In September of 1990, just 13 years after WCFE-TV began broadcasting as our region’s PBS television station, Tom Rogers accepted an offer from WCFE General Manager Gerald Bates to join the staff at One Sesame Street as a Maintenance Technician. A Baltimore native and Air Force veteran, Tom began what was to be a remarkable career at WCFE 57, later rebranded as Mountain Lake PBS.
As right hand to former Director of Engineering Charlie Zarbo, Tom was instrumental in the necessary evolution of Mountain Lake PBS from its early days as an analog television station to a multiplatform public media center. He was at the vanguard of transformative projects ranging from the transition to high-definition digital production and transmission, to the integration of a new remote Joint Master Control center, to the implementation of a highly secure IT network… and when our Lyon Mountain transmission tower collapsed in 2007, Tom and Charlie leapt into action to ensure the survival of our station. In late 2014, Tom took over the leadership of our Engineering and Operations Department.
By the time I arrived here in 2015, Tom had long since established his well-deserved reputation for hard work, dedication, and ingenuity… along with an impressive ability to not only adapt to changing technology, but to master it. As Director over the past six years, Tom met major challenges head-on, including the particular difficulties inherent in having a transmission tower and facility on a remote mountaintop. Through most of that time, Tom was a one-man department as the department dealt with budget cuts.
Nearly four years ago, Tom started working on the latest FCC-mandated spectrum repack, a project that would require new equipment to be installed on our tower and in our mountaintop building, and an intensive effort to coordinate what would be a multi-year project. A year ago, Tom was scheduled to retire. However, he recognized the precarious situation that Mountain Lake PBS was in… as severe weather conditions and damage to our Lyon Mountain facility threatened our ability to stay on the air.
Tom made a personal commitment to Mountain Lake PBS to postpone his retirement, for which we all are enormously grateful. During the ensuing year, Tom managed critical repairs to our transmission facilities and infrastructure, allowing us to continue the FCC-mandated work and meet their deadlines. He personally coordinated and led an incredibly complex set of projects that all had to come together in the correct order to keep us on the air… and he did it all through a pandemic that could not have been foreseen when he agreed to stay on. Because of Tom’s efforts during this very challenging period, Mountain Lake PBS has a much stronger infrastructure and is well-positioned for future success.
At the same time, Tom worked very closely with our new Broadcast Operations Technician, Kurt Lanning, offering the benefit of his own knowledge and experience. Mountain Lake added that position in early 2019, and we were fortunate to find a talented and capable person in Kurt. His education and previous training, coupled with the wide range of project and broadcast engineering experience he has gathered working with Tom, have made Kurt exceptionally well-qualified to lead our technical efforts into the future, and we will be following up with an official public announcement about his acceptance of a promotion to be our new Director of Engineering & Technical Services.
I am thrilled that Tom will continue to support Mountain Lake PBS on a part-time basis as our Engineering Consultant. We are all grateful to his wonderful wife, Katy, and their entire family for all the years of sharing Tom and his talent with us. As he steps down from his full-time leadership role after 30 years of service, we want to pay tribute to Tom Rogers… our friend and colleague, and an architect of what Mountain Lake PBS is and can continue to be.
-Bill McColgan, President & CEO