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E. Fetzer:
When
John E. Fetzer died on 21 February 1991, he left a life replete
with the legacy of a broadcasting empire, a World Series winning
baseball club, philanthropy, and exploration of the mystical fringes
of science. 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 wonders of early electronics and
the Detroit Tigers, which he would later own, via telegraph reports.
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. People
began buying crystal sets - tinny, primitive radios that required no
electrical power - to listen in. In
1923 he came to Michigan, to build a radio station for
Emmanuel College, now known as Andrews University, in Berrien
Springs. He built and operated the station, and also met
Rhea Yeager. They married, and for sixty-five years the couple were
partners in life and business, Rhea supporting him in all his
endeavors by working side-by-side with him. 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.
Emmanuel College was running out of money to operate its radio
station and offered to sell it to Fetzer. He bought it and, in 1930,
moved the station to Kalamazoo because of his wife's area
ties and the fact that Kalamazoo was the last major city in Michigan
without its own radio station. He named the station WKZO and started
broadcasting in 1931. The station was located in the Burdick Hotel,
now the site of the Radisson, and its transmitter was on Nichols
Road northwest of Kalamazoo. The Fetzers worked side by side, she
serving as program director and secretary, and Fetzer selling ads and
putting them on the air. 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 a
station in Omaha, Nebraska, that said it would interfere with their
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 that
serves the cable needs of the Kalamazoo area. In
1956, the troubled Briggs family trust put the Detroit Tigers
baseball team on the auction block. Fetzer became part of the
syndicate that bought the club so they wouldn't lose the lucrative
baseball rights. He bought controlling interest in the club in 1960
and bought out his last partner in 1961. Soon, under his leadership,
the Tigers were contenders and missed the pennant by a single game
in 1967, then winning the World Series in 1968. Fetzer
began divesting his financial holdings in 1983. Philanthropically,
he gave some of the money to Western Michigan University for a new
business development center and some to Kalamazoo College for a new
media center. But
most of the money went to the John E. Fetzer Foundation, which he
established in 1962. Called the Fetzer Institute today, it sponsors research into what Fetzer called the connections
between body, mind and spirit - another interest of his from his
youth. In August of 1987, Fetzer moved his foundation and its staff
of nearly 30 to new headquarters overlooking
Dustin Lake on West KL Avenue in Oshtemo Township. The structure is an equilateral
triangle shape representing the three connections he believed in.
His interest in parapsychology and spirituality began at an early
age, and he claimed to have had several spiritual experiences that
influenced his later life. While spending a year bedridden with
complications of influenza, he made this commitment, "If I am permitted to live,
I will devote my life to the spiritual work of the Creator."
For the next 73 years he did. Fetzer
also had a keen interest in family history. He wrote two books, One
Man's Family: A History and Genealogy of the Fetzer Family
(1964) and The Men from Wengen and America's Agony (1971).
John
E. Fetzer died at the age of 89 while vacationing in Hawaii. He and
his wife are buried in Mountain
Home Cemetery in Kalamazoo under an interesting stone that
includes his family history.
Written by Fred Peppel, Kalamazoo Public Library staff, January 2006. Last updated 3 May 2006.
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