The Nebraska network’s home station in Lincoln was the recently launched ninth on the nation’s educational TV map at right when McBride posed with KUON’s first chief engineer, Adolph Dvorak, more than 50 years ago. (Photo: Nebraska’s NET.)
Obituary
McBride looked to the future with Nebraskans in mind
One of public broadcasting’s great system builders, Jack McBride, age 82, died July 28 [2008] in Lincoln, Neb., where he managed Nebraska Educational Television for four decades.
Rod Bates, who succeeded McBride as g.m. 12 years ago, remembers he was intimidated by the thought that he’d have to fill McBride’s shoes. Bates says he calmed down after revising the metaphor: He’d be following in McBride’s footsteps.
“McBride’s work over more than 40 years enriched and broadened the lives of thousands of Nebraskans,” said a Lincoln Star-Journal editorial, which called the broadcaster “a rare individual who seemed to have the ability to peer around corners at what was coming next.”
Whenever McBride began orating within earshot of his staff, Bates recalls, “we would take bets on how long he would talk before he would say, ‘As we look to the future.’”
In McBride’s view of that future, NET would given Nebraskans many of the educational and cultural benefits of cities even if they lived in small towns.
He was “a very persuasive, persistent visionary,” Bates says. “You wanted to be on the same side as Jack because he would stay on it until he got it accomplished.”
The manager would lock himself in a room to write up a plan or a grant application, Bates says. “He was very well prepared to make his case.”
In the late 1960s, his next goal was a network headquarters building, recalls Ron Hull, McBride’s longtime program chief. “He wrote down all the alternatives, all the negatives a senator might use against his case.” Then he dispatched Hull to win an appropriation from the state legislature. (The building, named after a state legislator, opened in 1972.)
“Ron was the people guy,” says Bates. “Jack was very analytical, very bright, but frankly there was a kind of running joke that he wouldn’t know your name.”
“He was a taciturn, shy character,” Hull says, though staffers could feel that he appreciated their work.
In a eulogy at McBride’s memorial service Aug. 1, Hull observed, “We worked hard for him because he engendered our respect, and as one staff member said to me yesterday, ‘We didn’t ever want to let Jack down.’”
After McBride delegated authority to managers, he quizzed them on their plans but didn’t say no, says Steve Robinson, who started NET Radio in 1990.
When the radio network planned to air an 11-hour reading of the late Willa Cather’s novel O Pioneers on her birthday, Robinson remembers, the boss said only, “Oh, really?” Robinson remembers that the marathon got a great public response.
NET’s org chart was complex, but McBride had a hand in making it that way. “You’re a state commission on one hand and a university on the other,” says Bates, while other units are nonprofit foundations and self-supporting businesses. The alliance with the University of Nebraska gave NET greater flexibility for growth than a state agency would have. The state would have balked when NET added services and employees, Bates says, but the university approved growth so long as revenues grew, too.
In 1976, this ambitious little public-sector enterprise had its David-and-Goliath moment, with NBC taking the larger role. Hull says the Nebraska network had spent about $35 creating a simple new logo, a stylized “n,” which it was already using in 1976 when the Peacock Network unveiled a nearly identical new logo that cost far more to develop.
Though this prompted some glee outside of Radio City, Hull recalled in his eulogy that McBride was adamant “that every move we made should make NBC look good as well as ourselves.” NET sued NBC, but McBride squelched the gloating and negotiated settlements worth $850,000.
Universities and civic groups across the country were planning educational TV stations in 1953 when McBride came to the University of Nebraska to make instructional TV program, but only eight licenses reached the air earlier.
Before the University of Nebraska had its own TV station in 1954, McBride (center) produced the series Trouble Spots featuring professors’ talks about foreign political turmoil. The series was produced at and aired by commercial stations, according to retired NET programmer Ron Hull. (Photo: NET.)
Commercial broadcast John Fetzer, who owned both VHF channels in the state capital of Lincoln, gave one of them to the university and kept a monopoly in the market for his company. KUON signed on in 1954. The state began applying for licenses outside of the state capital and activated eight by 1968.
In the 1950s, while Ford Foundation apostles of instructional TV focused on introducing the televised teacher into big schools and large classrooms, McBride said in Jim Robertson’s oral history Televisionaries, Nebraska adapted the idea for the state’s tiny rural schools, where the broadcast could add courses that otherwise could not be taught.
As new video technologies appeared, McBride brought them to Nebraska. In the 1960s, NET developed a regional archive of classroom videotapes into a national distributor, Great Plains National Instructional Television Library.
In 1974, NET tried two-way video for distance learning over land lines between university campuses in Omaha and Lincoln.
In 1990 Nebraska leased a full-time satellite transponder for educational programming — the first for a state. NET still serves 303 digital receiving sites in Nebraska and 200 others around the country.
And in the late 1970s, long before the Web made interactive media a daily tool for most Americans, the Nebraska network experimented with the early 12-inch analog optical videodiscs, aiming to develop their great potential for training and education. The Nebraska Videodisc Design/ Production Group trained hundreds producers from across the country. As many as 50 full-time and 50 part-time workers created discs containing the state’s noted high-school correspondence courses, Bates says. Though the big gleaming platters didn’t stay on the cutting edge for long, the experience “positioned us for going digital,” says Bates.
NET got around to the old medium of radio in the late 1980s. Before Robinson arrived as the first manager of Nebraska Public Radio Network, NET had recruited local citizen teams around nine TV stations to raise the $500,000 needed to add radio to each local tower. NET stayed clear of Omaha, maintaining good relations with independent stations there.
McBride retired in 1996 as NET g.m. and secretary of the state ETV commission, but he kept coming to work. Bates says some of his peers thought he was crazy to give an office and a part-time role to the legendary former boss, but McBride “never second-guessed me” and remained “the consummate professional and gentleman,” each year proposing a list of tasks he would work on.
In national forums, McBride argued for more attention to instructional TV even as the first Carnegie Commission prepared its report proposing public TV for general audiences. In Televisionaries, McBride said he urged the commission to propose advances for the formal-education side as well. “Please don’t exclude it,” he recalled telling the commission, but it went ahead with its 1967 report, which led to Congress passing the Public Broadcasting Act and creating CPB.
Looking back, McBride said one of his big disappointments was “that we have not been able to really get American education to realize the full potential available to them through the medium of video,” he said in an interview for Televisionaries in 1981. “It has advanced, but at a snail’s pace.”
McBride was very healthy until a decade ago, and then bounced back after losing part of a lung to cancer and largely recovered from a stroke two years ago, according to Bates. But fatal complications set in after recent surgery to remove the rest of his left lung.
On one of Hull’s last visits to McBride, he brought news that one of McBride’s last remaining obligations would be in good hands. Public TV retirees Bob and Maxine Reed agreed to maintain publication of the Old Timers’ Newsletter that McBride had distributed to retired colleagues around the country.
McBride is survived by his wife, Jean; children Julie and David; and four grandchildren.
NET established a Jack G. McBride Memorial Fund in his memory.
Jim Robertson's book, Televisionaries, an oral history of public TV, will be republished by Current later in 2008.
Web page posted Aug. 11, 2008
Copyright 2008 by Current LLC
