Born To Be a Newspaper Man

by Martin J. McGowan Jr.

Changing Careers

After eight years in the legislature my situation changed and my career changed. It was apparent I could not educate nine children on the income from the Appleton Press and I was willing to sell the paper. At the same time the management of KTCA-TV, Channel 2 in St. Paul, was looking for somebody to do grants writing and government relations. A buyer for the paper turned up in Bill McGarry, of Crookston, who ran a free circulation shopper there but wanted to own a newspaper. At the same time an offer of a position came from KTCA as a grants writer and government liaison. It was thought my political connections would be an asset for such a job.

So both deals were made. The lady for whom we rented the house in South St. Paul during the legislative session wanted to come home from the south. We returned to Appleton long enough to pack up and get moved to St. Paul in June. I began the new job with KTCA by July 1 1966.

In an unusual situation I served a special session of the legislature in the summer of 1966, still representing Swift county but living in St. Paul. The fellow who represented the St. Paul area where we lived sat directly behind me on the floor of the House.

Dr. John Schwarzwalder was the general manager of what was then called an educational TV station. He started the first ETV station in Houston, Tex., and was then hired by some civic minded citizens to start a similar station in the Twin Cities. The call letters of the station were designed to represent serving the twin city area with the TCA call letters.

The University of Minnesota naturally wanted to take over and operate the station. People there felt it was a natural extension of their educational duties. However, some of the state legislators opposed that idea strongly. They said, "We don't want those left-wing professors spreading their liberal doctrine throughout the state by television." This difference of opinion between the university and some legislators actually contributed to the station being neutral and independent. When I first came to the station the management tried to keep away from the legislature in any requests for funds so as not to be under legislative direction. Later when that possibility seemed remote the effort switched to seeking as much federal help as possible. That was how my grant was obtained. I traveled to Washington, D. C. several times and also hung around the Minnesota capitol to see what bills might impact the station.

The station did a fabulous job of providing class instruction in subjects like mathematics and Spanish, educating most of the public school students in the twin city area in those subjects. There were also classes for some of the Minnesota state college students.

Dr. Schwarzwalder had a weekly program on foreign affairs where he spoke about recent events and illustrated on a map where the area was being discussed. When he was gone or unavailable for this program I was drafted to fill in for him. There was another current events program called "Inquiry" where Dick Vogl was the moderator and I sat in with him on most programs.

I secured a grant of $250,000 from the federal Administration on Aging working with the Minnesota Council on Aging. This was intended as a research project to determine if senior citizens could be informed about things that would help them, would they retain information supplied to them by television. Viewing groups were organized in areas penetrated by the state ETV network in Duluth, Appleton and Fargo-Moorhead. The program called "Seminars for Seniors" ran every Tuesday evening for two years. At the end of that time the viewers were tested to se how much of the information they had retained. The project was successful in proving that senior citizens could learn by viewing television programs and could retain the information.

I had a young woman, Betty McRoberts, working with me to find and schedule experts to appear on the program. A staff TV engineer also assisted in setting up the backdrop for the interviews, all of which I conducted.

The program was so successful that many viewers wanted the program continued as a public service. However, the Administration on Aging said the program had proved its point and there were no funds to continue the series as a service project.

Children's television was then becoming popular and "Sesame Street" began serving that clientele. After the "Seminars for Seniors" ended I did some work popularizing that series by taking publicity around to elementary schools in the area.

After several years of supplying viewers with material for special audiences, the Minneapolis Tribune began a campaign to get KTCA to switch to cultural material of general interest. Dr. Schwarzwalder resisted this campaign strongly. Gradually over the years the change occurred. The station began showing music, drama, arts and the news instead of mathematics and foreign language instruction. The designation also changed from ETV, educational TV, to PBS, the Public Broadcasting Service.

During my tenure at KTCA I was asked to do a couple of unusual assignments. One was to buy land to erect towers at three locations for a relay system from St. Paul to Appleton. I went with the assistant engineer for the station out on Highway 7 looking for high hills. The engineer had a topographical map showing high spots and when we found one at the proper distance we drove to the farm house and asked if the owner would like to part with a small corner of his field. Usually they did. So we negotiated and bought three sites at St. Bonifacius, Lake Lillian and Clara City. In addition to supplying KWCM at Appleton with signals the purpose was to relay those signals to the University of South Dakota at Vermillion and to Moorhead State at Moorhead. Since we were an educational station at the time the idea was to sell the educational programs to South Dakota to use there. The same at Moorhead. Unfortunately, South Dakota didn't want any educational programs from Minnesota and that arrangement never developed. When the Appleton station received programming by satellite the relay system was not as useful.

Another unusual assignment was to see if there was any interest in Bemidji for a station on a channel assigned to that area. Channel 9 was available and since we were an educational channel at that time I went to the superintendent of schools in Bemidji to see if he wanted to join the state ETV network.

I apparently caught him by complete surprise. He obviously was unaware that a channel was available. Either he had a bad day that day or already had enough problems without taking on the construction of a TV station and management of it. Better groundwork should have been laid for the visit. He was not interested.

As it turned out Channel 9 was later granted to a group in Bemidji at Bemidji State University for a PBS station. Another station was activated near Brainerd to run simultaneously on Channel 22. They operate as KAWB Brainerd and KAWE Bemidji.

As an incumbent state legislator in 1966, even though I was from a different district, I was endorsed to run as the DFL candidate in the Como-St. Anthony Park district. This was the year Dr. Schwarzwalder chose to run as a DFL candidate for the state senate in a district along the Mississippi river. We both campaigned after work and weekends. I ran well but the city voters didn't like my voting record for rural issues in my previous four terms. I lost as did Dr. Schwarzwalder.

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