By Roger McKinney

rmckinney@joplinglobe.com

Anyone who watches anything on cable television has Tom Whitehead to thank.

Clay T. “Tom” Whitehead graduated from Columbus (Kan.) High School in 1956. It was then called Cherokee County Community High School. He died of prostate cancer in July at age 69. He was living in McLean, Va., at the time of his death.

Whitehead, during the administration of President Richard Nixon, became the country’s first telecommunications policy adviser, according to his obituary in The Washington Post and other national papers.

As director of the White House Office of Telecommunications Policy from 1970-74, Whitehead set the stage for what was known as Open Skies, the policy that led to the creation of the domestic satellite system that brought cable television and lower-cost long-distance phone service into American homes.

His efforts allowed the cable television industry to get its own programming channels to a national audience using satellites. Before then, cable companies were required to lease land lines from monopoly provider AT&T.

He was sometimes a critic of broadcast television networks, whose news programs he said in one noted speech reflected a liberal bias, calling them purveyors of “elitist gossip” and “ideological plugola.” He later apologized for those comments before a Senate committee.

His sister, Betsy Conerly, said by phone from her home in Alpharetta, Ga., that rather than being a political partisan, her brother was a proponent of free markets and competition.

“To us, he was just Tommy,” Conerly said. She said he kept business and family life separate.

“They never got the Kansas out of him, thank goodness,” Conerly said.

After his time in the Nixon administration, Whitehead became president of Hughes Communications, a satellite manufacturing subsidiary of Hughes Aircraft Co. While there, he developed the Galaxy program of commercial communications satellites. He went on to establish SES Astra, a satellite television service in Europe in the 1980s. Its programming reaches more than 65 million homes and is estimated to be worth more than $1 billion.

‘He was kind of a geek’

Conerly, 61, said their parents, Clay B. and Helen Whitehead, moved with her, her brother and her sisters, Susan Whitehead and Nancy Whitehead, to Columbus in 1951. She said before that, they had lived in Fredonia and for a brief time in Parsons. She said their mother died in 1965 and their father died in 1986. Both are buried in Columbus.

She said her brother was interested in amateur radio. He had attached his radio antenna to a telephone pole outside their house, which she said she enjoyed climbing as a child.