John Earl Fetzer (March 25, 1901 – February 20, 1991) was a radio and television executive who was best known as the owner of the Detroit Tigers from 1961 through 1983. Under his ownership, the 1968 Tigers won the World Series.
Biography
Born in 1901 in Decatur, Indiana, Fetzer moved with his mother to Lafayette, Indiana, after his father died when Fetzer was 2 years old. There, his brother-in-law, a telegraph operator for the Wabash Railroad, introduced young John to the early workings of wireless communication. Via telegraph reports, they would track the baseball games of the Detroit Tigers, which he would later own.
Radio was still in its infancy, but Fetzer took it seriously and built his first transmitter-receiver in 1917 and began communicating from his home in Indiana with a man in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. In 1922, he came to Michigan and enrolled at Emmanuel Missionary College, now known as Andrews University, in Berrien Springs, and began operating an experimental radio station for the school. The station became so popular that in 1923, it sought and received a full license under the calls KFGZ, operating it as a noncommercial full-service station for the St. Joseph Valley. The calls became WEMC in 1925. While at EMC, he met Rhea Yeager. They would stay married until his death, 65 years later.
Fetzer toured Europe in the late 1920s, studying radio operations, and recalled being repulsed by government monopolies on radio there. He returned to the United States at the beginnings of the Great Depression and would remain a staunch advocate of a "hands off" policy by the government in the communications industry.
By then, despite WEMC's popularity, Emmanuel Missionary College was running out of money to operate its radio station. Unwilling to either operate commercially or solicit donations from listeners, college officials offered to sell it to Fetzer. He bought it for $2,500. As in his student days, he ran the station's operations himself, serving as technician, engineer, announcer and salesman. In 1931, he moved the station to Kalamazoo because of his wife's area ties. Kalamazoo was also the last major city in Michigan without its own radio station. Later that year, the station signed on under new calls, WKZO, from studios in the Burdick Hotel. Mr. and Mrs. Fetzer worked side by side. She served as program director and secretary. He sold advertising and kept track of the technology. He said of these early beginnings, "It was a mixture of pride, stubbornness and stupidity that kept me in the business. If I knew then what I know now about economics, I would have shut down."
His innovations in radio led to the development of a directional antenna for broadcasting at night. This, in turn, led to a lawsuit by WOW in Omaha, Nebraska, which claimed the directional antenna would interfere with its signal if allowed. The case went through the Supreme Court twice and was finally settled in Fetzer's favor on the floor of the United States Senate. This led to some 3,000 stations getting their licenses granted by the FCC and put Fetzer in the position of pioneer and confidante of many in Washington.
During World War II, he was appointed the national radio censor for the U.S. Office of Censorship and created voluntary censorship of more than 900 radio stations so that they would not broadcast information that would be beneficial to the enemy. When the war started to wind down, Fetzer began asking for smaller and smaller budgets to run the office and began firing the 15,000 people employed by the office. When the war ended, he closed up shop and stored all the information in the basement of the National Archives. He said, "I'm convinced if we hadn't, the Office of Censorship would still be with us today, and I shudder to think how powerful it might be."
Fetzer's own broadcasting empire grew during the war and spread from Kalamazoo to Grand Rapids, Nebraska and Peoria. He formed the Fetzer Music Corporation and acquired the Muzak franchise for out-state Michigan in 1958. Inevitably, he would get into the new medium, television, and established Fetzer Cablevision, eventually, in Kalamazoo. That has since become Charter Communications providing cable television service to the Kalamazoo area.