Argus-Leader from Sioux Falls, South Dakota • Page 61

Argus Leader, Sioux Fails, South Dakota, Sunday, April 20 Off HOW TO REACH US If you have a question or news tip concerning the features section, call Life editor Jon Walker at 331-2206 or Venture editor Mike Bennett at 3312333. Section Travel 4,5 Books 6 Anniversaries 9 'I don't hunt or fish or play golf or tennis. I just work' Chuck Poppen Pppeiro dedfcatedl to COTW growth TERRY WOSTER a i i iiu nun i a By BOB KEYES Argus Leader Staff Chuck Poppen knows what he's up to. A 44-year-old father of four, he waves off questions about free time. By most accounts, his job is what he does.

He counts his time away from work as general manager of KTTW-TV in Sioux Falls as family time. But he doesn't dare document the hours he spends at the office each week. It's routine to find him at work until 8 or 9 at night or on weekends. When asked what he does away from work, Poppen answers quickly and directly. "I'm dedicated to this project.

I don't hunt or fish or play golf or tennis. I just work. If I take time off, I like to spend it with my family." In Chuck Poppen, people find the genuine article of a successful risk-taker. He started his TV station when it was something of a joke, then rode a crest of good timing, financial backing and his own dogged approach to life to make it work. People also find in him a man of contrasts and balances: a dreamer who survived long years when his dream was a black hole for investors, a technician whose top trait in business is his zeal to succeed, a man whose life is tied up in entertainment but finds little time for himself, a big-picture guy who changes his own light bulbs.

"He's a cross between Walt Disney and Pecos Bill," says JoAnn Gieseke, who joined the station in 1988 and is Poppen's most senior employee in terms of service time. "One day he'll be in a suit and a tie doing business, on the phone to New York or arranging programming. The next day he'll be on the tower, repairing a piece of equipment" And now he's basking in success not by his own choosing, but by virtue of people noticing that the funny little experiment called the Fox television network, and local affiliates such as Poppen's KTTW, are now 10 years old. Physically, Poppen doesn't fit the image of a high-powered TV executive. He's of average height and thin, with medium-length dark hair.

Even when he dresses up, he looks more like a technician than a power player. If he passed you on the street you wouldn't notice him if you didn't already know him. Lew Sherman Argus Leader Poppen started selling commercials to people who before wouldn't tune to his station, let alone buy advertising on it. Chuck Poppen, founder and general manager of KTTW-TV, put a lot of hours into his station. After Fox landed NFL games, figures KTTW will be worth at least $15 million.

Poppen was a long shot. Elmen says his friends laughed at him for investing so much in Poppen, who was then an unproven 34-year-old TV junkie with a dream. But the Elmens' support didn't waver. Poppen's zeal for the project if not his business acumen convinced them their investment was sound. "Chuck is a young man, he's ambitious.

He's trying to prove something. He needs help in certain areas finances for example," Bob Elmen says. "But he's doing a good job." His family is wife Kimberly and four sons, all between the ages of 11 and 18. They live in Dell Rapids. Poppen was reared on a farm near Wahpeton, N.D.

He played PoppenSee 2G Poppen arrived in broadcasting through the technical end of the business. His background was in cable television. Specifically, he made a name for himself building rural cable systems around Sioux Falls. But more than that, he was a fan. He loved shows like "Batman" and "Star Trek." Across the Midwest he kept hearing about new independent TV stations.

He wondered why there wasn't one in Sioux Falls. Then he read in a trade journal that Rupert Murdoch was planning to launch a new network to compete with ABC, CBS and NBC. This was his chance. "You saw more and more evidence that there was an opportunity there," Poppen says. "I just felt I could put a station on the air for not much money." Not much of his own, anyway.

Communications. The Elmen brothers own 80 percent of the company. Twenty-one other stockholders, including Poppen, own the rest "He came into my office and told me what a great opportunity he had to get a license, to make a TV station. It was a terrible risk," recalls Bob Elmen. "We -hitched our star to an early situation that had some potential, but it needed a lot of work.

And the work goes on." Elmen says he and his brother poured $5 million to $10 million into the station during the licensing process and the early years of its on-air operation. "We had a couple years of H-E-double-L," Elmen says. "I wore my back pants pocket out taking my billfold out so many times." With the investment starting to pay off, Elmen now knows he'll make back all of his money and then some. Within five years, he Profile Name: Chuck Poppen. Job: General manager, KTTW-TV.

Company name: Independent Communications Inc. Age: 44. Family: Wife, Kimberly; four boys age 11 to 18. He put a business plan together and went door to door to round up investors. One of the doors he knocked on was that of Bob and Jim Elmen, of rental business fame.

The Elmens knew little about TV and less about Rupert Murdoch. But they knew a business opportunity when they saw it And as they got to know Poppen, they learned to like him, too. More important they trusted him enough to invest in his TV venture, which soon was incorporated as Independent Ranchers try to straddle two worlds South Dakota has given us much to dislike since the first ice storms covered roads and roofs last fall. Blizzards, floods, torrential rains, record lows and all-but-unclockable winds have visited us in the past six months. Each has been an awesome reminder of how puny our human efforts can be when we try to control, when we even try to coexist with, nature.

For all that, though, the storms and their accompanying effects have been inspiring reminders of how magnificent we humans can be when we have no other choice. They've also, in some cases, driven us back to the basics, reminding us how we all survived before heat pumps and four-lane highways and electric lights. A favorite image of the most recent blizzard, the storm that swept the state the first week of this month: A cowboy, wide-brimmed hat tied tightly to his head with twine like Charlton Heston in the movie "Will Penny," urges his saddle horse through chest-deep snow drifts from a pasture somewhere out on West River prairie toward the warm lights of a small barn more than a mile distant The rider, a wiry figure inside the sheepskin overcoat, squints into the wind-driven snow, looking for a place to cross the barbed-wire fence that sticks up from the drifts and marks the edge of the range. A rough lariat is tied to a weathered, oversized sled that carries a newborn calf, wrapped tightly with a wool blanket and bleating softly. It's an image from South Dakota's vast range almost a century ago, but it's an image from last week, too.

It's how Larry Gabriel of Cottonwood and hundreds of other ranchers tried to save calves born during the untimely blizzard two weeks agi. More ranchers than most city folks would imagine still do their calving on the open prairie, in the huge pastures that exist in places like Haakon County. Many, of course, have barns and corrals close to the home place where they drive the herd along about calving time. Others don't have that minimal luxury. Calving is done on the spot and on the range.

It's a tough business physically and an important one financially. Every calf that drops and doesn't struggle to its feet and find its mother is money off the spread's bottom line. This spring, bottom lines have eroded like so many stream banks. "We aren't losing half of the calves by any means, but we're losing too many, that's for sure," Gabriel said during a post-blizzard telephone conversation as he gulped down a meal, warmed himself and prepared to mount up and head back to the pasture to check the herd. Gabriel comes to Pierre every January.

He's a legislator, Republican leader in the House, in fact That makes him big heat in the Capitol sometimes. He was a key player in telecommunications bills last session as the state tried to position itself to join the information superhighway of the 21st century. Back home, though, the superhighway is a horse track through snow, and the majority leader is simply one more cowboy trying to haul a wet weak calf home on a saddle horse so he can wipe its curly hide dry with burlap sacks and get it ready to go back and find its mother. Twenty years ago, John Milton wrote of South Dakota as a place where people stand with one foot in the pioneer past the other in the space age. When nature rages, any cowboy can tell you that's a tough place to stand.

Terry Woster Is an Argus Leader staff writer. Write to him at Box 1011, Pierre 57501. Stewart thrives on class and mass center code-named "AskMartha." doesn't exist yet but then, just a few years ago, neither did a $200 million-a-year publishing, television and retailing empire now known as Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia. What started 15 years with her breakthrough book, "Entertaining," is now a cultural phenomenon. It's a cottage industry in roughly the same sense that Stewart's $3 million Gordon Bunshaft-designed East Hampton estate her second home in that exclusive Long Island enclave is a cottage.

When Stewart isn't busy being all about inclusiveness, she's all about synergy. Wall Street is growing old waiting for her former employer. Time Warner, to exploit the supposed synergies among magazines, cartoons, cable TV, books and movies that were the point of the 1989 megamerger that created it Meantime, Stewart has used frequent TV and personal appearances to help StewartSee 2G By THOMAS S. MULLIGAN Los Angeles Times NEW YORK In concept it's a hyperactive calendar. It not only reminds you when the car-insurance bill is due, but if you dent a fender, it tells you the deductible.

It alerts you to birthdays and doctor's appointments. It does meal planning and airs the news, the soaps, whatever else you're half-watching between tasks. What's more, it isn't bulky and hard to use like a typical home computer. Its flat screen shares space with the magnets and crayon drawings on your refrigerator. And from whose brow does this fount of Jetsonian convenience spring? Microsoft's newly domesticated Bill Gates, perhaps? No, silly, Martha Stewart the Con-tessa of Cuisine, the Doyenne of Decor, the Nabob of Nesting.

Let's call the next phase Martha Vision 2000: The Wiring of the American Woman. Of course, Stewart, who is all Profile Name: Martha Stewart Age: 55 Earty years: Second of six children of a middle-class family in suburban New Jersey, worked her way through exclusive Barnard College by modeling. She posed in the "Us Tareyton Smokers Would Rather Fight Than Switch" ad campaign. Family: Married Yale law student and future publishing executive Andy Stewart in 1 961 her sophomore year in college. Their daughter, Alexis, was bom shortly after she graduated.

Getting started: Martha Stewart became a successful stockbroker, but she left Wall Street for the home front in the early 1 970s. Ever industrious, she devoured cookbooks and launched her first business, as a caterer. about inclusiveness, would never restrict her idea to one gender. She always says "homemaker," never "housewife." Her electronic kitchen command Los Angeles Times Martha Stewart has built an empire as an arbiter of American taste. j22iTuesday Fun with crafts: Children are invited to join an After School Craft Class from p.m.

at Kenny Anderson Community Center. Sign up at the center or call 367-6103. (20Today For the first time: Folk rocker Steve Forbert is looking forward to his first performance here. He'll follow Scotty Spenner in a gig starting at 7:45 p.m. today at Sioux Falls Brewing Co.

Tickets are $15. Call 332-4847. C21) MondaY A spring walk: Let's say the sun comes out and it warms up a lot. Celebrate by walking through a park. Or, check whether there are some fuzzy, new arrivals at the Great Plains Zoo.

The zoo at 805 S. Kiwanis is open 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. daily. Call 367-7003.

It's circus time: I The El Riad Shrine Circus opens a four-day run at 7 p.m. in the Arena. Other dates: 12:30 and 7 p.m. Thursday; 12:30 and 7 p.m. Friday; and 10 a.m., I 2:30 and 8 p.m.

Saturday. Call 336-1117. Find (24)Thursday out See a play: O'Gorman 111 rant vl what's C26 Saturday It's Finally here: The acclaimed movie "Secrets Lies" opens with showings at 2 p.m. and 7:30 p.m. Saturday and Sunday at August ana's Gilbert happening C270 Sunday Outlaws at Huset's: The sprint-racing season gets off to a hot start when the biggest names in the business visit Huset's Speedway at 5 p.m.

April 27 near Brandon. Tickets are $25 at the gate for the World of Outlaws show. Call 582-3819. (25Friday A festive weekend: The Festival of Choirs includes performances today and Saturday. Call 367-7957.

Also, the Phillips Avenue Music Festival is planned downtown from 6 p.m. to 1:30 a.m. Saturday. There'll be a big variety of first-class music and food. Call 335-5555.

High School students perform "Crazy ForYouat 7 p.m. in the school auditorium. Call 336-3644. Across town, Washington High hosts a performance of "Rumors at 7:30 p.m. Call 367-7969.

Both schools plan shows at the same times Friday and Saturday. 605-331-2262 Call our hot line 24 hours a day for entertainment news in Sioux Falls Science Center. It's the final film in the Sioux Falls Film Society series. Admission is $5.