![]() MAXWELL: At least there was a plane that went there. I got a job as a field engineer and it was very exciting for me because I hadn’t traveled a great deal and this gave me an opportunity to really see the world and travel all over, and being a rookie, the first jobs they gave me were really, really terrible – Devil’s Lake, North Dakota in the middle of the winter, it was 22 below zero when I got off the plane. LEVINE: I went to work for Milt – Milt Shapp was there at that time, and Bob Beisswenger was there, and Lee Zemnick was there. So I saw an ad in the paper for a field engineer for Jerrold Electronics in Philadelphia and I applied there, was hired and moved to Philadelphia. He wanted me to stay on with him but I never thought it would really grow as big as it did in that part of the world. But then that business started to deteriorate and Alan decided that he needed to expand this cable business. It was small town we only had about a thousand customers, so the big part of his business at that time was really selling televisions and appliances and so on. He had a big TV repair and appliance service center, it was the biggest in that area, so I ran that department and also oversaw the cable operation, as well. LEVINE: I worked for Alan for about five years and actually ran his service center. And then I ran into a fellow by the name of Alan Gerry, his own cable system about ten minutes away, and we got to be friendly and he said, “You know, Nate, I’m expanding my business and why don’t you come work for me?” I said, “Well, I own this little cable system, or a piece of it, down here.” He said, “Well, I’ll buy that and you’ll come work for me.” He was a good salesman, and I did. I worked there and fixed televisions and worked on the cable system and owned a piece of it. At that time cable was starting to come into being. LEVINE: No, we brought in seven channels at that time, and later converted it to a 12-channel system. MAXWELL: What did you bring in? Three channels? LEVINE: That town had about 500 homes, very small. They didn’t know a great deal about it and they asked me if I would join them and we formed a little company called KLM Video and we wired a little town up in Sullivan County called Woodburne, New York. Then I finished school and I went on and got a job in a neighboring community in Sullivan County, and again, the people that I was working with wanted to go into the cable television business. So, we got interested in cable and I got working with Ken and started wiring the town and working there weekends and summers, and got a little interested in cable. The interesting thing was it was also the headquarters of Channel Master Corporation, which was the largest antenna corporation in the country and you couldn’t receive a darn thing on one of their antennas. It was a completely dead town of about 10,000 homes. It was right behind the Shawangunk Mountains and 100 miles from New York. It was an area that didn’t receive any television at all. ![]() It was probably the first or second cable system in New York State. LEVINE: It was around 1960, and a friend of mine by the name of Ken Distel was working with a guy called Dave Weiner in Ellenville, New York, and they were building a cable system. MAXWELL: So when was that that you graduated? ![]() When I graduated cable was just getting started. LEVINE: Well, I started going to electronic school in New York at a school called the RCA Institute of Technology when I got out of high school, and I got interested in electronics. MAXWELL: So what brought you to it, though? MAXWELL: What got you into the cable business, Nate? Levine of Dallas, Texas and somebody I’ve known for damn near 30 years, I guess. ![]() MAXWELL: I’m Paul Maxwell with The Cable Center and this is part of the Gus Hauser Oral History Project for The Cable Center.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |