[ BLOG09: M O R E on
  Frank Kyle Spain ]

Spain's participation as sole owner of Microwave Communications, Inc., Mid-South and partner of Microwave Communications, Inc., Southeast with Metromedia in the first MCI incarnation came before William G. McGowan was named CEO of the Company. Spain's key role followed his own milestone engineering development and construction of a telecommunication microwave system for Tupelo cable and television broadcasting in 1959. The FCC approved privately-held microwave ownership for corporate communications needs for the first time in that year (end 3), allowing Spain to immediately start legal network transmissions in and out of Tupelo. Was Spain first to provide microwave importation of distant television signals for cable distribution? Probably. This author believes Spain's lead over other inventor/engineers will be proved eventually. Milt Underwood of the Discovery Network, who is a former Teleprompter and Westinghouse employee living in Alabama, confirms for this Chotank.com blog article that Spain's designs of Mississippi microwave systems were the very earliest to use highly reliable solid-state circuits. After building the first system to serve Tupelo in 1959, Spain had expanded to other cities before joining with Jack Goeken to become one of MCI's founders in 1963.

"MCI is moving away from its traditional long-distance voice transmission business into the business of packaging, distributing, and owning digitized content. Its alliance with News Corporation was one step in this direction. MCI recently expressed an interest in purchasing rights to direct-broadcast satellite technology."
                                Adam L. Gruen, MCI Corporate Historian, 1995

When William McGowan took over from Goeken around 1968, Spain's involvement with MCI continued. Much later in 1993, WorldCom from its Mississippi headquarters, while the company was still using the LDDS Communications name, bought Metromedia, East Rutherford, N.J., which was Spain's partner in MCI, Southeast. In WorldCom information from the period Metromedia is described as a "full-service long distance provider". Spain owns the Microwave Service Company of Mississippi and Florida in 2005.

In September 2005, Garvey Schubert Barer, the important Washington law firm, represented both Frank Spain and MCI. Destined to lose separate corporate identity after a 2005 merger with Verizon, the MCI brand name has disappeared rapidly. The Washington Post reported, 7 January 2006, that Verizon was changing the name of the "MCI Center", a 20,000 seat sports complex in DC, to the "Verizon Center" by March. The "Comcast Center", another high-profile DC-area sports complex at University of Maryland, College Park, is underwritten by a $25,000,000 grant by its namesake and isn't likely to vaporize the way of the "MCI Center".

"The acquisition of MCI -- formerly known as WorldCom -- marks the final chapter for a company that brought competition to the long-distance phone business. The company was ultimately hobbled by the WorldCom scandal and bankruptcy."
                                Reported by NBC4, Washington, 6 January 2006

Nine years before building a television microwave system for Tupelo, while still part of the RCA/NBC engineering staff that he had joined in 1947, the young Spain designed and launched the first microwave television link between Washington and Philadelphia for NBC Television. Prior to his development of the microwave interconnect, NBC depended solely on an inferior AT&T leased-line coaxial link between Washington and New York that had to be shared with DuMont Television and a fledging ABC Television network. But, it was to Spain's regret that RCA/NBC dependence on the link had been slight. He speculated that Sarnoff considered relations with AT&T too important to challenge its microwave monopoly before the FCC and Congress. The young NBC engineer's experimentation with microwave television program transmission for RCA/NBC is even more astonishing when the reader knows that Spain's work had also included participating in the first television programs from The White House, The Capitol, and other D.C. locations. Spain and the other hard-pressed field engineer staffers of WNBW, Washington, supported television network development while often being stretched thin by network programming demands and maintenance on unreliable field equipment. He recalls frequent requests from New York for more Washington television shows to fill out the New York station's schedule. By November 1947, NBC had a live network of four cities: New York, Boston, Philadelphia, and Washington. The Boston service was provided by a new AT&T microwave system. NBC owned and operated both the New York and Washington stations, but AT&T had been first in 1940 to transmit television quality broadband signals by cable from Philadelphia to New York for broadcast on the RCA/NBC station.

"An official Comcast Cable history, written by Comcast's Daniel Aaron, portrays the Company's start-up in Tupelo as the result of a chance 1963 encounter on a Philadelphia street of Comcast's founder with the broker and original owner of the Tupelo franchise." (See Daniel Aaron and David Long, Take the Measure of the Man: An American Success Story in Chapter 11 "The best-laid plans". Multichannel News retitled it "A Chance Encounter Spawns a Cable Giant" when they offered the chapter to readers of their website in 2001.) Foote continued, "My opinion is that Comcast Cable history should recount the company's relationship with Tupelo electronic media especially with Frank Kyle Spain's business interests." It is undisputed that Ralph J. Roberts founded the American-giant cable operator; an aspiring Disney buyer in 2004 (end 4) ; and the 2000+ broadband internet leader Comcast Cable in Tupelo and then developed additional cable services in Laurel-Hattiesburg and in Meridian (all Mississippi). These cities have significant Spain involvement in their media history.

Foote said, "Suspenders aside, can Comcast Cable otherwise explain why -- not how -- Roberts selected these Mississippi towns for his pioneer cable efforts such a very long-distance from the Darby, Pennsylvania home of his company? At least one Comcast history has acknowledged that Mississippi was gripped by racial conflicts and segregation disagreements in 1961, 1962, and 1963, some spilling over from Alabama where John Kennedy and George Wallace were locked in challenges with national political implications concerning Alabama's racial policies." During the British Foreign Secretary's visit to Tuscaloosa with Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice, The Sunday Telegraph of London reported, 23 October 2005, that one of Rice's "friends was among four pupils killed in the bombing of a black church in Birmingham, Alabama, in 1963." Roberts' Pioneer line of belts and suspenders for men had been marketed around the country from an administrative base hundreds of miles away from where the genius engineering honor graduate of Mississippi State College was building TV stations featuring his own unique engineering designs for program origination and intercity transmission. But of greatest significance to Comcast historians, such as Joseph N. DiStefano of the Philadelphia Inquirer who is author of Comcasted (published April 2005), should be that Spain started a microwave transmission company in Tupelo right where Comcast first located four years later. Highly-reliable microwave transmission would have been critical to Comcast distribution of cable network programming to local cable systems, such as Tupelo, long before the invention of satellite distribution for television programming feeds. Could Roberts' business plan for Comcast have been this far-sighted in 1963?

Years before Spain's own electronic business development, his successful engineering work with the Washington field production team caught the attention of key RCA/NBC executives in New York. They moved Spain to the New York's Radio City, home of RCA. Once in New York, the young engineer was assigned to help spearhead television color development. He worked on designs for the industry's first color-camera studios and field systems and on related development of microwave transmissions systems for both field and the network interconnects. At the telecommunication policy level, he made appearances before the Federal Communications Commission in Washington while a member of RCA's corporate color team . (end 5) He says he was selected for the job on the color team because the FCC engineering people in Washington knew him quite well from his years with WNBW. Spain wanted the government to make RCA's electronic color television system the nation's color standard by getting the FCC to reject a very competitive, but very different, CBS mechanical proposal. Spain and the rest of the color team stressed that the RCA system was compatible with older black and white receivers, allowing owners to view NBC color telecasts in monochrome, while the CBS system was not compatible with existing sets unless owners purchased an expensive converter. Spain recalls that, during the presentation to the Commission, bouncing of a tennis ball showed CBS mechanical system flaws that disrupted accurate color rendering when objects moved rapidly on the screen. Never-the-less, hearings spokesmen seemed to like the Technicolor film look of a high saturation CBS color system although Spain still likes to call it "a front loader washer".

See Frank Stanton introducing the latest CBS Color Television Set prototype in 1950s (the same set that Spain calls "a front loader washer") --
CLICK for Broadcasting & Cable's Anniversary Special Cover featuring Stanton that helps celebrate 75 years of publication in 2006. The photo also appears in Airwaves, Spring/Summer 2007, published by the Library of American Broadcasting Foundation, U-Md, College Park. Donald V. West, president of the Foundation, is a former assistant to CBS President Stanton. Stanton is famous for his leadership of CBS over 25 years after pioneering broadcast ratings research while completing a Ph.D. at Ohio State University in the 1930s (end 6).

After first preferring the CBS mechanical system shown on the Broadcasting & Cable's 2006 Supplement Cover and announcing a decision in favor of a mechanical approach, the Commission was forced to reconsider its action and then to postpone a final decision until July 1953. The government "freeze" on new television technology gave RCA time to make additional engineering improvements, especially in the receiver that had been the biggest problem during the first hearings. The electronic color proposal that Spain helped demonstrate eventually became the Commission's first choice for all US TV, whether cable or broadcast service.

"If you've ever wondered why your cable bill goes up every year, why the channels get worse, and why Comcast's Roberts[es] keep getting richer while shareholders tread water, Joe DiStefano's wonderful book COMCASTed is a must read for you. He takes you through the whole Comcast story from stringing cable to trying to string up Disney's Michael Eisner. An eye-opening tale with details and stories that will fry every couch potato."           Andy Kessler,           former hedge fund manager and           author of Wall Street Meat and Running Money           --quoted in Camino Books, Inc., Philadelphia,           --Book Catalog for September 2006, Page 10. Chotank.com Reminder: This advertising publication quote is intended to promote book sales for Camino. Dr. Foote first adopted COMCASTed for his UNA Senior Seminar class in fall term 2005. He highly recommends the book and made it required reading again in fall 2007 classes. (OCLC, Dublin, Ohio will give a list of libraries loaning the book in your area. CLICK for Libraries) The Comcast attempt to buy Disney dominates the Broadcasting and Cable (B&C) 2004 magazine cover pictured above. Beginning in fall 2003 when Harry A. Jessell was editor, Broadcasting & Cable provided Dr. Foote's UNA students more than $25,000 of publications (at cover price), helping UNA broadcasting / cable / internet classes maintain precise tracking of Comcast and Disney announcements / activities and developing relations between the two media giants. Foote and Jessell arranged the B&C support while seated together with Don and Carroll Virginia West at the Broadcasting & Cable table honoring Sol Taishoff who was the editor-in-chief of the magazine for 51 years. Don West followed Taishoff as editor-in-chief. During the 2003 broadcasting awards ceremony in New York in the Grand Hyatt, B&C announced gift of the Donald V. West Archive, containing 200,000 photos, to University of Maryland Library, College Park. Les Moonves, president of CBS, showed his support of West by joining a vigorous applause to the announcement. Three years later West became president of the Library of American Broadcasting Foundation at Maryland. Jessell is member of the 2007-08 Peabody Awards Board, Grady College, University of Georgia. The 25 free, year-round subscriptions for UNA students, sent by Airborne Priority for first year, ended 1 January 2008. (See Endnote 7 for more on Moonves and Roberts.)