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News Release

Last modified: Tuesday, September 23, 2008

Four IU alumni being inducted into the Indiana Broadcast Pioneers Hall of Fame

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Sept. 23, 2008

BLOOMINGTON, Ind. -- Four Indiana University alumni will be among nine people honored Oct. 2 by the Indiana Broadcasters Association's Richard M. Fairbanks Indiana Broadcast Pioneers Hall of Fame.

The IU alumni being inducted are Arthur Angotti Jr., president and chief executive officer of Artistic Media Partners; Hal Fryar, television entertainer best known as "Harlow Hickenlooper;" Phil Jones, a reporter for CBS News for more than three decades; and Sam Simmermaker, a broadcaster already a member of Indiana Sportswriters and Sportscasters Hall of Fame and the Indiana Basketball Hall of Fame.

Kenneth A. Beckley, former president and CEO of the IU Alumni Association and Indiana television journalist, will be installed as the new president of Broadcast Pioneers.

They will join other inductees Chuck Marlowe, someone else familiar to IU fans as the play-by-play man for the Hoosiers and host of the Bob Knight Show for 29 years; Bill and Gloria Gaither, winners of eight Grammy Awards and music and television producers; and Jerry Arnold, director of engineering at Midwest Radio in Terre Haute.

The awards will be presented at a dinner at the Fountains Banquet and Conference Center, 502 E. Carmel Dr., in Carmel, Ind.

"We're very pleased that these individuals are being honored for their outstanding professional careers in broadcasting. The fact that the majority studied at Indiana University, including coursework in the Department of Telecommunications, is a testament to the legacy of our program and, more generally, to IU," said Walter Gantz, the department's chair. "We continue to prepare students for careers in all aspects of media. The Hall of Fame sets the standard to which our students aspire."

"The quality of any university is ultimately assessed in large part by the quality of its graduates," added Dan Smith, dean of the Kelley School of Business. "Mr. Angotti has consistently demonstrated the sense of bold vision that we seek to instill in our students. He has long been a role model for those who come to us with interests in entrepreneurship and dreams of starting their own companies. Mr. Angotti has certainly brought great honor to the Kelley School and to IU."

Here's more about the IU alumni being honored:

• Angotti earned a bachelor's degree in 1966 and a master of business administration degree in 1970, both from IU's Kelley School of Business. He was president and CEO of Artistic Media Partners, a radio broadcast company he founded in Indianapolis in 1988. The company currently has 11 radio stations in Bloomington, Lafayette and South Bend, which serve as the flagship stations for IU, Purdue and Notre Dame sports networks. He also founded and was president of Heritage Management Inc. and Indianapolis Cablevision Co., the Indianapolis Arrows, Broadcast Management and five venture capital firms.
• Beckley, a Lynnville, Ind., native, earned a bachelor's degree in telecommunications from IU in 1962. He spent 14 years as a television journalist, including nine years as anchor at WRTV in Indianapolis. In 1977, he became the first director of university relations at Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis. He later had a career at H.H. Gregg Appliances & Electronics, retiring as executive vice president of that company in December 2001. He came out of retirement in 2002 to head the IUAA, an organization he'd served as a volunteer for more than 30 years. For his accomplishments he has been named Indiana Advertising Person of the Year and received the American Advertising Federation's Silver Medal Award. He retired from IU in 2007.
• Fryar, a 1950 graduate with a bachelor's degree in speech, began his broadcasting career as an announcer, emcee and writer as a teenager in Indianapolis in the mid 1940s. By the 1960s, he had developed his entertainment talents as host of programs geared to young audiences in radio and TV in Ohio. He is best known in Central Indiana for his 12-year run as a stumbling, fumbling and loveable character known as Harlow Hickenlooper. As Hickenlooper, he was host of the "Three Stooges Show," which led to his appearance in the comedians' 1965 movie, The Outlaws is Coming. He still makes public appearances for a whole new generation of young viewers.
• Jones, a Fairmont, Ind., native, was a student of beloved IU professor of journalism and telecommunications Dick Yoakam and chosen with then graduate student Dick Enberg to be color commentator on a new radio sports network being launched in the late 1950s. Jones left IU in 1960 to start a television news career that included stops in Terre Haute and Minneapolis before joining CBS News. While at CBS, he reported from the Vietnam battlefields and on presidential campaigns, Watergate, President Nixon's resignation, former Washington, D.C., Mayor Marion Barry's legal problems and the impeachment and trial of President Clinton. He was considered the dean of broadcast correspondents reporting on Congress from 1977 to 1989 and was the White House correspondent in 1974-77.
• Simmermaker, who also received a bachelor's degree in telecommunications from IU, in 1954, has more than 50 years of broadcast experience -- 47 of them with Columbus, Ind., station WCSI, where he has been the news and sports director and a play-by-play announcer. He twice has been honored as the National Sportscasters and Sportswriters Association Sportscaster of the Year and is a member of both the Indiana Sportswriters and Sportscasters Hall of Fame and the Indiana Basketball Hall of Fame.

More information about the Fairbanks Indiana Broadcast Pioneers Hall of Fame is available online at https://www.indianabroadcastpioneers.com/.

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