Obituary of Marlowe Darrell Froke

Marlowe Darrell Froke, of State College, born Nov. 4, 1927, in Vienna, S.D., died Tuesday, Feb. 23, 2010, at Mount Nittany Medical Center.

He is survived by his cherished family: wife Marliene and daughters, Paula Froke of New York City and Dana Plumley of Indiana, Pa., and Dana's husband, Glen. He was preceded in death by his parents, Peter and Amanda Froke, of Vienna, S.D., his foster parents, Ralph and Hazel Olmsted, of Vienna; and two brothers and four sisters.

Froke was a passionate believer in education at all stages and stations of life, and an early and lifelong proponent of television's power to bring education to rural areas and to anyone who couldn't physically attend school in a classroom. As part of that approach, he established WPSX-TV (now WPSU-TV) at Penn State in 1964, and took the lead in the early days of cable and public TV to establish networks of connections among Pennsylvania stations and cable operations that preceded today's Public Broadcasting System. Above all, he was simply an extraordinarily nice and decent person. He did the right thing, always. He made friends with cable industry millionaires and taxi drivers in Denver, waitresses, professors, nurses, business leaders and bus drivers in State College, and children in the neighborhood for whom he was a surrogate grandpa. He never ceased to say "please" and "thank you." And he meant it.

After serving as news director for the Armed Forces Radio and Television Service in Osaka, Japan, from 1946-48, Froke earned a bachelor's degree in journalism from South Dakota State College and worked as news director for KWAT-AM in Watertown, S.D. He earned a master's in journalism from Northwestern University and worked as news director at WGN and WGN-TV in Chicago, then taught journalism and supervised television news courses at the University of Illinois, where he met his future wife.

He joined the Penn State faculty in 1959 as an associate professor of journalism, developing the school's first broadcast journalism curriculum. In 1964, he was named Penn State's director of broadcasting and established WPSX, which within a few years featured such popular programs as TV Quarterbacks and What's In The News, a current events show for children. In 1971, he was named director and general manager of what became the University's Division of Media and Learning Resources, including WPSX and other groups. Working with Pennsylvania's cable television operators, he established in 1976 a 24-hour statewide education and public affairs network of cable systems then called PENNARAMA, now the Pennsylvania Cable Network. He later served as chairman of the strategic planning committee whose report led to the establishment of Penn State's School of Communications, which became the College of Communications.

He retired from Penn State in 1992 with emeritus status and served in a variety of volunteer positions after that. Continuing his deep interest in the significance of cable television as an educational medium, Froke worked with cable industry pioneers both before and after his Penn State retirement to establish the first cable television museum, initially housed at Penn State in a joint effort of the Cable TV Pioneers and the university. The museum later relocated to Denver in a new and greatly expanded facility now called The Cable Center. Froke served as the center and museum's first president in Denver for three years.

As a young boy he loved playing the piano in a small South Dakota Lutheran church. Decades later he returned to that love and filled the house with the sounds of Mahler and Bach and Beethoven. When arthritis prevented him from playing any more, he donated the piano to Penn State Public Broadcasting, which uses it for various musical productions including the annual "Music Theatre Spotlight." He reveled in the wild and beautiful trees and flowers that grace the quiet lane where he lived, and – lest they somehow run out – added seedling after seedling to the century-old trees already towering above the lane, and flower after flower to the wild array of pinks, purples, reds and yellows. He weeded with equal enthusiasm, dedicated to the belief that there must always be room to grow.

Services will be private. In lieu of flowers, memorials may be made to Penn State Public Broadcasting — WPSU-TV and WPSU-FM, 238 Outreach Building, 100 Innovation Blvd., University Park, PA 16802; or to South Dakota State University, Department of Journalism and Communication, 823 Medary Ave., Box 525, Brookings, SD, 57007. Or he would ask that you simply do something nice for someone else today.

Arrangements are under the care of Koch Funeral Home, State College.