Gary Fries
CLASS OF 1994 During a career that has spanned nearly 55 years, Gary R. Fries spent his entire professional life on the front lines of Radio as a salesperson, sales manager, general manager, group head, and network president, with first-hand sales experience in markets from Grand Island to New York City. He held numerous executive […]
Tom Brokaw
CLASS OF 1994 Tom Brokaw, while anchor and managing editor of the NBC Nightly News, was equally at ease covering the convulsive changes in world capitals and monitoring the heartbeat of America in small town and inner cities of the United States for nearly a half-century. His beginnings in the business took place in the […]
Mel Sauer
CLASS OF 1995 Mel Sauer enjoyed well over thirty years in radio. Despite being blind since the age of six months, he worked in jobs from utility man to general manager. A native of Bayard, he attended the School for the Blind in Nebraska City from 1947 to 1956 then transferred back to Bayard where […]
Jack Payne
CLASS OF 1995 Jack Payne’s career in broadcasting spans 46 years and includes association with six radio stations and one television station. He is best known in Nebraska for his 17 years at WOW and WOW-TV and his 22 years at KFAB. Love of sports was in Payne’s blood from his youth in his native […]
Fred Seaton
CLASS OF 1996 Fred Seaton’s media career started at the age of six in the composing room of his father’s Manhattan, Kansas newspaper. All through his public school years, he worked on the paper, doing every job in the plant. He got into radio at Kansas State College of Agriculture & Applied Science (now Kansas State), broadcasting […]
John Mitchell
CLASS OF 1996 An Omaha attorney with roots in Kearney, John Mitchell’s radio empire not only endured the tumultuous 1990s but continued to flourish. Mitchell got an early start in radio while in college in the 1940s as a newsreader and sportscaster at KGFW Kearney. After getting his J.D. degree with honors from Georgetown Law […]
Jack McBride
CLASS OF 1997 Jack McBride guided the growth and development of Nebraska educational television. For 43 years, he was a pioneer in television, cable, satellite and interactive computer technologies and also helped other states and countries launch educational broadcasts. He retired in 1996. It began with the donation of KUON to the University of Nebraska. […]
George Haskel
CLASS OF 1997 George Haskell spent his entire career in Nebraska broadcasting from age 16 until retirement in 1980. A Lincoln native, Haskell was a piano player in local and traveling dance orchestras during the Depression, earning $1 a day. In 1937 he took a part-time job in radio as a mail boy at KFOR […]
Ray Lockhart
CLASS OF 1998 Born in North Platte, Ray Lockhart started his broadcast career in his hometown at KNOP-TV in 1959. In 1967, Ray was named General Manager of KOGA AM in Ogallala. Two years later he bought into the company, Ogallala Broadcasting Company, Inc. By 1974, Ray purchased control of KOGA. Lockhart then slowly but […]
Mal Hansen
CLASS OF 1998 Mal Hansen, a native Iowan, graduated from high school in Davenport. While attending the University of Iowa in the late 1930s, Mal was assistant farm editor at WHO Radio in Des Moines. In 1943, prior to a three-year stint in the U.S. Navy, he was farm editor at KSO/KRNT Des Moines. Returning […]