John Earl Fetzer was a radio and television executive who was best known as the owner of the Detroit Tigers from 1961 through 1983.
15 Facts About John Fetzer
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Radio was still in its infancy, but John 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.
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John Fetzer toured Europe in the late 1920s, studying radio operations, and recalled being repulsed by government monopolies on radio there.
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John Fetzer 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.
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John Fetzer sold advertising and kept track of the technology.
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John Fetzer's own broadcasting empire grew during the war and spread from Kalamazoo to Grand Rapids, Nebraska and Peoria.
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John Fetzer formed the Fetzer Music Corporation and acquired the Muzak franchise for out-state Michigan in 1958.
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John Fetzer purchased KOLN-AM-TV in Lincoln, Nebraska in 1953, and did something unique for a broadcaster at the time.
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John Fetzer later established KGIN in Grand Island as a satellite of KOLN, further expanding both the coverage area and the profitability.
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John Fetzer was active in negotiating broadcast packages for Major League Baseball.
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John Fetzer mostly left the Tigers in the hands of general manager Jim Campbell, though he nominally remained team president until handing the title to Campbell in 1978.
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For residents of the northern Lower Peninsula and eastern Upper Peninsula, John Fetzer's name was synonymous between 1958 and 1978 with ownership of WWTV in Cadillac and its satellite in Sault Sainte Marie, WWUP, as well as ownership of the Tigers.
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Much of John Fetzer's wealth was used to fund the John Fetzer Institute, which was established in 1962 with the following mission:.
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John Fetzer studied various forms of meditation, prayer, philosophy, and positive thinking, and explored other ways of healing.
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John Fetzer died in 1991 in a hospital in Honolulu, Hawaii, where he was being treated for pneumonia.