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Some people have a passion in their life and some people seem to live their life with passion. Put Fritz Kass, owner of the New Windsor Mall and volunteer director and head of operations for the Intercollegiate Broadcasting System (IBS), in that second category.
Kass, 66 and a New Windsor resident, is a retired Navy veteran, who left the service with the rank of captain after 30 years on active and reserve duty in a career that spanned Vietnam to the first Gulf War. In the service, he did everything from, as he said, “drive” small boats to scuba diving off Vietnam to ensure the hulls of ships were not endangered by mines, nor their propellers fouled by nets. Later, he helped guide Navy ground and flight operations in the desert terrains around Kuwait. Along the way, he earned a commercial pilot”™s license and took various correspondence courses, as they were called in the days before the Internet, which broadened his career into intelligence and military law.
“I just kind of hung in there,” Kass said with the modesty that often marks an accomplished man. “I did a lot of other things in my life, but I”™ve been retired from W-2 employment, I guess you could say it, since October of 2006.”
Besides his Navy career, he purchased “most of the stores” from the chain of Lafayette Radio stores in upstate New York in the 1980s, as well as opening and operating the 20-store, 3-acre New Windsor Mall. “And profits from the New Windsor Mall, now in its 27th year, have allowed me to have flexibility in volunteering,” Kass said.
His prime volunteering outlet is his work with the nonprofit Intercollegiate Broadcasting System. “It is certainly my passion,” Kass said.
Founded in 1940 to help facilitate college and even high school radio stations, IBS now has more than 1,000 member radio, television and Webcasting stations. The group provides expert guidance to help startups and established student broadcasting ventures and hosts an annual conference in New York City every March as well as seminars at far-flung sites around the nation.
“It”™s primary mission is and always has been education,” Kass said. It also lobbies Congress on behalf on nonprofit and student broadcasting, “I testify on the value of radio as an educational tool,” Kass said. Locally, the college radio stations at Vassar, SUNY-New Paltz and Pace are all IBS members.
Partly due to Kass”™ international travel in the Navy, where he made a point of visiting college radio stations in countries from Korea to Australia to the then Soviet Union, IBS is connected with the worldwide broadcasting community.
His involvement with IBS began in 1960 in college, but his love of radio predated his attendance at Lehigh University. “I was born and raised in the Hudson Valley,” Kass said. “Like most kids in the 1950s, I enjoyed AM radio and going to visit the AM radio station in Delmar.”
There he became fascinated with the mechanics of radio broadcasting and went to Lehigh intending to get a degree in electrical engineering. “We were the Sputnik generation and had to beat the Russians and remake the world in technology.”
He actually graduated with degrees in science, business and marketing, but was also president of the journalism society on campus as well as being active with the college radio station. About the only thing he didn”™t do there was ever get on air. “I became the manager of the radio station there in my freshman year and went to the IBS conference and the rest is history,” Kass said.
And now, with a military career, a business career and extensive international travel under his belt, he is still living that history, volunteering 40 to 60 hours a week to further the mission of IBS.
“What we are trying to do is have more life labs we call radio stations in high schools and colleges,” said Kass. “And my part of it is to handle day-to-day operations and make sure it happens.”
