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Tom Jensen Interviewed by Hilary Hilscher

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Tom Jensen Interviewed by Hilary Hilscher Archives and Special Collections, Consortium Library, University of Alaska Anchorage. HMC-0859. Hilary J. Hilscher Alaska telecommunications history project records. Series 3: Oral history recordings transcripts. Tom Jensen Interviewed by Hilary Hilscher Dec. 15, 2001 Tape 1, Side A Hilary: (I‟m with) Tom Jenson on the 15th of December in the Conference Room of the Anchorage Museum. Tom, start at the beginning. Tom: Don‟t I need an attorney to represent me? Hilary: If you like. Tom: Is there a statute of limitations on telecommunication activities? Hilary: We can put an embargo on part of your tape. Tom: For what it is worth, just for your background I‟m a life-long Alaskan, born in Douglas, Alaska, to at that time a third-generation family which makes me fourth-generation, which means my children are fifth generation. Our family settled in Alaska in 1865, two years prior to the Russians arriving and buying it. None of which got me an extra nickel at all but it makes for interesting lies and storytelling. Hilary: Why were they were in 1865? Tom: They actually were an element of a family that fought in the Revolutionary War in 1776 to the British. They were Tories and French Canadian and ethnic backgrounds. When the war was over they lost so they scooted north to Canada and one branch of that family took about 90 years to migrate across Canada, settling just south of Ketchikan and that‟s where it all started. That was on mother‟s side of the family. Father‟s side of the family came to Alaska in the depression, came up steerage and worked their way (up). None of which made me rich at all, but I have great stories to tell about relatives who were federal marshals. Relatives who were gold miners. Relatives, who lost fortunes. So here I am working. Grew up in the state of Alaska, lived in Juneau for a while, then Anchorage for a while, settled in Fairbanks going through junior high and high school. During high school, my sophomore year, I left home and needed to make some money „cause you don‟t get to eat for free. Went to work, believe it or not, for a little local radio station just gathering news for a local radio newscaster at the age of 15. Stuck with the business for about 15 years, worked my way up into the industry. At one time I was really the janitor working midnight to six. Cleaned the bathrooms, the toilets, changed the toilet paper, washed the Tom Jensen with Hilary Hilscher December 15, 2001 Page 1 of 25 Archives and Special Collections, Consortium Library, University of Alaska Anchorage. HMC-0859. Hilary J. Hilscher Alaska telecommunications history project records. Series 3: Oral history recordings transcripts. floors, fixed the teletype paper, changed the ribbon in it, and every 30 minutes got to open the microphone and say, “This is KFAR.” Interesting, it turned out. KFAR and Al Bramsted, who owned the network for one of the premier networks in the state, the Old Midnight Sun. Worked for Bram for about six years, seven years, and then worked for Augie (Hiebert) when I came back from Vietnam – was offered a job at Augie‟s station because Midnight Sun didn‟t have a home for me. So I then worked for the Northern Television Network. Migrated to Anchorage in the early 70s and ended up my broadcast career with Augie in 1976 as his operations manager for AM/FM radio, news director for television, newscaster on the 6 p.m. and 10 p.m. newscast and general gopher. For all of that -- six days a week from 6 a.m. in the morning until 10:30 at night -- I was paid the grand total of $1,300 a month, $300 of which was called talent fee which tells you how much talent I had. And when I decided that I was going to get married and would like to see my wife more than two hours a week. I went to Augie and said that, “Gee, I‟d kind of like to have maybe Saturdays off or a little more money.” And his response was… keep in mind this was in 1976, nine years after the flood in Fairbanks. His response was, “Well, you know, we‟re still paying off the SBA (Small Business Association) loans in the Fairbanks flood and things are tight. We were kind of wondering if you could work a part-time shift on Sunday.” At which point I went back to my desk and resigned. To this day Augie and I are still very good friends. I admire the man for what he has done. He knows where every nickel is he‟s made. In fact, he may still have some of the first ones. Very prudent businessman. But I just couldn‟t live by eating teletype paper and stealing records. It just didn‟t work out real well. Hilary: So Tom, go back to the early days with KFAR in Fairbanks. What kind of equipment? What kind of programming? Tom: Well, the Midnight Sun Network was really the only network around. There was another station there but no one listened to it and part of it was because of personality. It was small-town radio and personality radio. Most of the equipment (was) usually surplus Korean War stuff. On the television side… when we went into television, we went into television with the old tube transmitters. We had no transistors or anything. We had black-and-white film projectors. There was no videotape at all. For years in Alaska broadcasting, (as) I‟m sure you‟ve heard, Alaskans watched the CBS Evening News with Walter Cronkite 24 hours after it aired to the rest of the world where it was live. And what made it rather unique is that you could read the newspaper at the end of the day in Fairbanks and find out what happened and that would tell you whether you wanted to watch the newscast the next night and see about it. And if there wasn‟t anything real exciting that happened, then you just didn‟t watch the news that night. And I grew up under that aura. Tom Jensen with Hilary Hilscher December 15, 2001 Page 2 of 25 Archives and Special Collections, Consortium Library, University of Alaska Anchorage. HMC-0859. Hilary J. Hilscher Alaska telecommunications history project records. Series 3: Oral history recordings transcripts. 1969 was the first year ever of a live satellite broadcast feed into the state of Alaska. It was made possible by the United States military who made some of their facilities available. The Comsat earth station located in Talkeetna downlinked the signal and we all got to watch man landing on the moon. Now I have in my portfolio a Polaroid picture, black and white, that I took of my television screen as the satellite or as the spacecraft first lifted off on the moon mission and then I have a second one I took when man landed on the moon. So I had these little black-and-white photos that I can say these were taken when it actually happened, even though it was my TV set‟s -- sitting in Alaska – black- and-white picture. So Alaska came into the telecommunications age just sort of late. It was a while later, after that first broadcast feat of the moon walk, that they figured out how to get enough money to bring in some other events live, and believe it or not it was football and it was sports and the Super Bowl and so forth. And the reason for all of that was that satellites were relatively new. The cost of satellite time started out at somewhere between $5,000 and $4,000 an hour to downlink a signal if you have the equipment to put it into your station and then broadcast it out. That‟s a lot of money back in the 60s and early 70s for a broadcast to underwrite. Most advertisers had a fixed budget for the year and if you convinced them to underwrite your Super Bowl football game for two-and-a-half-hours at $5,000 an hour, you had just eaten up their first six months of the budget and you weren‟t going to get any more money from them. So you were just taking the money from one pocket and putting it into the other. Took a while for the economics to catch up. What helped is the introduction of satellite dishes that were a lot less expensive. Transistor electronic equipment and the cost of satellite transmission went down as more satellites went up. Competition helped. Now as we sit here in the year 2000, you can have a dish in your backyard for less than $200 installed, (and) pick up 150 channels of live digital television. That‟s not the way it started. Hilary: Talk to me about those early days of radio programming. Tom: We had… it was some strange things. First of all, in the telecommunications arena, long distance did not exist outside of Anchorage, Fairbanks, Juneau, and Ketchikan. So the rest of the state to rely on or to get messages (by) tuning into AM radio and just about every station in the state had a program similar to what we did in Fairbanks called “Tundra Topics”. And what would happen is people could write into that radio station or they could stop by if they were local and drop off a message.
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