Services for Jacobs set for 3:30 Sunday

GAINESVILLE - A memorial service will be held Sunday at 3:30 at Grace Episcopal Church in Gainesville for Jacobs Media Corp. founder and chairman John W. Jacobs, Junior.

Jacobs, who died at Northeast Georgia Medical Center Wednesday morning after suffering a stroke on Saturday, had suffered a much less serious stroke in June 2010. He would have been 89 on Monday.

A journalism graduate of the University of Missouri, Jacobs, a World War II veteran, who survived such engagements as the Battle of the Bulge, founded the company in 1949 along with nine other investors, also veterans of the war.

Jacobs, born Nov. 28, 1922, was an innovator in the broadcast field from the word "go." In addition to WDUN-AM, the company also established north Georgia's first FM station, WDUN-FM, and he opened the door to putting women behind the microphone and steered WDUN-AM to become the first north Georgia radio station committed to what is today's news-talk format.

In 1959, he started a weekly newspaper, the Gainesville Tribune but sold it a little more than a year later. In the 1960s, Jacobs, who, by then, had bought out most of the original investors, brought cable television to Gainesville and the company continue to evolve through the years. WDUN-FM's call letters and formats changed several times until it was sold in the 1980s to a national radio outfit which moved its studios to Atlanta and began marketing the station to the metro area. Jacobs Media Corp. acquired WGGA after the FCC relaxed longstanding rules on how many stations in one city or town a company could own. Then, another FM, licensed to Clarkesville, was bought.

The Jacobs Media holdings also grew over the years to include a travel agency, Wide Travel, and real estate holdings, including Thompson Court, a shopping center located next to company headquarters on Thompson Bridge Road.

Jacobs lived to see the company grow into the Internet age and he was on the cutting edge, with son, John III, now the company's President & CEO, in bringing Jacobs Media into the next phase of radio and new media, adding north Georgia's first Internet news service - AccessNorthGa.com in 1999.

But Jacobs was not all business.

Much of what he did for the community was done behind the scenes. But he was very open and public about his devotion to Brenau University and Riverside Military Academy. He served on the board of trustees at both, joining the Brenau board in 1958. The school's business and communication arts building on Green Street was dedicated in his honor in 1994. He was also an active member of Grace Episcopal Church and the Gainesville Kiwanis Club. In 2010, he and his wife Martha were named Philanthropists of the Year by the North Georgia Community Foundation..

In his memoirs, The Longer You Live, published in 2009, Jacobs noted that he shares a "birth year" with radio. It was in 1922 that the first radio station in the country (KDAK, Pittsburgh) was licensed.

Jacobs' journalism career actually began at age 12, when he begin publishing Weekly Neighborhood News out of his boyhood home on Boulevard in Gainesville. His first byline in a "real" newspaper was above an article in the Gainesville News, a preview of a Gainesville High School basketball game. Jacobs graduated from GHS in 1939.

During World War II, Jacobs served as an officer with the 230th Field Artillery Battalion, earning the Army's Silver Star.

After the war, he went back to the University of Missouri to complete his journalism degree, work which had been interrupted by the war.

Once that was done in 1946, he headed to New York, seeking work with an advertising agency or newspaper. He interview with two and was offered a job by both. But were it not for a bit of sought-after advice from the father of a New York friend, Gainesville might never have known the well-known business and civic leader. Jacobs wrote in his book that he was told "'you can stay in New York and become a little fish in a big pond, or you can go home and have the opportunity to be a big fish in a small pond.' His words helped with my decision."

In 1947, he began discussions with James "Bubba" Dunlap about starting another radio station in Gainesville. In 1948, he quit his job with the Gainesville News and went to work as executive secretary of the chamber of commerce in Gainesville while he and Dunlap continued to work on their dream of opening a radio station. He and the others who came on board as investors then created Northeast Georgia Broadcasting Company and the stations, WDUN-AM and WDUN-FM, signed on two years later.

But going up against an established radio station , WGGA, was a daunting task, and things looked bleak after that first year.

However, as he wrote in his book: "I was going to make this thing work," declaring that he was not going to quit what he had started.

Jacobs retired in the early 2000s after undergoing a heart by-pass and at the insistence of his doctors, according to an account of the illness in his book. But he continued until his death to maintain a daily interest in the company's operation and its employees.

Three years into his retirement, he was asked to help revive and upgrade the Georgia Mountains History Museum. The result of that love of labor is today's Northeast Georgia History Center at Brenau University.

In October, Jacobs was one of this year's Governor's Awards in the Humanities recipients from the Georgia Council on the Humanities; last November, he and wife Martha received the North Georgia Community Foundation's 2010 Philanthropists of the Year Award; and in June 2009, Jacobs was inducted into the Emmy Awards Gold Circle, which honors professionals who have been a "vibrant, talented and contributing member of the broadcast community for five decades."

In 1998, he was inducted into the Georgia Association of Broadcasters Hall of Fame.

A memorial service will be held Sunday at 3:30 at Grace Episcopal Church. A private interment will precede the memorial service in the All Souls' Columbarium Garden of Grace Episcopal Church.

The family will celebrate Jacobs' life in the Parish Hall of Grace following the service.

(A full obituary can be found on the AccessNorthGa.com Obituaries Page.)