John Earl Fetzer (March 25, 1901 – February 20, 1991) was a radio and television executive who was best known as the owner of the Detroit Tigers from 1961 through 1983. Under his ownership, the 1968 Tigers won the World Series. Biography Born in 1901 in Decatur, Indiana, Fetzer moved with his mother to Lafayette, Indiana, after his father died when Fetzer was 2 years old. There, his brother-in-law, a telegraph operator for the Wabash Railroad, introduced young John to the early workings of wireless communication. Via telegraph reports, they would track the baseball games of the Detroit Tigers, which he would later own. Radio was still in its infancy, but Fetzer took it seriously and built his first transmitter-receiver in 1917 and began communicating from his home in Indiana with a man in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. In 1922, he came to Michigan and enrolled at Emmanuel Missionary College, now known as Andrews University, in Berrien Springs, and began operating an experimental radio station for the school. The station became so popular that in 1923, it sought and received a full license under the calls KFGZ, operating it as a noncommercial full-service station for the St. Joseph Valley. The calls became WEMC in 1925. While at EMC, he met Rhea Yeager. They would stay married until his death, 65 years later. Fetzer toured Europe in the late 1920s, studying radio operations, and recalled being repulsed by government monopolies on radio there. He returned to the United States at the beginnings of the Great Depression and would remain a staunch advocate of a "hands off" policy by the government in the communications industry. By then, despite WEMC's popularity, Emmanuel Missionary College was running out of money to operate its radio station. Unwilling to either operate commercially or solicit donations from listeners, college officials offered to sell it to Fetzer. He bought it for $2,500. As in his student days, he ran the station's operations himself, serving as technician, engineer, announcer and salesman. In 1931, he moved the station to Kalamazoo because of his wife's area ties. Kalamazoo was also the last major city in Michigan without its own radio station. Later that year, the station signed on under new calls, WKZO, from studios in the Burdick Hotel. Mr. and Mrs. Fetzer worked side by side. She served as program director and secretary. He sold advertising and kept track of the technology. He