A tractor-pulling contest in Rockwell, Iowa. “The Big Joe Polka Show.” A veterinarian discussing preserve flies off cows. A rerun of a 1982 episode of “Hee Haw.”
Those have been among the latest choices on RFD-TV, a 24-hour channel created by Patrick Gottsch, a satellite-dish installer who had the concept to start out a community aimed on the farmers and ranchers who have been his clients.
Its programing will not be the stuff of must-see tv in city and suburban America. But RFD-TV, which additionally carries gavel-to-gavel protection of the Future Farmers of America conference, occupies an everlasting, if slim, area of interest on the tv spectrum.
Mr. Gottsch, whose spinoff properties embody the Cowboy Channel, the Cowgirl Channel and Rural Radio, Channel 147 on SiriusXM, died on May 18 in Fort Worth. He was 70.
His demise, at a lodge within the metropolis’s historic Stockyards district, was sudden. His daughters Raquel Gottsch Koehler and Gatsby Gottsch Solheim mentioned that the household was awaiting a medical expert’s report back to study the trigger, however that it was in all probability associated to his historical past of diabetes.
Mr. Gottsch, who grew up on a farm in Nebraska, fought tenaciously to show that TV programming about agriculture, horses, the agricultural life-style and conventional nation music could possibly be viable — particularly in his firm’s early years, when, he favored to recall, traders and media executives advised him that it was a “silly thought” or that “farmers don’t watch TV.”
“Patrick at all times got here again to this chorus: I don’t assume these media executives look out their airplane home windows after they’re flying from coast to coast,” Mrs. Solheim mentioned in an interview. “He actually was enthusiastic about serving the individuals who grew up like he did in rural America.”
His demise prompted testaments to his impression from stars of nation music, rodeo and Western-themed leisure, together with Dolly Parton and the creators of the tv drama “Yellowstone.”
“While ‘Yellowstone’ receives a lot reward for bringing rural America into the general public zeitgeist, ‘Yellowstone’ stands on the shoulders of Patrick’s creation,” Taylor Sheridan, a creator of the sequence, mentioned in an announcement.
In the Nineties, Mr. Gottsch was a single father who couldn’t afford a babysitter, so he would decide up his daughters after college and produce them alongside as he put in satellite tv for pc dishes.
“He’d climb as much as the roof, and we’d be in the lounge calling out the sign power,” Mrs. Solheim recalled.
Mr. Gottsch first tried to get RFD-TV — he named it for the Post Office’s Rural Free Delivery service — off the bottom in 1988. That try ended a yr later in chapter, as a result of no cable service would carry it. He returned to putting in satellite tv for pc receivers.
But a founding father of the Dish Network, Charlie Ergen, recommended that he reboot the channel as a nonprofit to make the most of a federal regulation requiring satellite tv for pc corporations to order bandwidth for instructional programming. The Dish Network promised him one channel.
RFD-TV was reborn in 2000, initially with virtually all its programming created by third-party producers. Two years later, it expanded to DirecTV; by 2007, Mr. Gottsch had transformed the operation right into a for-profit firm.
That yr, he signed the cowboy-hatted discuss radio persona Don Imus to simulcast his present on RFD-TV, after Mr. Imus was booted from MSNBC for a racist remark. The Imus deal persuaded Comcast, a cable behemoth, to choose up RFD-TV, introducing many perplexed however curious city viewers to its stay studies on commodity costs and rural climate, exhibits like “Cattlemen to Cattlemen,” and broadcasts of the Rose Parade wherein hosts named each Budweiser Clydesdale pulling the beer wagon.
“With cowboy hosts and insider jargon, the channel affords no translations for parochial cityfolk,” Virginia Heffernan, a columnist for The New York Times Magazine, wrote in admiration. “Really, city folks ought to really feel privileged to look at RFD-TV, like freshmen allowed to audit an upper-level seminar.”
Mr. Imus jumped ship to the Fox Business Network earlier than the tip of his RFD-TV contract. But Mr. Gottsch, who was by then on his method to being an enormous success with a 50-person broadcast studio in Nashville and a non-public airplane, purchased Mr. Imus’s 3,400-acre ranch in New Mexico. He additionally purchased, at public sale, the taxidermied stays of Roy Rogers’s horse Trigger and his canine Bullet. He put in them in a John Wayne museum he created with Wayne’s son Ethan in Fort Worth.
In 2017, Mr. Gottsch began the Cowboy Channel, which grew to become the official TV residence of the Professional Rodeo Cowboys Association. Showing a whole lot of rodeo performances stay drastically boosted the game’s viewers, introduced in new sponsors and elevated the payouts to cowboys. A former broadcaster on the Cowboy Channel, Jeff Medders, nicknamed Mr. Gottsch Rodeo Elvis due to the big reputation he gained with the game’s followers.
Mr. Gottsch’s daughters, each of whom are executives with the corporate, mentioned that RFD-TV is offered in round 25 million properties, and that the Cowboy Channel is offered in about 14 million.
Still, viewership is comparatively small. The common variety of households tuned to RFD-TV in a latest four-week interval was 9,915, based on Comscore, a media monitoring agency. The common family viewership of the Cowboy Channel was 4,850. (By distinction, Headline News had 101,000 common viewers, and the Golf Channel had 85,000.)
Patrick Gene Gottsch was born on June 3, 1953, in Omaha to Bernard and Gloria (Borowiak) Gottsch. His father was a full-time farmer, and his mom managed the family. He was the oldest of 5 surviving kids who grew up on the household farm in Elkhorn, Neb., which produced corn, soybeans and cattle.
Patrick attended Sam Houston State University in Texas on a baseball scholarship however dropped out after one yr as a result of he broke his hand. He moved to Chicago in 1977 to work as a commodities dealer on the Chicago Mercantile Exchange.
He was quickly again in Nebraska, the place he heard from clients after putting in their satellite tv for pc dishes that they liked with the ability to get ESPN or the Disney Channel, however questioned why there weren’t exhibits about their very own lives on the farm.
Mr. Gottsch’s marriage to Shirley Hickey resulted in divorce in 1991. He moved with their two daughters, of whom he had bodily custody, to Fort Worth, the place he grew to become the director of gross sales for a livestock public sale home. But he quickly stop to strive his hand but once more on the satellite tv for pc dish enterprise — and to pursue his dream of RFD-TV. Later in life, he moved again to Nebraska and purchased a part of his household’s unique farm.
In 2017, he married Angie Good, with whom he raised a 3rd daughter, Rose. His daughters and spouse survive him, as does a brother, Mickey; three sisters, Terri Murphy, Tammy Hill and Toni Korpela; and 4 grandchildren.
Mr. Gottsch created the Cowgirl Channel in 2023 after his youngest daughter, whereas watching a rodeo, requested why barrel racers and different feminine rodeo performers didn’t get equal time on tv.
At the launch of the Cowgirl Channel outdoors the corporate’s studios within the Fort Worth Stockyards, Mr. Grottsch’s older daughters demurred when requested in the event that they needed to talk. But Rose Grottsch, then 9, made an announcement.
“Girls rule. Boys drool,” she mentioned.
