"You ought to see what those 11- and 12-year-old kids can do," said Hiebert, who travels to Mirror Lake Middle School about once a month, with his daughter, Cathy, to watch the students produce news programs for their peers. His entourage may include anyone else in the community he believes can contribute to the program.

Whether the students eventually become media professionals or not is not the point, Hiebert said. What's important is their advisor, longtime Mirror Lake teacher Emily Blahous, is teaching them accountability, responsibility, teamwork and courtesy, he said.

Hiebert, a pillar in the Alaska communications industry, marked his 89th birthday on Dec. 4. While officially retired since 1997, when he sold Northern Television, his interest in broadcast communications has never waned.

Hiebert was just 15 back in 1932, when he built and licensed his first ham radio in Bend, Ore. He sees a little of himself today in young people like Andrew George, now a student at Chugiak High School, who was part of the Mirror Lake program.

"He's a technical genius," Hiebert said of George. "He's just a natural. He can fix anything electronically."

Hiebert's enthusiasm for the Mirror Lakes communications program is echoed by the school's enthusiasm for him.

"His mentorship for us is giving us a network of people that we can draw from, whenever we need to know something," Blahous said. "He has been an enormous, unbelievable help.

"Every turn is something positive that happens because of Augie," she said. "Quite frankly the boys and girls just love him. He thinks of the students as his kids. He doesn't let them drop after they leave the school if they have an interest (in media)."

When school officials expressed an interest in getting a Federal Communications Commission license for their school station, Hiebert brought in people from the FCC licensing bureau in Washington, D.C.

"We never know who is going to walk in (with Hiebert). He's proud of it and he warms our hearts and I think we warm his," Blahous said.

Indeed, Hiebert's eyes light up and his smile quickens when talking about the Mirror Lake program, where students produce five-minute video news broadcasts, five days a week, to be aired on closed circuit television to fellow students less than an hour later.

Beyond teaching students accountability and responsibility, Hiebert sees the program as a source of the next generation of Alaska broadcasters and broadcast engineers. After all, Hiebert said, one of the toughest jobs in broadcasting is finding good help.

"I look at television as a window on the world, to entertain and inspire people to do things," Hiebert said. His own favorite programs include the CBS News magazine "60 Minutes" and features on the History Channel. For news reports, he prefers KTVA Channel 11, which he built in 1953 as Alaska's first television station.

How Hiebert came to build that station is a story in itself.

Born on Dec. 4, 1916 in eastern Washington state to Peter and Josephine Hiebert, he grew up helping every way he could on the family orchard, which produced apples, cherries, apricots and peaches. By age 8 he drove a tractor that pulled the spraying machine used to control worm infestation in the orchard. He also irrigated the orchard, thinned the apples to promote growth and propped up fruit-laden tree limbs to prevent breakage.

During the Great Depression era, Hiebert's teen-age years were filled with playing basketball, baseball and getting his ham radio license.

When a small loan at the bank could not be paid, the bank foreclosed on the 160-acre farm and the house where young Augie was born and raised. Yet by 1932, the teen-ager acquired his ham radio license and his curiosity about electronics was piqued.

"I was just interested in electronics," he said. "It was early in radio days, and I was interested in building things."

The summer after he graduated from high school, Hiebert landed his first radio job at station KPQ in Wenatchee, Wash., at $120 a month. The job was short-lived. In the fall of 1938, Hiebert found an announcer/engineer job with a radio station being built in Bend, Ore., which paid a meager $60 a month.

When the station's chief engineer, Stan Bennett, left in June 1939 to build KFAR radio in Fairbanks, he wired Hiebert, offering him $185 a month to come help him build the station. On Aug. 15, 1939, Hiebert headed north to Fairbanks, population 3,300, to put his engineering resourcefulness to work for station owner Austin (Capt) Lathrop, owner of the Healy Coal Corp. On Oct. 1, 1939, KFAR went on the air.

In 1953, Hiebert built his own television station, Alaska's first, KTVA in Anchorage. KTVA's first program schedule included programs like "Victory at Sea," "Gene Autry," "Amos and Andy," and "Art Linkletter and the Kids." It also offered local news, weather and sports reports and feature films, like "Titan" starring Frederick March. Two years later, he brought television to Fairbanks via KTVF. Other Hiebert firsts included establishing the first permanent television translator in Alaska in 1959, and in 1969 the first live satellite broadcast, the Apollo moon landing. Over the years his television stations gave many Alaskans their first jobs in broadcasting. In 1997, after 65 years in broadcasting, Hiebert sold Northern Television.

His interest in communications has never ebbed, although it has turned from commercial interests to promoting broadcast communications to a new generation. "If you don't teach the media, sooner or later there will be a shortage (of broadcast industry professionals)," he said.

Over the years, Hiebert has worn many hats in broadcasting, from first president of the Alaska Broadcasters Association and director of the Alaska Educational Broadcasting Committee to membership in the CBS Television Network Affiliates Association. This year he was the first inductee into the Gold Circle of the National Academy of Television Arts and Sciences Northwest Chapter, honoring him for 73 years in the broadcast industry.

Along the way, Hiebert's adventures in broadcasting have opened a window on the world to people all over Alaska.

"When I think of those people at the far reaches of the North Slope, and out west of Kotzebue, and down on the little cove near Homer, I know what Augie Hiebert has meant to them," wrote CBS News icon Walter Cronkite, in the introduction to a biography on Hiebert by his daughter, Robin Ann Chlupach.

"He, as much as any single person, has brought them into touch with one another and with the great outside world.

"He was one of the pioneers who brought them radio, and now television, and it is fitting that this book by his daughter should honor his contribution to the state which I have decided deserves to be the nation's biggest, and where I probably wouldn't even mind going out in the winter."

Margaret Bauman can be reached at margie.bauman@alaska