KELLER: This is the oral history of
Joseph S. and
Irene Gans. They are the owners and participants and primary owners, in fact the owners of Gans Multimedia, a multiple system
operator headquartered in
Hazleton, Pennsylvania. The date is August 3,
2001; the place is
Gettysburg at the annual meeting of the
Pennsylvania Cable and Telecommunications
Association's
Heritage Weekend. Joe is a cable pioneer in both the uppercase "P" and the lowercase. He's both recognized as a
Pioneer and actually a very early pioneer of the cable television industry. Joe, let's start out by giving a brief history of your background prior to getting into cable television. Before we get into this, I know you did an extensive interview with Strat
Smith in October of
1989, and I would recommend that anyone viewing this history also review that oral history for a lot of the details that we may not cover today. So, please just give us a capsule of your history.
JOE GANS: Well, what made me into this, as a little kid I enjoyed the so-called crystal radios. In fact, from my mother's house I had a wire hanging all the way to the backyard, because the longer it was the easier it was to get radio signals, and me, and believe it or not,
Brian Lockman's, I guess it was his uncle, we used to sit there and we had a set of earphones and we'd play with the crystal sets. So, then when I was inducted into the service, in the
Army, I guess that was
1944 and I was fortunate enough that I got into the
Army Signal Corps. It actually was the Army
Signal Division of the
94th Division, and some of the things that happened there, which I don't know how you'd relate it to the cable system, but we used to send code back and forth and we never knew what we were sending because everything was coded, and anyhow
...
KELLER: But you knew about long distance transmission and reception.
JOE GANS:
Right. Another interesting thing though, is when we were going into
Czechoslovakia -- I was there at the end of the war, not the beginning -- and the guys in our division found out that we'd put the antennas up on top of the mountain and we'd have the trucks there and no sooner we turned the darn transmitters on the 88ths were shooting and blowing us up. How this relates to cable I don't know -- what we did then was we put the towers on top of the mountain but we put the trucks down on the bottom of the hill. Then if they shoot it we didn't care.
(LAUGHTER)
More:
http://cablecenter.org/barco-library-hauser-oral-history/item/gans-joseph-and-irene
.html
- published: 12 Feb 2013
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