Bringing Bert and Ernie to Montanans

The Man Who Invented MontanaPBS

By Marjorie Smith, 7-25-06

The recent retirement of Jack Hyyppa, founding general manager of KUSM, Montana’s first PBS station, has brought the history of public television in Montana back to my mind. The twisted tale of how Montana finally got a public television station is tangled up in politics, some suspected financial skullduggery, virulent cross-state rivalries and generous dollops of good luck. Jack Hyyppa has been square in the middle of it the whole time, fighting on the side of the good guys. Or as William Marcus, general manager of KUFM, the west-of-the-Continental-Divide half of MontanaPBS, said at the retirement roast held for Hyyppa earlier this month, Jack Hyyppa pretty much single-handedly ensured that Montana would have a single PBS entity. “There was this man at U of M who thought Missoula should align itself with KSPN, the PBS station in Spokane,” Marcus said. “But Jack Hyyppa went to the regents (of the university system) and convinced them that wasn’t how it should be.”

If you know Jack Hyyppa, it’s easy to imagine him as a match for the entire Board of Regents. He’s a large, youthful-looking man with a placid manner that belies his intense creative bent but does hint at a certain stubbornness. I worked for Jack for several years, producing the monthly Program Guide publication, and I know whereof I speak. If Jack had a strong opinion about something, that was the way it would be. Fortunately for all of us, Jack Hyyppa had a strong opinion about public television and how it should be organized in his home state.

The fact that my home state had no public television station was brought home vividly to me many years ago when my two-year-old daughter and I spent a few weeks with my parents at their home on the edge of Bozeman. Kimi was accustomed to watching “Sesame Street” every day but in Bozeman, my mother had to call her friends who lived within the city limits and had cable TV in order for the kid to get her Bert-and-Ernie fix on KUED, the Salt Lake City channel.

The punch line is that for the first 22 months of Kim’s life, we lived on the remote island of Saipan, a United Nations Trust Territory in the far western Pacific. We had “Sesame Street” over the air in Saipan – but only on cable from Salt Lake City in my highly educated hometown of Bozeman. Sheesh!

I wasn’t the only one looking for a “Sesame Street” fix for my little kid. A few years later, a childhood acquaintance (our fathers had taught in the same department at MSU), Nancy Flikkema, was living on a farm just a few miles west of Bozeman. Like my parents two miles south of Main Street, the Flikkemas were outside the then-range of the cable company. But Nancy wasn’t just passing through, like I had been when my daughter was a toddler. Once Nancy Flikkkema hooked up with Jack Hyyppa, Montana broadcast history was made. In October of 1984, KUSM went on the air, broadcasting out of studios in MSU’s visual communications building with a tower atop Hedges Hall dormitory. The signal reached only a limited radius stretching out from campus just a few miles – but at last Ernie and Bert were on the air in Montana.

Hyyppa explains that back in 1975 the Montana Legislature had authorized an educational television system, “but the people involved screwed it up so much that it died.” There were suspicious connections between a state official and the man charged with setting the ETV system up, and more suspicious relationships between that guy and a questionable real estate deal. “The stench soured Montanans on public broadcasting for ten years,” Hyyppa says.

Jack Hyyppa never set out to make Montana broadcasting history. In an interview during his last week at KUSM, Hyyppa told me, “My career path presented itself to me – I really didn’t plan it this way.” In fact, his original plan had been to attend the University of Montana on a track scholarship, but a knee problems spoiled that option. So the Whitehall native, Butte High School graduate abandoned the Grizzlies and came to MSU to enroll in commercial art.

Hyyppa first got involved in television production as an undergraduate when he was asked to design some logos for projects at the film center which had been set up so students majoring in film and television could practice their skills. (I still remember my late father – an MSU administrator and a passionate lifelong Bobcat partisan – chortling when the Legislature authorized the so-called “cow college” to create that department, despite the protests of the university in Missoula, that its journalism school and theater and dance departments made it the natural home for any film programs in the state). As he designed art for the student film projects, Hyyppa became fascinated with film as a medium and ended up getting a bachelors degree in 1969 with majors both in commercial art and in film and television. He went off to Northern Illinois University for a master’s degree and worked in the Midwest for a few years.

“I didn’t dream it was possible to find a job in Montana,” Hyyppa says. “But I called the national association of educational broadcasters, and they had just gotten a letter from MSU looking for someone to teach broadcast production. Until then, I hadn’t thought of teaching.” Since his boss would be his old mentor, Fred Gerber, one of the founders of the film and television program at MSU, Hyyppa and his wife, Linda, moved to Bozeman where he ended up managing the film center. The studios were in tiny McCall Hall while Hyyppa’s office was in a doublewide trailer.

Gradually the film center evolved into a television broadcast center, and Hyyppa’s responsibilities grew. Eventually Montana State University obtained a license for a broadcast station. While Nancy Flikkema organized a powerful “Friends of Montana Public Television” organization outside the university, Hyyppa planned a station that would be unique in the entire public broadcasting system for the degree to which it depended upon student help. “It took us three years to get our financial bases set up but the TCI Company put us on cable which gave us more viewers and more contributors and finally we were big enough to go to the Corporation for Public Broadcasting and apply to join.

“It never would have been possible without Fred Esplin who ran KUED in Salt Lake,” Hyyppa said. “He mentored me all the way through. They let us use all their programming and during pledge drives, they sent us the Montana contributions. And when it was time for us to cut the ties, KUED gave us its blessing.”
Meanwhile, the director of media services at the University of Montana had been watching. Dave Wilson decided to develop a station in Missoula by hooking up with KSPN in Spokane the way KUSM had partnered with Salt Lake. And that is where the famous Hyyppa stubbornness changed the course of Montana broadcasting.

“I just explained to the Regents that Montana would be much better off with a single public television entity,” he says. I think back to the earliest days of KUSM when I had first returned to live in Bozeman, and of all the public discussion programs on the schedule about Utah politics. If Dave Wilson had had his way, folks west of the divide would be up to speed on Washington state politics, but Montana issues would forever be an afterthought.

“The regents decided with us,” Hyyppa says simply. “And now we have an excellent working relationship. We each – KUSM at Bozeman and KUFM at Missoula – have our strong points. It was a shotgun wedding, but fortunately, William Marcus had replaced Dave Wilson and our relations have always been collegial and never nasty.”
At Hyyppa’s retirement party, Marcus recalled that after the “wedding,” Hyyppa had become his mentor. “My own background was mostly in radio,” he said.
Hyyppa says both stations’ staffs are always quick to congratulate each other on jobs well done. He cites their joint work on Montana election coverage as the prime example that the regents knew what they were doing when they decreed that the two rival universities would work together on this public broadcasting venture.
“I’m proud of our working relationship,” Hyyppa says. “It’s an example of what could and should be, between the universities.”

The cooperative relationship has paid off recently as MontanaPBS faced up to the congressionally mandated conversion to digital television. At first glance, the costs of the projected conversion looked prohibitive, as though they could completely stifle the nation’s youngest PBS system. But with the statewide scope of the system, financial help has come from many sources. “When the donor of the largest gift to help us cope with the digital conversion made the final commitment,” Hyyppa says, “he found himself meeting not just with two station managers but with both university presidents. I think that was an unexpected honor for the donor.”
And so the mandated digital conversion will happen on schedule and at the same time, MontanaPBS is going out over the air not just to Bozeman and Missoula but in Butte, Helena and Billings. The biggest hangups have been in Kalispell and Great Falls where there was no chance to set up analog frequencies before the digital conversion deadline. Viewers in those regions will be dependent upon cable for a little longer.

Hyyppa says, “One very gratifying thing is what’s happened to the Montana revenue stream for public television. While the national trend is for less in donations, ours keep going up. It’s fantastic.”

Maybe that’s because everyone likes to back a winner – and that appears to be what MontanaPBS is.

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