McBride hailed as living exemplar of ‘carpe diem’
Jack McBride, who headed Nebraska's state public TV network from its beginning, retired in 1996, but kept working — on his Heartland program export project, among other things.
Jack McBride already was something of a legend in public broadcasting, long before the Central Educational Network brought its annual meeting to Nebraska last month.
The CEN conference just made it official. Jim Fellows, president of the regional network, gave McBride its first Carpe Diem Award, and cracked, "If Jack McBride didn't see an opportunity to seize, he created it and then seized it."
The legend became concrete as covetous executives from other stations toured "the House That Jack Built," a busy and well-equipped five-story teleplex that they'd all like to pack up and take home with them.
Out back, like big dandelions on the lawn, were about a dozen dishes pointed every which way at various satellites, including Nebsat--a transponder that carries 15 or more video channels for the state's colleges and schools as well as the ETV network. The almost comically crowded dish farm represented the many services McBride and staff have developed over 40 years.
The flagship station in Lincoln, KUON, will be 40 next year; it was the seventh or eighth educational TV station in the country.
Nebraska ETV's producers and programmers--led by Ron Hull, Gene Bunge and others--have been recognized for their strong local productions and increasing contributions to the national schedule. And a series of programmer-alumni have gone on to high posts in stations elsewhere. But what CEN was most interested in displaying at Nebraska was the extensive range of telecommunications services, channels and underlying technologies available there.
As Penn State's Mark Erstling remarked later, "There's no point in talking about multiple channels ... Jack has them all." Why exactly it all developed in Nebraska is open to debate. Ron Hull, McBride's associate g.m., points out that Nebraskans are proud of their institutions, their university and its Big Red football team. They were sold on the idea of land-grant colleges and of sharing the intellectual wealth, and educational TV fit that mindset "completely and totally." When rural people saw what educational TV had brought the city people, they said, "We want that, too."
But there was a bigger factor in Nebraska ETV's achievements, Hull contends. "The difference is the leadership--a Nebraska boy, and he is one of the most visionary people in this business."
Since "Carpe Diem" was the theme of CEN's meeting, McBride and Nebraska provided the case in point.
"Sometimes opportunities present themselves when you least expect them," McBride said last week. "Then the need is to act quickly as possible."
One such opportunity presented itself in 1954, within months after McBride came to the university in Lincoln. A broadcaster, John Fetzer, offered one of the city's two VHF stations. (It was an opportunity for Fetzer, too, because he owned the other station, which became the only commercial station in town.)
Four years ago, McBride moved just as quickly when he heard from his Washington lawyer that the Public Telecommunications Facilities Program might be interested in funding a satellite network for agricultural telecourses. Within months, Nebraska had convened a group of 23 land-grant colleges and applied for funding of Ag*Sat. The network now serves 38 universities and some 850 ag extension sites across the country.
By being quick with the grant proposal, Nebraska walked in the ground floor of many of the newer media technologies. A few years after the invention of videotape, Nebraska got a federal grant to study tape's educational potential, which led to the founding of Great Plains Regional ITV Library at the university in 1962. It survives as GPN, one of the largest instructional TV videocassette distributors.
Likewise, a 1970s federal grant to study the videodisc gave Nebraska educators the chance to work with prototype players and gave it the head start to establish the Nebraska Videodisc Design/ Production Group, whose workshops trained 85 percent of the producers making interactive videodiscs, according to McBride.
Other opportunities were more "made" than seized. Expanding from KUON into a statewide network--the political and economic foundation for all that followed--required strategic consensus-building. The Nebraska Council for ETV, a group based in school districts that was formed in 1960 to develop classroom programs, petitioned and won five VHF channels from the FCC. The council "could do it faster than going through the state government," McBride says.
Bringing public radio to the state took longer--18 years, according to Steve Robinson, head of the eight-station network that signed on in 1990-91. Commercial broadcasters opposed public radio for years; McBride and company gradually changed their minds. Those who weren't convinced had time enough to die or retire.
The big teleplex building, built more than 20 years ago, is now full with 200 employees and technologies that were hardly imagined then. For sightseers who came for the CEN conference, it was a symbol of McBride's foresight.
"His great genius seems to be imagining potentials--then he hires staff and pats them on the back, and off they run," says George Hall, a teleplex advocate who once worked with McBride.
"He's really a pioneer, but more than that, he's had the vision of how to use the medium," says Betty Dyer, a longtime employee who is now retired.
When a vision comes to McBride, his colleagues say, a dedication ceremony is soon to follow.
Sometimes, it's on a cold prairie, where onlookers huddle outside the transmitter building until a dignitary cuts the yellow ribbon. And sometimes there's a oversized old electrical switch for somebody to swing down, seeming to turn on a new network. "Jack has a passion for dedication ceremonies," says an aide. "Jokes abound about that, but we won't go into them."
Web page posted March 23, 1999; revised Dec. 19, 2006
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