former PBS Board secretary.
The communications counsel to the Senate Commerce Committee in the 1950s and ’60s was the quintessential behind-the-scenes champion for educational use of the public airwaves, Hobbs said. He combined that vision “with the knowledge of the nuts and bolts of how to bring it about.”
Through a period of advances and upheaval in telecom as well as broadcasting, Zapple spoke with the authority of the powerful committee Chair Warren Magnuson (D-Wash.) and communications subcommittee chair John Pastore (D-R.I.). Zapple had such a key position in oversight of the FCC that he was known as the eighth commissioner, said Howard Kitzmiller, the commission’s legislative liaison for many years.
“That was such a boon for public broadcasting, first in launching the Public Broadcasting Facilities Act in 1962 and then the Public Broadcasting Act in 1967, and pushing through the first multiyear appropriations,” said Peter Fannon, a onetime PBS planner who later served as president of the National Association of Public Television Stations.
In the rapid run-up to the 1968 act, when Hobbs was a young lawyer working in educational TV, he watched Zapple call commercial broadcasters, urging them to support federal aid to public TV in their own interest. If public TV weren’t created, Zapple argued, the public would continue to demand more public-interest services than commercial TV wanted to offer.
Zapple also phoned educational TV leaders to “knock their heads together” — a favorite phrase of his — and get them to cooperate strategically. “He was the translator instructing the naifs of educational broadcasting how they needed to come together ... to have the prospect of success,” Hobbs remembered.
Though Zapple could have become a well-paid telecom lobbyist when he retired in the 1970s, he remained an elder statesman and advisor to pubcasters into the 1990s, Kitzmiller said.
This advocate of a public dividend from spectrum grew up poor in Jersey City, N.J., the son of Ukrainian immigrants who barely learned English, his eldest son Rob said in a eulogy at a funeral mass Feb. 12. On the advice of his elders, Zapple went to law school and got out of Jersey City. After serving in World War II, he married and moved to the Washington area.
Zapple impressed his devotion to public service on his six kids. “He told me that, whatever I did, to make sure that I left the world better off than when I entered,” Rob Zapple said. “You can be sure I think about that every day of my life.”
Survivors include his wife of 63 years, Jean; three daughters; three sons; eight grandchildren; and three great-great-grandchildren.
Web page posted May 14, 2008
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