00:01 - How did it all start?

00:03 - I guess between your

00:05 - your father in law and his dad.

00:09 - Right.

00:09 - This is the original.

00:12 - The original

00:14 - panorama name.

00:17 - And actually, we'll start with the reason for the network.

00:22 - Mm hmm.

00:23 - 1967,

00:26 - there was a freeze on on cable industry, on channel carriage.

00:30 - We were allowed to carry the local

00:31 - channels, three independent or one independent

00:35 - and three distant signals. That was it.

00:37 - And at that time stated, our cable systems

00:40 - were 35 to 40 channels.

00:42 - So we had a lot of empty space on our systems.

00:47 - People were going out.

00:48 - There was a network called the fourth

00:49 - Network was started by Sun Oil.

00:51 - You'd buy it, subscribe to this, they'd send you a videotape,

00:55 - three quarter inch cassette,

00:56 - and you'd hire some high school kids or college kids at night.

00:59 - And they play these tapes on a daily basis.

01:01 - You play them all day long because we just had

01:03 - we had no program.

01:04 - They had 16 millimeter film chains and all

01:07 - all kinds of anything

01:09 - we could put on television devices

01:10 - where you had a camera or a ticker tape

01:13 - and you'd watch the news.

01:14 - You know, you'd read the news as good as it was Reuters.

01:17 - Reuters News was digital and not digital,

01:20 - but it was a teletype type of machine

01:23 - somewhere between,

01:26 - uh, 1973, 74.

01:30 - My father, Yolanda, George, I think you were there.

01:34 - We went to

01:37 - the State Association, had a meeting in State College

01:40 - because they Phillips, who was a system engineer for

01:46 - introduced,

01:48 - took us through the studio.

01:49 - Marlo Frank was there

01:51 - and they had archives just like you guys had here.

01:53 - There was hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of videotapes

01:56 - with college level programing and interesting programing.

02:00 - My dad said to Marlo, Marlo, could we use this?

02:03 - He said, Sure.

02:05 - Well, that's how it started, my dad.

02:08 - But that was before the Passion Network.

02:11 - Oh, definitely.

02:12 - That was it was just in 1974.

02:15 - We ran a return fiber path.

02:17 - We actually ran a fiber and a coaxial cable

02:20 - from our Dunmore office Northeast Cable

02:23 - that to scrub oak.

02:24 - But it we ran a three quarter inch cable coaxial cable

02:28 - from Scranton Worthington campus back to our offices.

02:33 - The initially we played tapes.

02:35 - Penn State the deal was Penn State

02:37 - because was Penn State property.

02:39 - We couldn't we couldn't take the tapes.

02:41 - They could play them.

02:42 - So they hired a girl.

02:45 - You know, I'll never forget she would come to the office

02:48 - at 8 a.m. in the morning till 5 p.m.

02:50 - and then the tapes were there and we we'd say we set them up

02:53 - and recycle them through four, four hour blocks of programing.

02:56 - Initial the initial system was a half

02:58 - hour program running for our blocks.

03:02 - And that's where the tapes were bicycled to your place.

03:04 - I mean, we brought them in from state call.

03:06 - Actually,

03:07 - Penn State sent a minivan to Scranton, Worthington campus.

03:10 - We had a half hour program and it ran

03:13 - the programs were half hour in duration

03:14 - and they were four hour blocks.

03:16 - So every every 4 hours they would repeat.

03:19 - Okay.

03:20 - And that was the same format we used for many years.

03:22 - And what kind of programs were these?

03:24 - Oh, there were all kinds.

03:25 - They had a a math program.

03:28 - It was education free.

03:29 - It was almost all educational, was, of

03:32 - course, material. Yes.

03:34 - Yes, some of it was, of course material.

03:36 - That's right.

03:38 - In some ways.

03:39 - Just like Travelog type things.

03:42 - Yeah. Yeah.

03:43 - So yeah, they had no, not like unlike today with TCN,

03:47 - there's very little, if any new programing.

03:50 - It was all for use pre-made.

03:53 - A lot of, a lot of it was

03:55 - public television

03:57 - information that they use and they had it

04:01 - previously aired there was no no new programing at all.

04:05 - Once we completed the Scranton Worthington campus interconnect

04:08 - to our office back to Scrub Oak, Blue Ridge

04:12 - asked for the programing, so we said, sure.

04:14 - We established microwave path between Temple

04:17 - Hill, from Scrub Oak to Temple Hill to Rocky Ridge.

04:20 - And that's how Blue Ridge then

04:24 - I guess it was 70.

04:26 - That was in 1974,

04:27 - middle of June of 74 is when we started the programing.

04:31 - So about 75.

04:34 - George was very interested in getting educational material

04:37 - across the state.

04:38 - He says, Can we do this?

04:40 - Well, he met with an individual and I don't remember his name.

04:44 - I have to think of it.

04:46 - In Harrisburg we flew down to Harrisburg.

04:48 - We had a meeting with the State Education Association.

04:51 - And this guy was the head of that.

04:53 - Yeah, I can't give his name.

04:54 - Yeah, I can't think of his name,

04:56 - but he, he Marlo would have known.

04:58 - Marlo would have known the Education Department.

05:01 - Department of Education.

05:02 - He was he was a principal and he was a president of it.

05:07 - They talked about

05:08 - interconnecting the state and they said it's going to take

05:12 - five years to do the study,

05:14 - $35 million to do the project, because the state

05:17 - looked at interconnecting all the counties and try

05:20 - to do an educational interconnect.

05:23 - And I got involved with my father.

05:26 - Actually, my father became involved,

05:27 - invited me to a meeting

05:29 - and I said, it won't cost that much money

05:30 - and sure as hell won't take five years.

05:33 - So we put together,

05:35 - we had several meetings and we met and they met in State

05:38 - College a dozen times, maybe even more.

05:42 - That's when we formed the corporation in Meadville.

05:46 - We all flew out and the charter, if I remember, was Verdell

05:49 - Blue Ridge.

05:49 - Meadville, Charles Cable.

05:52 - Tell TCI, Oh, Blue Ridge, let's say them.

05:57 - They get all of those SATs.

05:59 - Yeah. They, they incorporate.

06:00 - I think he already has all those.

06:02 - There were I think ten or 11 of Armstrong's here

06:06 - but. Oh yeah.

06:09 - William Pat's

06:12 - Lansford,

06:14 - William Penn.

06:15 - The town wiped out.

06:17 - Yeah, we put together a corporation.

06:20 - It was Yolanda.

06:22 - I know George was a president.

06:24 - I know his vice president.

06:26 - Your father was vice president.

06:28 - He was right there.

06:29 - Oh, okay.

06:29 - Yolanda was secretary, I think.

06:31 - Okay, George is the president.

06:33 - My dad VP.

06:35 - Yolanda was VP administration.

06:37 - Zilch management was it was the church.

06:40 - Yeah.

06:42 - We'll tell the story about him.

06:43 - Jimmy Tedesco is secretary and Bob was assistant.

06:47 - They then tasked Billy to say, What do you need?

06:51 - I'll never forget this. George was sitting there.

06:52 - He said, What do you need to put this microwave in?

06:55 - I said, Well, we could do it several ways.

06:58 - I said, First of all, we need to identify the participants

07:01 - who you know what, cable operators want this service.

07:04 - So we put it actually Yolanda and Ilene did the work there.

07:08 - They canvased state operators found out who wanted it.

07:12 - So typically a microwave project of this scope

07:15 - and nature would take take five years.

07:18 - But when we knew where we had to go, what I decided to do

07:21 - is, okay, we'll build the eastern route first.

07:24 - We're going to utilize existing astrocytes wherever practical

07:27 - and we add using the head ins from the cable companies

07:31 - wherever we could. Right. That was that was key.

07:35 - We then while the East was ees,

07:37 - we knew where we knew where to go.

07:39 - We had more locations out there

07:41 - than we have more subscribers, right. Yeah.

07:43 - So the ease was a simple task.

07:45 - We knew that we needed an F.M. system or

07:51 - we needed a type of microwave

07:52 - that is capable of doing multiple hops transportation.

07:56 - And it had operate in a car's band frequency range.

07:59 - I designed a network with

08:02 - with Microwave Associates equipment

08:04 - because they were the best at the time.

08:06 - We had a bid from Collins, Rockwell and a bid from Macomb

08:10 - Microwave Associates.

08:11 - Microwave Associates was a little less money

08:15 - and it had better operating parameters.

08:17 - So we made that decision.

08:19 - We installed that in the spring of

08:25 - 1980.

08:28 - That sounds right.

08:29 - And that was the. No, no, no, no, no.

08:31 - It was a it was a spring in 1979 versus 1979.

08:35 - Yeah. And that was the Eastern Loop.

08:37 - That was east.

08:38 - Just east.

08:39 - That's just part of the Eastern Loop.

08:40 - That one or even all of it. No, no.

08:42 - That went from Williamsport to Lock Haven,

08:46 - Avis to William.

08:49 - It went from State College Center Point State College

08:52 - to Lock Haven, then the Avis Williamsport

08:56 - to Berwick, S.E.

08:59 - Scrub Oak Temple Hill, Rocky Ridge.

09:04 - So I don't remember those two.

09:05 - And then down to

09:08 - Kutztown.

09:09 - Yeah, Kutztown to almost north.

09:12 - That was Jerry Lenfest, right.

09:14 - Waldorf was a that was the initial installation route.

09:18 - Okay.

09:18 - Okay. And we,

09:21 - we did that.

09:22 - And then in two weeks,

09:24 - wow, we had we had we all we use helicopters.

09:29 - We transported people around actually

09:32 - lock haven.

09:33 - You couldn't there's no roads up to that.

09:34 - It was about

09:35 - three quarters of a mile from from the last main road.

09:39 - It was a very steep mountain,

09:40 - a lot of rocks and a lot of rattlesnakes.

09:43 - It was bad.

09:44 - We had we used

09:45 - we flew everything on helicopters

09:46 - and we maintained that site for geez,

09:49 - I don't know how many years what el copter.

09:50 - Yeah,

09:51 - either you either walked up there

09:52 - or you couldn't you couldn't even take a snowmobile up.

09:55 - There was just too steep.

09:57 - I remember one time we went up there that you dropped down.

09:59 - I jumped off to fix a place for it to come in.

10:07 - Well, I was out fixing a landing spot.

10:09 - Yeah, when we first went up the trees and falling down and.

10:12 - Oh, yeah, we dead first time.

10:15 - The first time we flew in there.

10:16 - There's a rock is on a real steep ridge.

10:18 - Yeah. Bald Eagle Mountain. Right.

10:20 - Uh, just the bald eagle ridge there.

10:23 - I'm not sure what it's called.

10:24 - I call it we always call it Lock Haven.

10:26 - Okay.

10:27 - We were able to get one skid on the side of a rock

10:29 - and got a guy out

10:31 - and in the chain saw it, and we hovered away. Yeah.

10:34 - And then he cleared an area to land.

10:35 - Then we cleared an alternate site

10:37 - just in case we had a problem with the helicopter

10:40 - or somebody got hurt, and we had to fly

10:42 - another helicopter and get people out.

10:44 - So we had a prime and an alternate site

10:46 - with some generators up to our gas tanks.

10:48 - Where did eventually we build the tower lock haven?

10:52 - No. Yes.

10:54 - No, no, that's right.

10:56 - We moved it.

10:57 - We moved that site to a point south of State College.

11:03 - Remember, Annie Baker moved that we State College,

11:06 - we dismantled that we flew everything out our everything.

11:09 - Then we had to go and pick port.

11:10 - We flew all this stuff out.

11:12 - Yep, yep.

11:14 - I figured maybe 45 or 50 trips,

11:18 - sling loading equipment out of there.

11:19 - Set the scene a little bit for me at the time

11:22 - that you got involved in this, you were doing what with

11:26 - you were working for your father's company.

11:27 - We were in it, right?

11:28 - We're in a cable business. Cable television business.

11:30 - And you had been in business

11:31 - for quite a while at that point, right?

11:33 - 19, 1954.

11:34 - This is our 50th year in business. Yeah.

11:37 - So in

11:38 - terms of being like 1979, you don't really have

11:42 - a good long period of experience in in the business.

11:45 - Oh yeah. Yeah.

11:46 - And you

11:46 - and you were working for your father

11:48 - in law, his company at that point, right.

11:51 - And you both were veterans of the cable industry.

11:53 - Yeah. Yeah.

11:56 - So he's

11:58 - the one who knew the microwave.

12:02 - He didn't know he learned office fast.

12:05 - Well, we, we built as we went you know the the industry

12:09 - at that

12:10 - that period of time was to me, the golden golden advantage

12:14 - years of the industry.

12:16 - You didn't have it, you needed it.

12:17 - You improvise.

12:18 - You you you did anything that would whatever work worked,

12:22 - if you had to make it, you made it.

12:23 - You know, if you had to

12:24 - put things together to operate, you did.

12:26 - I mean, there was

12:26 - there were no hold more by it and say, okay, this is it

12:30 - had to build it.

12:31 - And that's what he was doing.

12:33 - It it it was it was really interesting to see

12:36 - how, how much you had to modify.

12:39 - And we did this at the time with state of the art

12:42 - technologies that right.

12:44 - The microwaves that you put in, it was not

12:48 - I don't think it got to be the state of the art until you

12:51 - got the huge stuff.

12:53 - Well, to make the microwave so it was pretty.

12:55 - That was good to make the Mekong.

12:57 - Yeah.

12:59 - The Mekong May com equipment was at its

13:02 - it was the best, it was the Cadillac of the industry.

13:05 - It was a big do I think and I don't mean to interrupt

13:09 - but I think the difference between Hughes

13:12 - when we got to Hughes, it was designed

13:14 - specifically for this system when we were

13:17 - microwave associates, you were putting together

13:20 - all that layout and it was not

13:25 - it was put together as you

13:26 - as you went along to take care of this site.

13:30 - And he kept building it, but by, you know, just building it.

13:32 - But microwave transmission was the state of the art way

13:35 - to make that.

13:37 - Definitely it was the fiber optic tech matter of fact.

13:41 - And we never capitalized on it.

13:42 - When we finished the Western route,

13:44 - we were the first

13:45 - the first operator in a state

13:47 - to utilize fiber optics for transmission.

13:49 - The route from the lighting you're building

13:51 - up to the center point for it was a fiber optic cable

13:55 - with Pirelli Optronics.

13:56 - We got this stuff was in a box and I mean have any idea

13:59 - how to operate it.

14:00 - We had to figure out how to make it work.

14:03 - We had no equipment to take, no testing.

14:04 - When we plugged it in, we put some of them underground.

14:07 - It was all underground. Yeah.

14:09 - So that went from Weidner building on the campus

14:11 - to my point was where the center point

14:13 - was just outside of the main campus.

14:15 - A state college's our main point of transmission.

14:18 - We we were from it was right on the campus.

14:21 - So when it was, it was an area where the Gulf,

14:25 - the Gulf class of trees.

14:27 - Yeah. Out in that area there's a

14:31 - with a

14:31 - mushroom door and that's, I remember

14:34 - that.

14:35 - Then we went from there to

14:37 - oh we went from there to lock haven, then up to Tuscarora.

14:41 - Tuscarora.

14:43 - No, Tuscarora, not Tuscarora.

14:44 - What was the one right outside of State College.

14:47 - God, I can't remember. I can get the book.

14:49 - Yeah, I can get the book.

14:50 - It's in there. I forget the name of it.

14:52 - It was only a six mile shot.

14:53 - Yeah, it was a very narrow path.

14:55 - It was a little notch in a mountain

14:57 - and we had to go right through the notch.

14:58 - Matter of fact, I had Jim in the airplane.

15:00 - We're flying past profiles

15:01 - to see if it would work before we designed it.

15:04 - Oh, that's interesting.

15:05 - So you flew the route to make everything on microwave?

15:07 - Had to be line of sight.

15:08 - Yeah, it was line of sight.

15:10 - And if you visualize a football, you needed more clearance

15:14 - in the middle of the path because the energy spread out.

15:16 - I say, yeah, we had we had very tight clearances

15:19 - and very, very close tolerances to work with what we would do.

15:24 - We were trying to put this to get we knew where we had to

15:27 - go. And East West was more challenging.

15:31 - The antenna sites that wanted

15:33 - the signals were not in the best locations.

15:36 - We also had a complication because they were already

15:39 - utilizing large band microwave frequency,

15:41 - so we had to coordinate frequency, use and distribution.

15:44 - So once I knew where we were going, then we would

15:47 - we would pick out the maps.

15:49 - And Pennsylvania's challenging with plateau region out towards

15:53 - Wellsville and all the mountains the Allegheny Mountains

15:56 - just a lot of there's a lot of challenges

15:57 - in designing this

15:58 - so rather than sitting and sitting

16:00 - in an engineering office

16:01 - looking at topographical maps, find a location that works,

16:05 - then go out, see if we could get the property.

16:06 - We did.

16:07 - We jumped in a plane

16:08 - and we would find find points that were in line of sight

16:12 - that would have Fresnel clearance,

16:14 - identify these points on our aircraft or nautical chart,

16:17 - come back in, get in a car, drive around or whatever,

16:21 - the jeep or the helicopter, knock on a door.

16:23 - Can we buy this property once we identify the antenna sites?

16:27 - Then I flew out to California and design started designing.

16:30 - The network was huge, but we short circuit years of

16:34 - oh years we did that

16:36 - we did that in a couple of weeks would have taken an engineer

16:39 - a couple of years to put together,

16:42 - covered the whole western part of the state.

16:44 - So as far as the layout,

16:45 - the couple of weeks

16:46 - in a couple of weeks,

16:47 - we did the layout, the design part of that,

16:51 - and then the Hughes engineers went to work

16:53 - and I was more as a consultant

16:54 - in that they stay design, they built that network.

16:58 - They're extremely proud of it.

16:59 - It was one of a kind there not there was never another one.

17:02 - Ernie Henry backwards on the design

17:05 - it what it was all put together.

17:07 - We started building it. He came to work for us.

17:09 - He came here as part of Hughes.

17:11 - Yeah. And never went back.

17:13 - Stay here. We, we, we stole them.

17:15 - We want, we want to say we need Ernie Baker.

17:18 - We hired him from Hughes.

17:20 - I say because he knew the system better than anybody.

17:23 - And then he worked for that a roofer for 20 some years,

17:28 - 20 some years? Yeah.

17:29 - He worked for PECS. He was text engineer.

17:31 - You know, he was the engineer for the effects we had.

17:35 - We, we,

17:36 - once we established point a point of transmission

17:40 - from State College, from the Wagner Building

17:44 - that the poor girl was working for like three years,

17:47 - four years. That was her job, you know.

17:48 - And we shut it down. She stopped.

17:51 - We stopped the last tape transmission.

17:53 - We pulled the transmitter out of scrub

17:55 - oak, flowed up to Rocky Ridge

17:56 - swap transmitters because that's the start of the

17:59 - Macomb link, took it out to State College and plugged it

18:02 - in at that Center Point Center video, the antenna site.

18:05 - And that's when the transmission started.

18:07 - And I had the actual logbook

18:08 - so that I have to give them to Brian.

18:10 - Yeah.

18:10 - They, we, we shut that down and turn it over.

18:13 - You know, it in that was in spring of 79,

18:15 - spring, spring, early summer, the

18:19 - cause cause then we started on the western,

18:22 - then we started we it was successful everybody

18:25 - was six letters did at 83 and it was already underway.

18:29 - Oh yeah, it was well under construction.

18:32 - Jim and

18:33 - I, Jim was tasked by Yolanda to assist me on the project,

18:39 - so I volunteered.

18:42 - Right.

18:43 - Biggest mistake I learned in the service never to volunteer.

18:47 - I didn't learn very well.

18:48 - He We're putting an antenna to antennas.

18:51 - Doug Alder and I were up on Meadville and Tower,

18:54 - and Jim shows up and says, Yolanda said,

18:56 - I have to help you.

18:57 - I said, Good, grab all our rope phone.

18:59 - I said,

19:00 - You just came from a golf course.

19:01 - He had white shoes and nice slacks, you know, $50 shirt.

19:05 - We're dragging him up this tower, holding on the rope.

19:09 - Now, I didn't know what I was getting into, but I

19:11 - and this was where what site was that?

19:12 - This is at Meadville. That's right.

19:14 - They will maybe look

19:16 - the next day, he shows up with a hard hat, khaki pants,

19:20 - gloves and work boots.

19:22 - But I see I wasn't told what it was picked it to do of me.

19:26 - And then I just I knew Joy.

19:30 - I said, well, I'll go see.

19:31 - I learned awfully fast and

19:33 - but then I got to I have to say to that

19:38 - during that

19:39 - period, you kind of get

19:41 - this is something that makes you want to do it.

19:44 - And then there were

19:45 - how many times we'd go for hours and hours, never stop

19:49 - and just do things that

19:52 - was out of the ordinary.

19:54 - We were we were putting together

19:57 - there were philosophical reasons for it.

19:59 - And there were there were more than that.

20:02 - It was it was something that we wanted

20:04 - to give back to

20:05 - to our subscribers is something that nobody had

20:08 - that we were going to make for them.

20:09 - And not only was it

20:11 - not only was it a challenge for us, which we like the challenge

20:15 - it was also there was some sad, there was satisfaction,

20:18 - there was gratitude to accomplish something.

20:20 - And, you know, I can't tell you that feeling.

20:22 - It's really makes you feel feel good, right, Jim, remember

20:27 - how we the first test we made with Georgie, that and Marlo,

20:32 - the two way they didn't know it.

20:33 - We completed the route and I

20:36 - that was the biggest through fact I tears.

20:39 - I had tears because of that,

20:41 - neither because of the hard work that it took.

20:44 - And then you see it where we work in a two way

20:47 - interconnect between Meadville and State College,

20:50 - Georgia, and Yolanda had no idea,

20:52 - and neither did Marlo for that. We had completed it.

20:55 - That actually we I patched a couple of pieces.

20:58 - We cut people

20:59 - a couple of pieces of equipment just to make it work.

21:01 - Just hang in there.

21:02 - And this is at Clarion.

21:05 - So we had Dave Phillips to get in Marlo.

21:07 - We had a story

21:09 - set up

21:09 - that, yeah,

21:10 - Yolanda and George want to talk to Dave or to Marlo.

21:13 - So they had come over to studio and Jim had Yolanda and George

21:18 - come over the studio because Marlo wanted to talk to them.

21:21 - So they walk in, there's a television set

21:23 - and there's a camera right behind a set.

21:26 - And more or less there,

21:28 - they thought they were being taped. Yeah.

21:30 - And so then there's a television set, Marlo, folks

21:33 - on this television set, and he

21:35 - he looks like this, you know, and

21:37 - they're looking at each other.

21:39 - They didn't they they didn't even know we were in a room.

21:41 - They're looking they sat down

21:44 - and they didn't say a word.

21:45 - A couple of minutes later,

21:46 - finally, Linda says, Marlo, can you hear me?

21:49 - Yeah.

21:50 - He says, Yes, and I can.

21:53 - That that shocked.

21:55 - But of course it shocked all of us to think they said,

21:58 - where are you and Lisa one, as they call it,

22:00 - were you or me, Bill?

22:01 - You know, they started they weren't cool.

22:04 - I think that was the first time that I've ever seen that.

22:08 - What day was that?

22:09 - They remember when I was in August.

22:14 - That had to be August 82, 82, 82, I would think August of be

22:19 - I know it was August.

22:20 - And that marked the completion of the full figure eight.

22:23 - No, it did not mark to completion but it did

22:27 - what it did is it

22:28 - we were so well along in completion

22:32 - there were still three or four sites that were not done.

22:35 - And I'll

22:35 - tell you a story about one, which I think is pretty amazing.

22:38 - The one down by Blairsville.

22:40 - We built that in nine days.

22:42 - Yeah.

22:43 - From not owning from

22:44 - not even owning the property to a completed operational relay

22:47 - facility in nine days,

22:49 - licensing everything.

22:51 - It was all.

22:51 - And we got the property from the state. Wow.

22:55 - Got to the state bureaucracy in that amount of time.

22:57 - But by that time I had made a pretty good friend

23:01 - with the guy who had a real estate.

23:03 - Dave Thomas was his name,

23:05 - just turned out to be a wonderful guy.

23:07 - He said, Well, go ahead and do it.

23:09 - Well, to do the.

23:10 - I told him what the situation was

23:12 - that we were in trouble because we couldn't use

23:15 - the tower site from there, so we had to build a new one.

23:20 - And he said, Go ahead and do that.

23:21 - We'll take care of the paperwork.

23:23 - That's how we did it.

23:24 - We took care of we had an antenna site available

23:27 - from Adelphia, and the tower was would not meet the test.

23:33 - It couldn't couldn't support the antennas.

23:35 - So we were we're actually going to try to install them.

23:37 - We're up on it.

23:38 - He was already right there on it.

23:39 - You're already on the tower.

23:40 - Working on the tower.

23:41 - And I look down and we're lifting

23:42 - these antennas up and the tower starting to buckle.

23:45 - I said, That's enough. Now we got to build a site.

23:47 - We went up on top of the mountain

23:49 - only a couple of hundred yards from where the facility,

23:52 - the Adelphia facility was,

23:53 - was you and I, Dave Grazer and Joe Lieberman.

23:56 - Right.

23:57 - And I said, we've got to build this here now.

24:00 - And Jim says, I think I know there's an old fire tower

24:04 - board there.

24:04 - He says, I think I know who owns the property.

24:07 - I said, okay.

24:08 - I thought I looked at Dave Grazer, who was because

24:11 - he was general manager for TCI, Pittsburgh.

24:15 - I said, Dave, can we get power here?

24:16 - He says, Let me make a call.

24:18 - So he goes down to the phone booth at the bottom of the hill

24:20 - he's calling the power company.

24:21 - I was ordering the tower from Camp Farm

24:24 - and I said, I need this Steve Vitellius.

24:26 - I said, I need this tower in three days.

24:28 - Yeah, you know, it's a self-support, 100 foot

24:30 - self-support.

24:31 - I said steal it from somebody. Boom.

24:33 - Another way they needed.

24:34 - The truck was leaving the next day with the tower

24:37 - I had Russ Newkirk.

24:38 - Yeah. Come in.

24:39 - That, that, that same afternoon and start

24:43 - digging in prefab and to put the base in.

24:46 - What was the urgency?

24:48 - Well, we're trying to finish the network and we needed that.

24:51 - The last one we had, the light was

24:53 - that was the last one to tie it together.

24:55 - That was that was

24:57 - let's say that

24:58 - was every project has its challenge.

25:01 - This one was challenging.

25:02 - We thought we had a facility

25:04 - we could use and it became substandard.

25:06 - And that was the last piece we needed.

25:08 - We did it in nine days and didn't want to wait any longer.

25:11 - Oh, we weren't waiting any longer.

25:12 - That's

25:14 - we were we didn't get it right.

25:16 - Everybody worked together on it.

25:18 - It all fell into place because of

25:21 - of the experience we had with what we were doing.

25:23 - And by that time, we were we were experts then.

25:27 - Oh, yeah?

25:28 - Who else work with you?

25:29 - I mean, with our people from any of the other cable companies,

25:32 - the project

25:33 - would have never been completed if it had not been

25:35 - for the cooperation of all the cable companies.

25:37 - Right. We couldn't have been complete that fast.

25:41 - TCI. TCI gave us Glenn Smith.

25:45 - Yeah.

25:46 - Join and gave us two other tech support guys.

25:49 - We had this from Meadville.

25:52 - They brought in Larry.

25:53 - She worked on the completion of the eastern route.

25:56 - We built the Western, but dug alder

26:00 - for your men.

26:02 - Very. Yeah, Larry, she work.

26:03 - Did you say she worked? Yeah.

26:05 - He was a big help up.

26:07 - And they they stuck and and remember,

26:11 - they could cut to 60 but they dug all their.

26:14 - Yeah.

26:15 - And they stayed with it as long as they could

26:18 - without interfering with their other work.

26:21 - The very

26:23 - you know what, I guess what it was is once they,

26:27 - once you got involved in the doggone project,

26:31 - it became kind of part of it.

26:33 - You just wanted to see it work.

26:35 - Mm Yeah.

26:36 - And I think that was the driving force really.

26:39 - We had no incentive, no bonus or anything like that

26:42 - and just ah, each one of us wanted to see it.

26:46 - And this was not particularly envisioned

26:47 - as anything

26:48 - that was going to make money for the cable company.

26:50 - Oh, this was something you were doing to

26:53 - well, you were providing yourself

26:55 - with a means of access to programing.

26:58 - But beyond that,

27:00 - I mean, this like Joyce said initially, it's it's

27:04 - it's something you were returning

27:06 - that the cable companies could say

27:08 - we're giving something back to our customers because that time

27:11 - it was the same way as it is now.

27:13 - The cable companies were jabbing everybody and,

27:16 - you know, taking advantage and making all the money.

27:19 - And I thought

27:20 - George,

27:21 - George and his father, Joe,

27:24 - this was a dream of theirs, really, of providing

27:28 - educational programs to your home.

27:31 - That's how it really started.

27:33 - It started and actually it was it was a it was

27:37 - there were some spirited meetings in Meadville at the bar

27:40 - phone back a lot.

27:41 - There are some very spirited meetings.

27:43 - And Don Rinehart, Milt Schmidt,

27:47 - you know, everybody in that room were all all leaders.

27:50 - They were there were no followers in that room.

27:52 - They were all leaders.

27:53 - And they decided to do something.

27:56 - Okay, let's do it.

27:57 - We might argue about it.

27:58 - We said we'll build.

28:00 - I said, I'll build it. And George said, How much money?

28:02 - You know, how much that no, no grant money,

28:06 - no go aid money or any cause I recall the deal was the cable

28:10 - companies would build it. Yeah.

28:12 - And Penn State would provide the programing

28:16 - program.

28:16 - And how much did it cost to build?

28:19 - Oh, boy.

28:20 - First phase was

28:23 - I can't tell you.

28:24 - Yeah, I could remember some of the numbers.

28:28 - The first phase was under 400,000.

28:31 - Second phase, which was the Western

28:33 - Loop was about 1.8 million. Yeah.

28:37 - And the completion, the eastern route in there because we had,

28:40 - we had some other,

28:42 - we had the Macomb equipment which we kept

28:44 - and then we, we completed a route through the Lamb's Gap,

28:48 - which was not until a year or two

28:50 - after we had the major network completed.

28:52 - So that was another 350 no, I don't know, $450,000.

28:56 - And it was supported.

28:57 - It was also often in supported through talks,

29:01 - two and a half million dollars, about two and a half year,

29:04 - which the state the side effect of fighting

29:07 - those you're talking that that I think that there was a point

29:10 - where we said it was 3 million total.

29:14 - Well I think what I going to

29:15 - put in or I don't remember what we paid for antenna sites

29:19 - see I don't remember those.

29:20 - There's a couple there's some land.

29:22 - Well we had to buy some, but most of them were

29:24 - mostly for state leases.

29:26 - Yeah, yeah. I handled most of those.

29:29 - We did it. We did it.

29:30 - You just push this off the $3 million?

29:32 - Yeah, I think it was close to $3 million.

29:35 - I think you remember talking to you until about $3 million.

29:37 - Yeah.

29:39 - And her figures

29:41 - to be pretty accurate.

29:44 - But George said he looked over his.

29:46 - I said, I'll build it.

29:48 - He said, okay.

29:49 - He says, well, you know,

29:52 - just tell me how much money you need.

29:53 - And then we start arguing against

29:56 - that.

29:57 - But initially, George went to each cable, each

30:01 - each of those companies, you put

30:04 - the basis of money up first,

30:07 - then went.

30:08 - Then we

30:09 - as we signed other cable companies

30:10 - on, they start paying by the subscriber.

30:13 - Yeah, we paid by the subscriber but we had a bank

30:16 - banking arrangement with Pennsylvania National PNC.

30:20 - Yeah, that was our first loan.

30:21 - Scott Curtis was was an accountant.

30:24 - Yeah, he did the books on that.

30:28 - We would have monthly meetings,

30:30 - you know, and with the result

30:34 - there was a story that and I don't know

30:36 - quite how it fits in with all of this, but

30:40 - of using the fire tower sites.

30:43 - Yes. As one of the ways you were able to expedite this,

30:46 - how did that I'd never, never do materialize with

30:50 - the thought the initial thought was that

30:53 - and this comes back to the original meeting

30:54 - we have with the state education associations

30:57 - that if each fire tower years and years ago the 20 spire

31:00 - towers were established

31:02 - and they had the semaphore

31:03 - to communicate, so they had line of sight,

31:05 - which is, you know, required for microwave.

31:08 - But the structures themselves were unable to support

31:11 - microwave antenna. There are too loose.

31:13 - They move too much.

31:14 - You know, the antennas need to be in a very rigid structure

31:17 - or they can't they can't move. No.

31:20 - So that's why we had to put towers.

31:21 - That was a good

31:23 - the philosophy was good because of the signaling.

31:27 - But we're going to have to change that in the book,

31:28 - because I think his father told us

31:29 - that they use the the fire towers.

31:33 - No, no, no, no. Right.

31:37 - So that was that was an idea that that came and went.

31:40 - So in most cases, you built

31:42 - new towers that built or used the towers or whoever,

31:45 - wherever possible.

31:46 - We utilize existing cable facilities

31:48 - that our tower structures able to support the equipment.

31:51 - For example, Meadville had a tower that we used,

31:54 - but there weren't very many of those.

31:56 - Not in the West? No, not in the West.

31:58 - Oil City. Meadville? No.

32:01 - All city media content?

32:03 - No, no.

32:03 - We built Kittanning Well, city.

32:05 - Meadville There's one other one that we use when.

32:08 - Armstrong No, we didn't. That was it.

32:11 - Oh, he had to build one town.

32:12 - No, we use ATC tower in Johnstown.

32:16 - Remember, originally we're on ATC tower, right?

32:19 - Right.

32:19 - That's that's a story.

32:21 - We had three we had way we built this is we would leapfrog

32:25 - Russ Newkirk, who is a tower constructor

32:28 - would we say okay Russ, we need this, this, this done.

32:31 - And these are in days now. Not, not much.

32:34 - So Russ would,

32:35 - I would task Russ with getting to these facilities

32:38 - and get for the concrete, get the tower,

32:40 - put the tower together.

32:42 - And he would run into problems with rock and dirt.

32:44 - And so we had to

32:45 - sometimes coordinate where we were going to be.

32:48 - Jim Draft and I in

32:50 - Joe Hammond

32:50 - We're driving from State College,

32:53 - we're going to go to Katanning the next day.

32:54 - We stopped in Johnstown.

32:56 - It was thunderstorms coming.

32:58 - We had to ten foot antennas with rate and stuff.

33:01 - So we start the three of us reporting this together.

33:04 - Jim and I get up on the tower.

33:06 - We Jim's driving my truck. We had a

33:10 - this is our approved

33:11 - by the way we had the road tire on the front of my two stories.

33:15 - He's backing up.

33:16 - We pulled them out up.

33:17 - We hooked him out, put the things in.

33:19 - I dropped a rope back down.

33:21 - We had a 110 foot antenna.

33:23 - We get that one up.

33:23 - I just put to put a bolt in it just to hold it there.

33:27 - Dropped a rope back down here comes to win the rain

33:29 - in this community really blowing that

33:31 - lightning cracking all over the place.

33:33 - I'm on the tower.

33:34 - He's driving a truck just holding on to the rope.

33:37 - Well, I'm waving to stop.

33:39 - The wind pushes this antenna up against me.

33:41 - Jim can see me, Joe going up the tower, and I just.

33:45 - I just get the bolt in, in time

33:47 - and he had the radio blasting even got

33:53 - it got out.

33:53 - We got out of we were soaking wet.

33:54 - Yeah, I remember that. Sounds a little scary.

33:57 - Sure do know it wasn't scary.

33:59 - It wasn't we had we had to get it down high, up

34:03 - about 100 feet.

34:04 - That sounds pretty, pretty high.

34:07 - There were some things that were done

34:09 - was not right but

34:13 - that's part of any project.

34:14 - Sure.

34:15 - We that's what

34:16 - that's when I guess earlier you asked us about it.

34:19 - That was we had the challenge and we met it.

34:21 - You know, we didn't

34:23 - there was nothing

34:24 - there was no obstacles that we could not overcome.

34:27 - So everything from start to finish, both loops

34:30 - was about how, oh, boy, the first loop

34:34 - part of it was established when we completed the figure.

34:36 - Eight took about 60 days for everything.

34:41 - For everything east and west, unheard of.

34:44 - That's just plain incredible.

34:46 - And out of how many

34:48 - how many

34:49 - transmission points were there in finger, right.

34:53 - Where there were towers, 30 to 32 points.

34:56 - And of those 32, how many were existing

34:59 - and how many did you say you were?

35:02 - Is 18 that we built in the Western completely,

35:05 - 18 in the West,

35:07 - four in the east.

35:11 - The I can't remember the extent of them were establishing.

35:15 - Yeah.

35:16 - And you did that in 60 days.

35:18 - Well less than 60.

35:20 - So the major construction was less than 60.

35:23 - But to complete the completion of it

35:25 - is the microwave is tower construction.

35:28 - That was that wasn't the total.

35:31 - The total of 90 days was equipment and everything.

35:35 - Yeah.

35:36 - I was from that was from once we established the points

35:39 - of transmission, Jim started clearing the antenna sites out.

35:43 - I flew out to L.A., worked with Hughes on

35:45 - putting the equipment together.

35:47 - They started assembling, building or parking.

35:49 - They actually built it

35:52 - in California,

35:53 - then shipped it to us in pieces.

35:57 - They made it.

35:58 - It worked out there.

36:00 - You know, they knew how to.

36:02 - We have a picture somewhere.

36:03 - I got again, I got to find it that they had a warehouse

36:07 - out in Torrance

36:09 - and we had all the equipment in this warehouse and configured.

36:13 - And it would be the time that you can go from Pittsburgh

36:16 - to to Lancaster in three steps, because it was all there.

36:21 - And they had they had equalizers in the route.

36:23 - So that simulated the microwave transmission path

36:26 - to do and then testing

36:27 - before they disassemble and shipped it to us.

36:30 - And they put that together from the design.

36:33 - The initial design, they put it together

36:35 - like it was really out in the field.

36:37 - And so we knew it worked.

36:40 - And so we brought when we brought it back

36:42 - to Pennsylvania Air and installed it, it worked.

36:47 - And very little trouble afterwards.

36:50 - Not much.

36:50 - We had some sort

36:51 - a touch, a couple technical little glitches here and there.

36:53 - That's pretty unusual, isn't it?

36:55 - Oh, yeah, I would think. Yeah.

36:58 - Yeah.

36:59 - But you know, the engineers out there,

37:01 - Abe Sonnenschein and that group, they were just as enthused

37:04 - about this as we were. You know, that's the other thing.

37:06 - That was the other thing, too.

37:08 - They worked very hard helping us

37:12 - because they wanted it to work too,

37:14 - because it was kind of opening the door for

37:16 - for the microwave into the cable industry.

37:18 - And they thought that was a pretty good opportunity.

37:22 - But they they I got to tell you, they were really yeah.

37:26 - They always

37:27 - they would call 11:00 hour time and they'd get into the plant.

37:31 - Abe would call. Joe, where are you?

37:34 - What is he doing?

37:35 - How does it work?

37:36 - Almost every day you hear from him

37:39 - every day.

37:40 - Every morning I hear from Abe.

37:42 - Is there anything we need to do?

37:43 - And I hope you're doing fine.

37:46 - Ari Haney, who was a salesman for Hughes,

37:48 - was also saying they think it's

37:51 - a special assistant, project assistant by Hughes.

37:55 - They brought in another engineer, a field engineer

37:59 - besides Ernie Baker.

38:00 - You know, to work with us on the technical side of it.

38:04 - And, you know, they are very instrumental in

38:08 - the operational side to do it.

38:11 - I didn't involve myself with the tests or set up setting.

38:15 - I would set the equipment in and physically get it operating,

38:19 - but it was just plug and play. It wasn't a lot.

38:20 - There's a lot of fine tuning that they did

38:23 - because we were Jim and I and the other guys were out,

38:25 - you know, on the construction, more

38:28 - putting the equipment together than doing the fine tuning.

38:31 - HUGHES People do that.

38:33 - It saved us.

38:34 - It saved us some time, too.

38:36 - When was it?

38:36 - When did it go live, go operational?

38:40 - That is a date that, uh, I think it was in September.

38:43 - September? I'm pretty sure it was in September.

38:46 - I don't remember the exact date.

38:47 - I'm sure we have it someplace.

38:50 - Center point, the center, September of 82, I think.

38:53 - I think it was.

38:55 - I think it was now.

38:57 - That's close enough anyway.

38:59 - Yeah.

38:59 - I don't know what they Bryce

39:00 - Jordan who was president of Penn State,

39:03 - we needed to get

39:05 - three quarters of a mile power lines put into center point

39:09 - and we had meetings with Penn State.

39:12 - People were more like like the government than anyone I've met.

39:15 - Not that facetiously saying that I don't want well,

39:18 - but they would say they took forever.

39:20 - But they had their own power company.

39:21 - They had their own power company. I couldn't build it.

39:23 - I said, I'll build it for you.

39:25 - Can't do that.

39:27 - I said, Listen, I'll put the poles and I'll bury it.

39:29 - I just I got to get that fired up.

39:32 - So we had a meeting with Bryce Jordan and Marlo Farouk

39:35 - and the head of the power company and Bryce Jordan.

39:37 - He says, Well, how far along are you?

39:39 - I said, Well, the western roofs completed.

39:41 - He said, When you started it about a month ago,

39:43 - you know, you looked at more, a lot more shaking.

39:45 - Is that so?

39:46 - He said, well,

39:47 - if they could build the Western part of United the Pennsylvania

39:50 - in a month, I think we could get the power to CenterPoint.

39:53 - A couple things.

39:54 - And he got set to go build it.

39:56 - Yeah, that was that was a whole

39:58 - we had those types of we had they were out of our control

40:01 - and we had a few of those that were challenging.

40:04 - Where did your experience in microwaves come from?

40:07 - How did you get it from

40:10 - school? Yeah.

40:11 - And you've heard of that school of hard knocks?

40:13 - Uh huh. That's pretty much on job training.

40:16 - I went through different engineering schools

40:18 - when we bought the Macomb equipment.

40:20 - We went to the Macomb plant and we had field engineering

40:23 - and microwave training there also

40:27 - multiple times at huge facility through huge microwave school

40:31 - that actually taught at that school

40:33 - so that you can use

40:34 - that you had hands on in terms

40:35 - of installing those as part of the.

40:37 - Yeah you it

40:38 - was you learn as you proceed that equipment was so new.

40:42 - You know the theory application of microwave is well known

40:46 - with the equipment itself.

40:47 - It was one of a kind.

40:48 - So when you got that equipment, you learn how to operate it

40:52 - and they're very similar.

40:53 - There's not too much dissimilarities

40:55 - between microwave of different manufacturers.

40:58 - They work the same principle.

41:00 - But how you get the signal from base, from base

41:03 - band up to microwave frequencies and back down again,

41:06 - maybe a little different.

41:07 - So it's not it wasn't that difficult.

41:09 - Well, we sent him out to California,

41:11 - but he couldn't stay out of jail.

41:14 - It sounds like there's a story behind that.

41:16 - There is what my buddy

41:20 - what happened in California?

41:23 - Because that itself in trouble and I had to get him out.

41:27 - Know you got me in trouble.

41:30 - Go ahead. Tell him we were.

41:32 - We were, too.

41:34 - It would borrow and I'd have no drink after a hard day at work

41:39 - and wherever that was.

41:41 - Would you call the place towards

41:44 - in California with Redondo Beach?

41:47 - Okay.

41:48 - And you guys kind of ignored me or something.

41:54 - I forget now. That was a long day.

41:57 - A hell of a day.

41:58 - We're doing all this engineering stuff, and it was

42:01 - we were I'd get up at like 530 in the morning.

42:04 - They never showed up till their time.

42:06 - And by now it's like 3:00 in the morning.

42:08 - Our time is midnight. Their time just getting finished.

42:11 - So we eat dinner,

42:12 - we stopped to have a drink or we're going to bed.

42:15 - You know, my buddy here talked to a security guard.

42:18 - I said, the security guard. This is you? Yes.

42:20 - I don't know who those phones are, but I.

42:22 - I know they're they're looking for trouble.

42:25 - And and I think one of them's carrying a gun.

42:28 - And I

42:32 - know I was away from

42:36 - you. Got me in all kinds of trouble.

42:41 - But that was that was the fun part.

42:43 - Part of the fun that part of the fun.

42:45 - They had to make some fun out of it.

42:46 - Yeah, I got to I got a parking ticket one day to.

42:50 - Oh yeah. The helicopter.

42:52 - I still have that ticket. You got a ticket for your.

42:55 - On your helicopter? Yeah.

42:56 - Where'd you park it?

42:58 - We had a swimming pool.

43:00 - The swimming pool?

43:00 - Where we filled it.

43:03 - We owned a hotel in Meadville. Mm.

43:06 - And of course, they had a parking lot.

43:09 - So I had made clearances with the police department

43:14 - the day before he was coming in so that they knew the

43:20 - segment, they knew the helicopter

43:22 - because not too many helicopters land in Meadville.

43:24 - Back in those days, they didn't have lifetime lifelines.

43:28 - Mm hmm.

43:30 - But the guy notified at

43:32 - Meadville the police station forgot to put it in the blotter.

43:36 - So the next day, we came in, in the helicopter

43:40 - to land in the parking lot of the hotel.

43:45 - Everybody in the neighborhood came out of the house.

43:47 - It must have been 200 people coming out looking for it.

43:50 - And next thing, the police come.

43:53 - And so happened.

43:54 - I knew the policeman, two of the policemen,

43:58 - and he

44:01 - he wrote his ticket, but then he handed it to me.

44:05 - So I kept it.

44:06 - Then I found out that

44:08 - we couldn't lock the door on the helicopter.

44:11 - So Joe says,

44:13 - I said, we can't just leave this stuff in the helicopter.

44:16 - People are nice and legal, but they might steal some of it.

44:19 - He said, Well, what about inside the fence?

44:22 - In the pool?

44:23 - Yeah.

44:23 - If you want to go in there, go ahead.

44:25 - I forgot to

44:27 - tell him about the furniture

44:28 - and we blew furniture all over the place.

44:30 - The aluminum furniture, the lawn chairs.

44:33 - So I blew them in the water.

44:34 - So we went.

44:36 - But anyway, that's how we then that whole week we worked out,

44:40 - I think we leave in the morning

44:41 - from the hotel on the helicopter

44:44 - and come back at night like we were in the car.

44:47 - We did that for a Yeah.

44:48 - For 2 to 3 weeks. Yeah.

44:49 - That's when you were delivering the equipment

44:51 - we were doing

44:53 - building everything, everything that was doing the whole.

44:55 - Okay, so you were using that helicopter just like a crane or.

45:00 - And a piece of a construction equipment?

45:02 - Yeah. Yeah. We would

45:05 - visualize

45:06 - anything from, say, 12 to 30 miles

45:10 - point of communication in figure eight and over

45:13 - 180 miles just from State College around.

45:16 - And if you had an anomaly or equipment in say rattlesnake

45:21 - and then that's affecting the pictures in Meadville

45:24 - well you to drive there's 4 hours one way

45:26 - yeah so it

45:27 - would take you all day to go

45:28 - there and back is not know if you fixed the problem

45:30 - that's why we used the helicopter

45:32 - and even lining up the sites.

45:34 - Sure was going from one site to another all the time

45:38 - back and forth,

45:40 - making the adjusting the antennas and the fine

45:43 - tuning it, establish point to point contact.

45:46 - They'd have to look at each other.

45:47 - So we do the rough tuning.

45:49 - We knew basically by a compass which way to point.

45:51 - So we'd energized

45:53 - the microwave equipment dropped team off at one point

45:56 - fly to the next point then do the do the

45:59 - what we call fine tuning saves a lot of time.

46:02 - Yeah so they would synchronizing them together. Yes.

46:04 - And then we go back, pick up,

46:06 - take one crew, drop them off at the next night,

46:08 - go back, pick the other one up were leapfrog.

46:10 - Yeah. Leapfrog leapfrogging.

46:12 - I remember they dropped me off at one time.

46:14 - I had no idea where I was. Absolutely. You

46:18 - now you mentioned some mileage.

46:19 - What were the longest distances and the shortest.

46:22 - Shortest, I think was Cochrane ten to Meadville.

46:25 - That was eight miles.

46:25 - And we just could not we just could not get to Meadville

46:29 - in a more

46:30 - we didn't want to spend the money

46:31 - for that close to the path, but we just had no choice.

46:34 - So Cochrane Terrain prevented it was the shortest

46:37 - in Williamsport to Berwick was 34 miles.

46:41 - That was the longest

46:42 - and everything else was right around 20, 21, 22, 18.

46:46 - Somewhere in there there were 721 miles of bi

46:50 - directional microwave with the aforementioned sites.

46:53 - 32 sites.

46:55 - Mm hmm. Wow.

46:57 - It still seems incredible

46:59 - you built that in that amount of time.

47:02 - Mm. That's true.

47:03 - I keep thinking if we could have done a little faster.

47:07 - What did you think of the.

47:08 - Of what resulted from it?

47:11 - Oh, I think that, you know, I think that that is

47:15 - is immeasurable in several ways.

47:18 - First of all, you don't know how many

47:20 - people watch that network that learned from it,

47:24 - you know, develop different ideas about

47:27 - going forward in life, you know, helping people.

47:30 - You know, there's a whole host of that work in a sense.

47:33 - The sad part, I think it was ahead of its time.

47:35 - That's exactly what I was going to say. It's ahead of it.

47:37 - It was ahead of its time educationally.

47:39 - It didn't work

47:40 - because in most cases the educators were afraid of it.

47:45 - Yeah. How so?

47:47 - How so?

47:47 - Well, first they thought they were to lose a job.

47:51 - That was the first thing.

47:52 - And in fact, if you remember the teachers union.

47:57 - Yeah.

47:59 - For it.

48:00 - They tried we tried to set up and with the 14

48:05 - she systems safety system

48:08 - that we met with McCormick

48:10 - so I was like $40,000 we spent for

48:14 - just to give him a proposal to tie all 14 colleges.

48:18 - And it was shut down and we could have done it,

48:23 - but we had the proof.

48:24 - Yeah, we knew we could shut down because of

48:28 - the union.

48:30 - Today we have the internet,

48:31 - we have self health, self teaching devices.

48:34 - They didn't have them then.

48:35 - They had they had a for the best college professor

48:38 - worked for State College and he had is

48:41 - had a screen and he had a box underneath it.

48:44 - Underneath the box they would program the county.

48:48 - Yeah.

48:48 - And then they would use the box underneath.

48:50 - He put the accounting numbers up

48:52 - and he would talk into the camera

48:53 - and then they had microphones

48:55 - in different classrooms across the campus and he would

48:58 - he had a switch.

48:59 - They get a light from the guy, would push a button.

49:01 - You want to ask a question,

49:02 - you push a button, light up this light,

49:04 - and they say, okay, class so-and-so.

49:06 - And then he talked to you and you give you the answer

49:08 - or explain what's going on.

49:10 - But that was the only methodology

49:12 - they had at that time.

49:14 - And for them to use telecommunications as we

49:17 - designed it and were to provide it was well ahead of its time.

49:22 - The system was interactive.

49:24 - Oh yes, way interactive. For many point.

49:27 - We had a network control center at Center Point

49:30 - and that if Clarion wanted to go to way back to

49:34 - to Meadville or anywhere, you know, it had that capability

49:37 - and anybody could tie and you could have a party line

49:39 - or a single point of communication.

49:41 - Was that capability ever really utilized?

49:43 - Not much.

49:46 - Oh, because they just didn't.

49:48 - It was just used to broadcast the pre recorded

49:52 - classroom lectures. It did.

49:53 - And then it started to develop.

49:55 - They started to do more live programing.

49:57 - Shippensburg University,

50:00 - Stroud, East Stroudsburg University.

50:02 - We met with them.

50:04 - We had a we had a

50:06 - I don't remember the name of it, Jim,

50:08 - but we had different operators on and educators on the board.

50:11 - Yeah.

50:12 - What was that called.

50:16 - We had a,

50:16 - we had a group of individuals to program that talked about

50:20 - their professors,

50:21 - their professors and we had cable operators

50:24 - and they would then design courses for this network.

50:27 - So they started to build that up in the early, early eighties,

50:31 - I'd say by mid eighties, maybe 85, 86,

50:37 - East Stroudsburg had four programs strictly for Panorama.

50:41 - MM One I went to see folk,

50:45 - he told me, and I was asking specifically

50:50 - how the shift in emphasis came about.

50:52 - Started out as an educational network,

50:55 - and then

50:58 - became the public affairs network, which it is today,

51:01 - right?

51:03 - Marlo felt that

51:07 - the educational side of it

51:08 - never put the resources into it, never put the money into it.

51:14 - That's right.

51:14 - It was necessary to provide the programing,

51:18 - the content that would have made it go.

51:19 - Is that how you saw it, too?

51:22 - But going back to that proposal we made to the 14 chief system

51:27 - through Jim McCormick, who was president at the time,

51:30 - they just didn't want to put the money into it.

51:32 - And I think that

51:35 - for a couple of reasons, they were afraid of it,

51:37 - and I think that they just weren't sure.

51:40 - And they recognized that

51:42 - even though they had a public television station

51:45 - that they were making programs for, it wasn't

51:48 - the type of programing needed for in-air,

51:50 - interactive programing.

51:52 - And so they knew

51:53 - that was another phase to start making more programs.

51:56 - And so it just kind of died, just kind of drifted away.

51:59 - And and I think we're the ones who made the decision

52:03 - initially to get into public affairs.

52:06 - There was a meeting in Meadville, 1988, 89.

52:12 - The network was ten years old.

52:16 - The oldest part of it was ten years old.

52:18 - The microwave equipment was becoming somewhat dated.

52:23 - Maintenance and repairs were becoming

52:25 - more common.

52:28 - There were technologies then developed

52:30 - with narrow scale, narrow transmission techniques

52:33 - which are using utilizing video compression,

52:37 - which were state of the art today.

52:38 - That that was at its earliest years was what

52:43 - we started with, with Panorama when they went satellite.

52:46 - Yeah.

52:47 - And it was a decision made by the board, the tax board that

52:50 - what should we do?

52:51 - And it was the,

52:53 - if we are not going to go to way interactive and provide

52:56 - those types of devices, then it's really the wrong network

53:00 - to have in place.

53:01 - And the Internet was coming up, digital technology

53:04 - was becoming more prevalent.

53:06 - Now there are better ways of communicating other than this

53:09 - two way microwave network.

53:11 - So it was decided to establish an uplink

53:15 - or you know, we leased facilities

53:16 - from Pittsburgh Freight and we transported our signal or down,

53:22 - I guess by microwave at first and then via a different means.

53:26 - And that's how we started.

53:27 - That's that's when it was decided.

53:28 - We use

53:29 - the teleport in Pittsburgh for some special programs

53:33 - and that seemed to work pretty good.

53:34 - And, uh, then we just decided to get into

53:39 - the satellite business.

53:42 - We could, you could, you could physically connect

53:45 - more cable head at a more affordable rate.

53:49 - You know, the economics were multipoint distribution

53:52 - was not the best application for microwave at that time.

53:56 - And in fact,

53:58 - what was a couple thousand dollars for that year to 2000?

54:02 - 20 $100 for the receiver? Yeah,

54:05 - for the satellite.

54:07 - And so we could get to the cable companies a lot easier.

54:11 - So this shift in the technology

54:14 - to the satellite

54:17 - was driven by the change

54:18 - in philosophy about the content on the network.

54:22 - Is that and my understanding that since we didn't,

54:24 - since we got away from the two way we did

54:27 - so there was no need to do the interactive

54:29 - because that just wasn't developing.

54:31 - Right. So

54:35 - I'm sort of it's sort of a chicken or the egg

54:36 - which came first.

54:37 - This shift to focusing on public affairs or the shift

54:41 - to the satellite transmission, or was that.

54:45 - Well, I think that was together.

54:46 - We once we decided we didn't

54:49 - didn't

54:49 - we weren't taking advantage of the two way interconnecting

54:53 - and it that we had to change the programing.

54:56 - If we change the programing

54:58 - we could change the method of distribution.

55:00 - So I think it came together both same time.

55:03 - I think there's a little confusion that maybe

55:07 - you don't understand totally how that network operated.

55:10 - Okay. There were 24 channels.

55:14 - By directionally, I mean we had 48 channel capacity.

55:18 - So one channel was totally dedicated

55:21 - to video programing for the cable systems.

55:24 - The other channels were allocated for either,

55:27 - you know, inner

55:27 - telecommunications or video conferencing data transmission.

55:32 - We had a data we actually did a pilot program

55:35 - for State College from Hershey Medical Center

55:39 - to University Park for High Definition Television

55:43 - and digital digital transmission.

55:46 - The predicted reliability for that that route

55:49 - and these are astonishing numbers was 99.8%.

55:53 - And when we tested it, it was 99.98%.

55:57 - Yeah. When

55:59 - AT&T put in a dedicated

56:01 - route to Erie or Erie campus there,

56:05 - and I think Baron's campus, they only came in at 89.1%.

56:10 - So we, you know, we just blew them right out of the water.

56:12 - It was nerdy reliability.

56:14 - Mm. But those are those types of applications

56:18 - as what was designed for.

56:19 - They didn't, they were never used, never fully.

56:22 - They were used some of it for

56:24 - very, very little.

56:26 - So I see what I see why you now say that was ahead of its time

56:31 - because today, today we still could be reliable.

56:35 - Well, I wouldn't say that with fiber. Fiber, I think we can.

56:38 - Yeah, fiber would probably because it lessens

56:42 - the distances

56:43 - you could transmit over glass without amplification

56:46 - where equipment is better and a signal to noise ratios or

56:52 - light years ahead of microwave. But.

56:54 - But if that system existed today, let's suppose

56:58 - you had made the transition the fiber

57:01 - from microwave instead of going to satellite

57:04 - and you still had that two way interactive system.

57:06 - I can't believe that it wouldn't be used today.

57:08 - It is. They're developed. There's still building them.

57:11 - I mean, they'll be building those forever.

57:13 - Yeah. You know, fiber technology.

57:14 - The state has interconnects in operation.

57:17 - That's now the best. Yeah.

57:20 - So in a sense that road not taken could have been.

57:24 - Yes, very interesting.

57:25 - Right.

57:26 - You could leapfrog some technology in the state.

57:29 - The state had and you know, it had

57:31 - it had an advantage over other states because of that

57:34 - ability to transport that type of information.

57:37 - We didn't sell it right and the educators

57:40 - didn't know how to operate it. I think that was the real

57:44 - they they they

57:46 - did not operate it and they were afraid of it. And

57:50 - for one reason or another, because maybe they didn't.

57:54 - You know, I think that they went through the same thing

57:58 - from going into a computer store

58:02 - or network, that

58:05 - they fought that for a while.

58:06 - But that went through

58:09 - because I think it was closer

58:11 - to where we were before the computer internet stuff.

58:15 - I think we're just a little bit yeah, yeah.

58:18 - We're six, eight years ahead of the Internet

58:21 - before it became the Internet.

58:22 - And yeah, they had internet.

58:25 - There were there were Internet.

58:26 - There are wide area networks

58:27 - that universities and colleges had in place.

58:30 - Penn State had one did have one.

58:33 - The really the Internet started in Seattle

58:35 - with boing boing interconnected its plants

58:38 - and then it connected to another university.

58:41 - And then it went once it's once that happened just leapfrog.

58:45 - But the initial microwave interconnect across the country

58:49 - state to state actually promotio

58:54 - they didn't have fibers in know

58:56 - what kind of role

58:57 - that you want to play in that philosophical shift

59:00 - of public affairs?

59:01 - Give Joe Hill

59:04 - spending too much money

59:06 - know she was George.

59:10 - She really George still alive at that point.

59:12 - Yeah. And George Watts.

59:15 - George was the type of person that he had ideas

59:19 - and he talked to Joe, his father, about it.

59:22 - And once it got into motion, he sort of backed away from it.

59:25 - It's up to you guys now.

59:27 - You look at work.

59:28 - Well, you learn to kept it going,

59:31 - you know.

59:32 - And then after George died, she really worked very hard

59:36 - to keep it going.

59:37 - Well, she disappointed that it didn't

59:39 - work out as originally envisioned.

59:41 - Everybody was all of us were.

59:44 - You know,

59:45 - the thought was, you know, I know.

59:48 - And our after and I'm sure the Gans family too.

59:52 - We we spent so much money and put so much hard work into it

59:57 - and they didn't accept it.

59:59 - 331 That was kind of a disappointment

01:00 - 03.633 when we knew what it could do.

01:00 - 05.969 And they didn't.

01:00 - 08.671 And and then, of course, we couldn't make

01:00 - 09.906 they could do

01:00 - 12.208 what it could do because we were not in the position that

01:00 - 16.012 do the interconnects.

01:00 - 19.015 And so that

01:00 - 21.517 the when after

01:00 - 25.221 was pretty much concluded by the time George died

01:00 - 27.523 that it wasn't going to work as an interconnect,

01:00 - 29.292 as a two way stuff.

01:00 - 31.928 And so then Girardi took over

01:00 - 35.565 as president, and then I was more

01:00 - 38.601 and I got more deeply involved into it. And

01:00 - 40.336 that's when we started

01:00 - 43.506 thinking about changing to public affairs.

01:00 - 46.342 Now, the up side is, of course, what did happen

01:00 - 50.246 and how it did develop into something probably beyond

01:00 - 53.750 what was envisioned even a short while ago.

01:00 - 55.218 Right.

01:00 - 58.721 It kind of goes like when we built the network, you know,

01:00 - 00.790 there were there were no obstacles

01:01 - 01.891 that we could overcome.

01:01 - 03.993 And we we built them up. We built it. We made it work.

01:01 - 05.762 Same thing on a programing site.

01:01 - 08.431 We relied on Penn State to supply programing.

01:01 - 11.968 Well, they did, but they did not develop any new programing.

01:01 - 14.203 They did not bring any luster to the network.

01:01 - 17.940 So it was decided, well, they can program it.

01:01 - 19.709 By God, we will.

01:01 - 21.310 And we made a decision.

01:01 - 23.312 This network is not appropriate.

01:01 - 25.515 That's the way the network is not the appropriate way.

01:01 - 28.651 Developing more viewers.

01:01 - 30.920 We need to change transmission medium.

01:01 - 33.322 We made a decision to go to a narrow band trips

01:01 - 35.958 digitally compressed

01:01 - 38.895 satellite and established and so that was it.

01:01 - 41.064 We close the book on the microwave

01:01 - 44.634 and it was not you know, it was not upsetting.

01:01 - 46.269 It was another challenge.

01:01 - 48.638 But we know we were we weren't upset

01:01 - 50.206 Penn State or anything like that.

01:01 - 52.542 It was just we saw it didn't work.

01:01 - 57.580 So we took the next path and it start working in.

01:01 - 00.650 And then really one of the keys

01:02 - 04.620 to make it where we are today is when Brian came

01:02 - 06.322 and spoke with your mother

01:02 - 09.625 and asked her if she indicated he'd like to go to work for us.

01:02 - 12.729 That took she didn't accept that right away.

01:02 - 15.798 She he came back two or three times and finally

01:02 - 19.001 she I remember she called me one day and said

01:02 - 23.673 she wanted to talk to me and and we sat down and talked about

01:02 - 27.410 that Brian was interested and he was with C-SPAN.

01:02 - 28.611 And he's one

01:02 - 32.281 he's one of the people who started with Brian LAMB.

01:02 - 35.451 And and course then we and I know we called

01:02 - 39.188 Joe's father, talked to him about it, and kind of

01:02 - 42.391 started out with a phone call agreement.

01:02 - 44.694 Then they had a board meeting. Yep.

01:02 - 47.163 And we went over to the board meeting

01:02 - 49.732 and we had already started doing that.

01:02 - 52.101 Some of that program. Yeah.

01:02 - 53.369 Before that, yeah.

01:02 - 55.471 It was kind of in a transitional right.

01:02 - 58.608 It was just moving along and it seemed to be doing pretty good.

01:02 - 00.343 But then

01:03 - 04.013 I think Brian Lockman coming was a

01:03 - 07.016 it was a real key to our success.

01:03 - 09.852 He knew a lot of things about it from C-SPAN

01:03 - 12.655 that we weren't aware of because we weren't programmers.

01:03 - 13.356 We were just

01:03 - 15.224 it was out of our

01:03 - 17.693 we we could build the best distribution,

01:03 - 19.128 but we didn't know.

01:03 - 21.898 And I think, you know, he's been here

01:03 - 27.303 ten or 12 years now and then it's a it's it's

01:03 - 30.840 I know I feel like it's a success now

01:03 - 34.377 and I think it's it's technically

01:03 - 37.446 a PC and is still text legally, isn't it. Yes.

01:03 - 40.149 And we never changed it never changed the corporate name.

01:03 - 40.783 Right.

01:03 - 44.187 But it has a completely new and different identity.

01:03 - 47.824 We're still Pennsylvania code is something Pennsylvania cable

01:03 - 52.128 network, an affiliate of Pete Tech's

01:03 - 53.963 and it's

01:03 - 55.731 we just don't use the term anymore

01:03 - 58.201 now it is still guided by a board of directors

01:03 - 00.236 made up same board.

01:04 - 01.270 Same operators.

01:04 - 04.340 Yeah cable operators and it is the cable industry

01:04 - 06.309 that continues to support PCM.

01:04 - 09.779 Right.

01:04 - 11.881 And we're a little over 3 million.

01:04 - 14.483 We a little over 3

01:04 - 18.421 million, around 3 million, 3 million in viewership.

01:04 - 21.691 Viewership. Okay.

01:04 - 24.227 3 million homes

01:04 - 27.096 times three and a half viewership.

01:04 - 28.197 Yeah.

01:04 - 31.434 Okay. Well, household should have.

01:04 - 34.470 Okay, that's a huge number.

01:04 - 35.538 That's right.

01:04 - 37.006 That's a huge number.

01:04 - 40.276 Now is is PC and supported with subscriptions

01:04 - 43.379 from the cable company from the cable companies.

01:04 - 47.350 It's you know so our new Brian came up

01:04 - 51.921 with the new logo only on cable I think that was clever. Mm.

01:04 - 55.925 Especially nowadays because it is only on, only on cable.

01:04 - 01.097 As a matter of fact I to tell you this month or so ago

01:05 - 03.933 I hope I get a post, we said Pittsburgh

01:05 - 07.503 and Comcast had a full page ad

01:05 - 11.908 and listed in only on cable.

01:05 - 13.142 Yeah, that's great.

01:05 - 15.478 They've been battling that. Did you know the satellite?

01:05 - 16.078 Yeah, that's great.

01:05 - 18.180 This is listed us.

01:05 - 21.350 It's only on cable, so

01:05 - 23.819 I just think

01:05 - 26.155 we've come a long way.

01:05 - 29.292 We're 25 years now, Joe.

01:05 - 31.494 I mean, I can't believe that it doesn't

01:05 - 32.662 it doesn't seem like that long.

01:05 - 34.964 It's it's amazing. It's a

01:05 - 37.566 I feel very good about it.

01:05 - 40.736 And I just stay with it because I

01:05 - 44.340 started with it and I just

01:05 - 46.742 want, you know, I just want to see it

01:05 - 50.179 succeed more for

01:05 - 50.980 George.

01:05 - 53.316 Yeah, and Joe and Yolanda.

01:05 - 58.454 A It's kind of so it's a personal legacy for them

01:05 - 01.590 and it's also an industry legacy for them,

01:06 - 02.858 for the cable industry.

01:06 - 05.461 But I and I, in my travels now,

01:06 - 10.833 it used to be I'd say I'm still with the Pennsylvania Cable.

01:06 - 13.202 Nobody knew what it was.

01:06 - 14.704 That doesn't happen now.

01:06 - 19.141 And I just left Gettysburg and they all know me down there

01:06 - 23.479 now, you know, all the Rangers and the Gettysburg people,

01:06 - 26.983 because we've done a lot for them.

01:06 - 31.020 And the same way with sports people.

01:06 - 34.490 Now, I would I would just to Chicago.

01:06 - 38.227 We went to Chicago for that Hall of Fame thing

01:06 - 41.764 and got the name of Larry Richard, who's the anchorman

01:06 - 44.934 for News anchor for KDKA.

01:06 - 50.439 Since you heard I was with PCM, raved about it.

01:06 - 55.144 There's a guy in the broadcast industry, knows PCM very well,

01:06 - 58.981 likes it very much, tells us what a nice job we're doing.

01:06 - 02.852 Those it's not that that's the kind of satisfaction

01:07 - 05.788 I get that I like and I enjoy that.

01:07 - 08.124 And I'm sure that anybody

01:07 - 11.460 else, it's certainly a way for people to be informed

01:07 - 14.864 about things that they are certainly not going, Oh, plus

01:07 - 18.601 we're the only state doing it that makes it feel good.

01:07 - 19.869 There's nobody else doing it.

01:07 - 27.610 What we're doing 24 hours a day, public affairs.

01:07 - 29.345 Are you both still on the board?

01:07 - 31.180 Yes, I'm not.

01:07 - 34.884 Well, you know, your dad is your father, as I.

01:07 - 39.121 I didn't step away from my step back from Texas.

01:07 - 43.726 Oh, maybe one, eight, seven, eight years ago I was involved.

01:07 - 45.261 I'm not a national board,

01:07 - 48.230 national cable television board in this state,

01:07 - 50.699 which is now back up on those boards.

01:07 - 52.068 And I'm still in the cable.

01:07 - 53.702 We're still in the cable business. Oh, yeah.

01:07 - 56.705 What's and, you know, heavily involved in those.

01:07 - 59.942 But, you know, they pick up the phone, they need something.

01:08 - 00.810 Oh, yeah.

01:08 - 03.813 You know, that's why I forgot he wasn't on it.

01:08 - 05.681 I just think he's still there.

01:08 - 08.484 So the industry is still just as strongly behind.

01:08 - 09.418 Oh, yes.

01:08 - 10.586 The end as ever.

01:08 - 13.222 Yeah. Okay.

01:08 - 15.524 Anything we haven't about so far

01:08 - 19.328 that you'd like to bring up,

01:08 - 21.697 I think the gratitude, you know,

01:08 - 26.102 the sense of accomplishment that the operators,

01:08 - 29.572 the the engineers,

01:08 - 33.442 you know, the average cable constructor, the guys that work

01:08 - 38.214 for us in the field, you know, the the exemplary performance.

01:08 - 40.783 They they put everything behind their stories.

01:08 - 43.352 Even if we're on a tower in a lightning storm

01:08 - 45.688 or they're digging in a ditch, you know,

01:08 - 46.922 where are we going to go for lunch?

01:08 - 48.290 You know, we worried about lunch.

01:08 - 49.058 You know, you

01:08 - 51.660 you start at six in the morning and when you finish that night,

01:08 - 54.330 you say, we are going to complete these three tasks.

01:08 - 57.133 And if it was 2:00 in the morning, 2:00 in the morning,

01:08 - 59.034 it was never a complaint.

01:08 - 03.606 You should say, better eat a big breakfast, go up.

01:09 - 06.442 It's still coming back. But they were

01:09 - 09.712 they were honorable people.

01:09 - 12.181 This just the regular

01:09 - 16.185 guy hanging out there, working

01:09 - 17.720 there. You could count on them.

01:09 - 19.822 Just you could count on them no matter what.

01:09 - 22.224 We did a lot of goodwill.

01:09 - 24.226 We did with the people in the neighborhoods.

01:09 - 27.429 We fly into somebody's backyard, we helicopter hop

01:09 - 28.931 and go for a ride.

01:09 - 32.001 You know, there's so many little, little

01:09 - 36.805 tangential stories to this that the to too many to mention

01:09 - 39.341 that it's it's just in everybody helped

01:09 - 40.309 you know one guy

01:09 - 42.211 found out what it was about he cut the grass

01:09 - 44.180 at the Katanning site for nothing

01:09 - 46.148 for I don't know how many. Yeah.

01:09 - 47.183 Just a neighbor.

01:09 - 49.385 His house was next door to the tower.

01:09 - 50.553 We'd go to cut the grass.

01:09 - 52.488 He'd be all cut.

01:09 - 55.024 He finally said. I said I wanted to do it.

01:09 - 57.993 You guys looked like you want things look nice, so

01:09 - 01.530 I want my yard to look nice and he just do it.

01:10 - 03.132 But I don't.

01:10 - 06.435 I can't remember any really big obstacles,

01:10 - 09.438 like people getting in our way at any time.

01:10 - 11.907 That was serious.

01:10 - 12.908 You had,

01:10 - 15.544 you know, the cable guy says you can't put that pole here.

01:10 - 19.548 Yeah, well, see, we pretty much we preempted a lot of that

01:10 - 21.116 the way we we just

01:10 - 24.353 where we flew, found and bought the properties.

01:10 - 27.489 We knew we preempted a lot of the typical problems.

01:10 - 29.692 So we knew what we were experienced enough.

01:10 - 31.126 We knew what they could be

01:10 - 33.596 and we knew how to avoid them when we did at all cost.

01:10 - 37.533 The DNA only animosities I had

01:10 - 40.803 were was with the educators not animosity.

01:10 - 42.471 They just they just didn't understand it.

01:10 - 44.473 It's I, I don't know how they fought it.

01:10 - 45.441 They really for

01:10 - 46.709 I don't know how many things I would sit

01:10 - 50.946 in at Penn State with educators, you know, more educated than

01:10 - 52.081 they should.

01:10 - 54.817 They were overeducated and they couldn't understand it.

01:10 - 55.050 You know,

01:10 - 56.018 and I like

01:10 - 59.088 to go into the most simplistic drawings and diagrams,

01:10 - 01.457 and then they would learn, but then they would sit back

01:11 - 03.425 and they wouldn't they wouldn't take advantage of it.

01:11 - 05.961 I think most of it was because they didn't want to

01:11 - 07.563 want to.

01:11 - 09.198 I didn't know how to either.

01:11 - 14.103 Either know change is always somewhat fearful for people.

01:11 - 16.705 Yes. In a yeah.

01:11 - 20.042 I guess in retrospect now you can.

01:11 - 22.711 I often wonder what they think now because it's here

01:11 - 25.981 and they are doing it now and so

01:11 - 30.352 but you know

01:11 - 33.689 me personally now,

01:11 - 36.492 I'm glad it went the way it did

01:11 - 38.360 because they

01:11 - 41.930 the teacher, I shouldn't I want to say that that

01:11 - 47.036 education system has changed and it's not like it used to be.

01:11 - 50.806 Now we're doing, I think, the service we're providing

01:11 - 55.077 the cable industry intensive NEA is much better.

01:11 - 56.679 It's and I think it's

01:11 - 58.981 better than just education.

01:11 - 02.484 You're providing education that probably is more accessible

01:12 - 03.052 to people.

01:12 - 05.821 Yeah, well, more accessible to more people.

01:12 - 06.322 Yeah.

01:12 - 10.225 The families, for example, I hear so many comments

01:12 - 12.961 about that program we do about tours

01:12 - 16.732 of different plants that's very popular.

01:12 - 19.535 And now the sports with the high school sports,

01:12 - 21.170 that's really good.

01:12 - 24.640 As a matter of fact, I think we're getting to an area

01:12 - 26.575 that sometime

01:12 - 29.211 we're going to start being asked by bordering states

01:12 - 32.281 to get the signal in there

01:12 - 34.950 because the high schools are playing across the state.

01:12 - 38.754 And then why can't we get it?

01:12 - 41.156 Like can't we get have any other states

01:12 - 44.927 giving you feelers about modeling?

01:12 - 47.863 Well, Brian's good. Brian.

01:12 - 49.698 Brian is being involved.

01:12 - 51.834 He's in he's

01:12 - 53.969 in that broadcast Syria now.

01:12 - 56.605 And he's in fact, he made a speech at the

01:12 - 00.175 convention this year to other cable people.

01:13 - 02.978 So it's being recognized now.

01:13 - 03.645 You're going to see more

01:13 - 06.348 niche programing like this begin to develop.

01:13 - 09.885 Cable has many competitors.

01:13 - 10.919 Cable per

01:13 - 14.723 se is direct broadcast satellite and things like that.

01:13 - 18.260 And these types of

01:13 - 23.132 opportunities for operators to provide specialized programing.

01:13 - 27.136 You can't get off satellite, you know, make it more attractive.

01:13 - 27.569 It's a

01:13 - 29.938 you know, it's to your service so they'll be develop

01:13 - 30.906 they're looking for ways

01:13 - 33.542 to do this and develop a regional sports network

01:13 - 35.644 and could become a regional,

01:13 - 38.147 you know,

01:13 - 40.949 public affairs network is a lot of applications.

01:13 - 46.121 I think the overall.

01:13 - 48.357 Well, let me rephrase I think that

01:13 - 52.861 what evolved here is so special.

01:13 - 53.762 Yeah.

01:13 - 57.099 The operators again, the cable operators became

01:13 - 00.002 involved in in a medium and took a challenge

01:14 - 02.604 to make it an educational process

01:14 - 05.808 because almost every show other than the gavel to gavel

01:14 - 07.976 and even that and even education.

01:14 - 11.113 Yeah, but everything that's out there, people are learning

01:14 - 14.883 from within this state, we're showing within the state

01:14 - 18.353 information that some children will never get to see.

01:14 - 20.956 They'll never get so many comments about

01:14 - 23.759 I never knew that was made in Pennsylvania.

01:14 - 25.794 A lot of people didn't know Harley-Davidson or Mack.

01:14 - 28.464 Truck trucks are made in Pennsylvania.

01:14 - 36.004 And it's the same thing with, in fact, I think about it

01:14 - 38.140 now more than I've thought

01:14 - 40.776 about it before, is that our footprint covers

01:14 - 43.412 the United States. You can go anywhere.

01:14 - 45.781 So right now we could go

01:14 - 49.651 send a signal to anyplace in the United States

01:14 - 52.187 and all it takes is a couple of thousand dollars

01:14 - 53.755 to receive it. Mhm.

01:14 - 57.493 So it's going to be interesting to see if something develops

01:14 - 59.428 in that direction once,

01:14 - 00.963 once that's

01:15 - 04.600 starting to become known that there are, we have a satellite

01:15 - 09.004 uplink that could transmit a signal to California.

01:15 - 12.641 And I

01:15 - 14.910 just something like that's going to happen someday.

01:15 - 19.681 Do you think that when you talked about sports,

01:15 - 23.118 I mean, one, maybe I could read into that a little that,

01:15 - 26.889 you know, PC and could become more than one

01:15 - 29.258 network.

01:15 - 32.060 Oh, you could have, you know, sports network

01:15 - 34.263 along with a public affairs network

01:15 - 37.733 and maybe a travel network in Pennsylvania.

01:15 - 39.134 All kinds of

01:15 - 41.970 there's all yes, there's all sorts of applications like that.

01:15 - 42.905 You Could you could

01:15 - 46.708 you could spin this off into multiple faceted organizations?

01:15 - 48.443 I don't believe that the board.

01:15 - 50.445 That's not its vision. Okay. Okay.

01:15 - 53.849 I think that this is this is you know,

01:15 - 57.419 this is a jewel for the state and it satisfies the need.

01:15 - 02.925 The basic mission statement of Tex is being fulfilled by PC.

01:16 - 05.060 Mm. Okay.

01:16 - 09.331 So it's to develop it in its present form.

01:16 - 10.766 I do it that's

01:16 - 13.502 I can't speak for the board but that's, that's my sense.

01:16 - 16.672 I think Jim said that's your sense of the word to right

01:16 - 20.175 but but I just think that

01:16 - 23.912 it's going to be hard to stop going in another direction

01:16 - 28.216 because once you had something to do it.

01:16 - 30.252 Mm. Yeah.

01:16 - 31.620 You can only

01:16 - 34.022 there's not too many more customers

01:16 - 36.758 for us to get out there now and then.

01:16 - 39.127 We're pretty well saturated.

01:16 - 42.831 We don't have but that's will come along with

01:16 - 44.132 but this year

01:16 - 45.200 and once you get IRI

01:16 - 48.003 then all the big cities are covered in terms of

01:16 - 50.806 availability

01:16 - 54.276 and so so it is available everywhere in the state

01:16 - 56.011 other than Erie pretty much.

01:16 - 59.481 So there's a few small areas where it's not

01:17 - 02.818 I think there's 4.2 million subscribers.

01:17 - 05.053 Yeah. And they're over three.

01:17 - 09.224 So there's scattered millions and it could be very small

01:17 - 11.259 system areas that you just don't have.

01:17 - 14.229 But we're now we're now starting to get those small systems

01:17 - 18.266 that are coming in asking we just signed up when this week

01:17 - 21.870 12. And

01:17 - 24.206 you never thought about that before.

01:17 - 26.775 Well you couldn't afford it with microwave.

01:17 - 27.309 Microwave.

01:17 - 30.979 It was a 25 to 20 4 to 25000 installation.

01:17 - 33.515 Just to get that pass established with the

01:17 - 35.751 the antennas, the hardware equipment,

01:17 - 39.154 with the satellite technology, you know, the deployment of that

01:17 - 41.590 was, exactly what this needed, you know,

01:17 - 45.427 that we had we stayed with microwave.

01:17 - 46.762 We would never be where we are.

01:17 - 48.530 Oh, no, that's right.

01:17 - 54.670 Good.

01:17 - 00.008 But I, I really think now that we can consider successful

01:18 - 04.079 and and I think that

01:18 - 07.916 George and Joe Gans and Yolanda

01:18 - 11.953 would be very happy with it, too. They

01:18 - 14.256 the new facility is.

01:18 - 16.958 Yeah astounding is is very nice

01:18 - 20.962 and I've only been around here

01:18 - 24.032 working with Brian a couple of years but

01:18 - 27.069 I mean the differences between what they used to have here

01:18 - 29.805 and this is just incredible memory.

01:18 - 32.507 Remember how we fought to found this place?

01:18 - 34.609 We never told this story, you know.

01:18 - 36.812 Yeah. Tell me about I mean,

01:18 - 39.614 it was down in Hershey for a while.

01:18 - 42.651 It was a not. Yeah, yeah.

01:18 - 46.922 Two closets in a store like that in the dentist's office.

01:18 - 49.491 Yeah. Well when we decided

01:18 - 53.261 to invite going on the satellite,

01:18 - 57.032 you had to have a find a place for a satellite uplink.

01:18 - 59.901 But then

01:19 - 02.771 this started telling us how much, how difficult that

01:19 - 05.640 might be with all the problems you have in this area.

01:19 - 11.379 But, you know, I knew enough about it just to be dangerous.

01:19 - 13.882 And so we start looking. And he was right.

01:19 - 16.518 It was difficult. Why was it difficult?

01:19 - 18.820 You can tell him why it was difficult

01:19 - 21.423 because of the frequency there are

01:19 - 26.161 terrestrial, which means point to point microwave that operate

01:19 - 29.131 in the same bands as frequencies as the uplinks do.

01:19 - 34.936 So to have a clear, clean signal, you need to have ample

01:19 - 39.007 space, frequency, space around you in the in structures

01:19 - 43.278 and there's all a whole host of problems,

01:19 - 46.381 reflections off of windows, off of church roofs.

01:19 - 50.152 There's just it's astounding

01:19 - 52.420 how many things could bother a microwave transmission path

01:19 - 54.122 to establish an uplink.

01:19 - 55.524 There has to be clear path.

01:19 - 58.293 So if there's a television station that has uplinks or

01:19 - 01.263 military facility, the government, everybody

01:20 - 04.132 putting uplinks it, it became challenging

01:20 - 07.369 then to coordinate where you could put these facilities,

01:20 - 09.871 which is fortunate you were able to get this this area.

01:20 - 13.542 Well, I can go a step further and I'd say

01:20 - 16.645 I would guess

01:20 - 19.681 a month and a half that I spent most of the time down there.

01:20 - 23.785 Ernie Baker We set up a test rig where

01:20 - 28.123 we just put the test rig up

01:20 - 31.393 and run the frequency tests,

01:20 - 33.962 and every time we'd run it wouldn't

01:20 - 36.965 work would be a problem no matter where

01:20 - 40.135 we were all over this area.

01:20 - 42.370 So one night after about a month

01:20 - 44.472 and a half, toward the end of the evening,

01:20 - 48.844 we were staying in Hershey.

01:20 - 52.147 And for some reason we started down this

01:20 - 54.783 route out here.

01:20 - 57.185 I can't remember the name of it.

01:20 - 59.521 And I saw this parking lot back here

01:21 - 05.126 and Ernest go back and try that parking lot.

01:21 - 06.461 So we come back.

01:21 - 08.797 We said every that people are watching us sit this thing up

01:21 - 12.534 and Ernie looked at the

01:21 - 15.904 scope, Yeah, he's got it. It's

01:21 - 20.208 such a we looked at it for about a half hour,

01:21 - 22.010 watch it for a half hour.

01:21 - 24.546 And it was clean. Clean.

01:21 - 27.182 So I said, okay, wrap it up.

01:21 - 30.652 We would see the Hershey Lodge back to Hershey first thing

01:21 - 33.922 the morning of going back, came back and checked it again

01:21 - 38.426 and it was still clear and we finally got it.

01:21 - 41.696 How do we find out

01:21 - 44.132 who owns everything?

01:21 - 46.801 So there was a side door here

01:21 - 49.371 and I said, Well, I'm going in and I'll go

01:21 - 51.873 and see what's happening and who owns us.

01:21 - 56.778 So I walked in and right to the door

01:21 - 58.914 that is now a studio.

01:21 - 01.249 It's a girl sitting in there and

01:22 - 02.183 I said,

01:22 - 02.784 I'm with

01:22 - 04.352 the Pennsylvania Cable Network and I'd

01:22 - 06.521 like to buy this building.

01:22 - 08.690 And she said to me, How do you know?

01:22 - 12.193 How do you know it was for sale?

01:22 - 14.863 And honest to God, that's the way it happened as well.

01:22 - 17.599 I just thought it might be and I've heard it might be.

01:22 - 21.803 And it was owned by

01:22 - 23.872 that. And I

01:22 - 26.808 it's a group that you can

01:22 - 28.543 they just built a new building,

01:22 - 31.179 beautiful building over in Harrisburg,

01:22 - 33.348 where you get federal money for education.

01:22 - 34.783 Of fear.

01:22 - 36.384 Fear, yeah. Oh, that's right.

01:22 - 42.357 I do remember when they owned and it was for sale, you know.

01:22 - 44.960 So it was just kind of ironic

01:22 - 47.662 that here is an educational people

01:22 - 50.131 when they found out that we were interested in it

01:22 - 52.600 and told what we were interested in,

01:22 - 54.336 they were very cooperative.

01:22 - 57.072 And in America for which we had, we bought it.

01:22 - 58.740 In fact, you. Right.

01:22 - 00.809 And I bought it and and

01:23 - 07.983 start working and that's how we got it.

01:23 - 11.987 So the building did exist and there was a building here

01:23 - 15.590 and that we operated the building at first.

01:23 - 18.393 Yeah, in fact it was a building in the back

01:23 - 23.231 but now the studio was a garage where the master control

01:23 - 27.602 is, was just a little like a it was a, it was a

01:23 - 29.471 like a

01:23 - 32.407 greenhouse for doing something with plants.

01:23 - 36.011 And we made that the master control,

01:23 - 37.712 but that's how we got here.

01:23 - 39.781 But it took a good month and a half.

01:23 - 42.450 I mean, a lot of sweat

01:23 - 45.954 trying to find a place now that the decision

01:23 - 49.591 to come to Harrisburg for the headquarters was made.

01:23 - 52.560 When you decided probably to shift the directions

01:23 - 55.563 public affairs Harrisburg made sense being the capital.

01:23 - 59.100 Is that how the thinking went?

01:23 - 00.702 Because you were at Penn state

01:24 - 04.139 was the headquarters before, was it not

01:24 - 04.873 you all?

01:24 - 07.208 Yeah, but that left that left some time ago

01:24 - 10.445 when we moved to Hershey, that was Penn State was when,

01:24 - 13.615 when the when the tax became

01:24 - 17.552 and that's really the Hershey okay

01:24 - 20.655 transmission ceased from Worthington campus.

01:24 - 21.890 I don't remember the date,

01:24 - 24.626 but that's probably we were still microwave then.

01:24 - 27.462 I still microwave but we had three three

01:24 - 32.067 remember 333 Market Street, you know, 333 Market Street

01:24 - 32.467 was where

01:24 - 35.904 all of the telecommunications terminated from the Capitol.

01:24 - 39.841 And that was a key point for landscape.

01:24 - 42.177 Right. And Lamb's Gap could see this facility.

01:24 - 44.813 See, we still have the microwave lamps get.

01:24 - 45.447 That's still

01:24 - 47.582 part of our system.

01:24 - 48.850 Oh, I didn't know that. Yeah.

01:24 - 49.451 Okay.

01:24 - 51.419 There's there's four points, microwave points

01:24 - 54.422 of communication out of this facility that I know of.

01:24 - 59.828 One two television station, 333 Market Street, Catherine.

01:24 - 02.330 And one other. Well, another farm show.

01:25 - 04.532 Yeah, farm show building.

01:25 - 06.167 And now Hershey.

01:25 - 07.735 Oh, really? You know, that's a new one.

01:25 - 09.571 Yeah, we do. We live from Hershey.

01:25 - 10.038 Oh, good.

01:25 - 11.806 Hershey the arena.

01:25 - 13.575 Arena the new one.

01:25 - 15.009 We live from there.

01:25 - 16.678 We don't have a permanent hook up there.

01:25 - 18.780 We don't hook up Hershey Lodge.

01:25 - 19.514 Hershey Lodge.

01:25 - 21.850 Okay.

01:25 - 24.385 I knew that one, but those are still used

01:25 - 26.588 and the signal comes here and then is uplinked goes

01:25 - 29.157 the lamps go up from labs, get to here

01:25 - 34.662 to the uplink.

01:25 - 36.264 Okay, so something's coming.

01:25 - 39.234 How, how are we doing the, the games at Hershey.

01:25 - 42.337 Oh, we do

01:25 - 43.771 two different paths.

01:25 - 46.407 One, we shoot two it's okay

01:25 - 50.044 fiber in back here and the other path

01:25 - 52.280 we shoot to lamps, gap and microwave.

01:25 - 53.281 It's okay.

01:25 - 56.484 But you don't have that permanent, you know.

01:25 - 57.652 Or is that permanent.

01:25 - 00.355 The stadium for three Jim.

01:26 - 06.294 They're getting them but they getting it done.

01:26 - 11.132 They'll ask how.

01:26 - 13.601 Okay. All right. I think so.

01:26 - 15.203 I think so.

01:26 - 16.971 We were no, that's all right.

01:26 - 18.973 We were sort of winding down.

01:26 - 20.341 I was asking if they had anything.

01:26 - 22.443 They had them and they did.

01:26 - 24.846 Oh, no, you get good stories.

01:26 - 28.683 Yeah, we were Jim and I were in Katanning

01:26 - 33.755 we had a flatbed with a power lift tailgate till today.

01:26 - 36.391 I mean, he thinks God helped.

01:26 - 38.927 I think he helped me.

01:26 - 41.029 I don't really help you because you're bad.

01:26 - 43.097 You had no idea. I knew I needed help.

01:26 - 45.400 We up

01:26 - 48.436 microwave rack and that was heavy.

01:26 - 49.871 They had a way

01:26 - 51.105 for 54.

01:26 - 52.974 For £500.

01:26 - 53.341 Yeah.

01:26 - 56.044 So in a truck, again thunderstorms are underway.

01:26 - 58.980 We've got to get this thing we got in the building.

01:26 - 59.914 Yeah, we can do it.

01:26 - 03.117 So we put this power lift tailgate right by the door.

01:27 - 05.353 We had the microwave equipment on it,

01:27 - 07.222 but we didn't calculate it.

01:27 - 10.291 We're calculators, but not we weren't working too

01:27 - 11.559 good that day.

01:27 - 13.962 We didn't realize that once we lifted the weight off

01:27 - 14.762 the power lift

01:27 - 16.831 tailgate that the truck suspension

01:27 - 18.833 was going to raise up a little bit

01:27 - 21.903 and there was only maybe an inch of clearance that we had.

01:27 - 24.372 So I'm in the building.

01:27 - 26.674 I'm lifting all I can do to lift it.

01:27 - 29.444 I lifted up Jim's on the truck, he's lifted it up

01:27 - 33.081 that the weight comes off, the truck comes up.

01:27 - 35.550 We're jammed in the doorway now we're sitting there.

01:27 - 37.952 There is only the two of us.

01:27 - 38.853 We're in the middle of the woods.

01:27 - 41.623 Nobody around here, I think we were there for about

01:27 - 43.157 eight or nine years

01:27 - 46.527 till not that long.

01:27 - 48.863 Could you move, Joe? I can't move.

01:27 - 49.564 Can you move?

01:27 - 52.166 I can't. I'm ten. I can't move. He.

01:27 - 54.869 I still don't know. Till today we. Couldn't we did.

01:27 - 56.604 There's only one of these. We can't drop it.

01:27 - 59.340 We can't smash it all replacement parts

01:28 - 02.343 somehow. Somehow we picked it up.

01:28 - 05.146 We picked that thing up, we got in the buildings at it.

01:28 - 07.582 There were two of us sat down on the floor for about an hour.

01:28 - 09.784 He couldn't move.

01:28 - 11.052 It was heavy.

01:28 - 13.388 That was a lot of money in that wreck, too.

01:28 - 14.822 Yeah, that was.

01:28 - 17.091 Didn't want a deer drop. It would have dropped.

01:28 - 19.627 It had been disastrous. But

01:28 - 22.130 as I say, I know.

01:28 - 23.464 God help me.

01:28 - 25.933 I'm worried about you

01:28 - 31.773 and your.

01:28 - 34.075 Well, those are the kind of things I think that that

01:28 - 37.512 you just go through those and

01:28 - 40.782 it's like any kind of a

01:28 - 43.017 even a game.

01:28 - 45.253 You go you wonder how you get strength.

01:28 - 47.088 Sometime

01:28 - 50.391 it was there.

01:28 - 52.827 I don't think I could do it today.