December 23, 2023 • 30 mins
In Episode 3 of "The Long Report," host Chris Long interviews Kevin Tucker, a key figure in bringing internet connectivity to Mecosta County in the 1990s. The episode delves into the history and evolution of internet services in Green Township, exploring Tucker's journey from starting with mechanical office machines to pioneering internet services in the area.
The conversation provides a detailed account of the technological shifts from mechanical to electronic systems, Tucker's educational background, and his early involvement with emerging technologies like ATMs and the internet. Tucker discusses the challenges he faced in establishing Tucker Communications, including the high costs of servers and modem racks, the need for self-taught skills in a rapidly evolving tech landscape, and the complexities of expanding internet services in a relatively rural area.
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
(00:00):
Hello and welcome to another long report. I'm your host Chris Long and we're here with Kevin Tucker, the pioneer of bringing internet to
(00:08):
Mecosta County way back in the day in the 90s. And in order to fully understand the history and the story of the Green Township internet situation
that's been going on for so long, you have to go to the source. You have to go all the way back and understand the history from the person who brought it here in the first place
(00:29):
and then the story of how his company was stolen, he was ousted and all the things that has happened over the last 10 years.
I'm setting my own clock.
Communist Party of China.
Red flags are everywhere.
We will be held accountable.
We're not Chinese owned.
They are not going to stop. They're not going to stop.
Oh, this is not a dumb deal.
If the door is that way.
(00:50):
Thank the board for bringing us together.
And now the act you've all been waiting for.
Professional picketers.
And if you don't like it, there's the door.
Well, I was born in Lansing, Michigan in 1959 and went straight to Alaska after that.
(01:14):
We had just annexed that place as a state after a few years up there, probably five.
My mom and dad separated and she came back here.
She met my dad and he was from the cost.
He had his own business down there in Lansing with state contracts and repairing office machines, typewriters, the calculators.
And this was back in the 60s.
(01:35):
Yeah.
So we're talking like IBM Selectrix and things like that.
The old, old typewriters.
The adding machines and all that was all mechanical.
Yeah.
The national cash registers, those great big things.
Oh, yeah.
Called them boat anchors because they were so heavy.
Yeah.
You know, we had some stores here in town.
Yeah.
When it went from mechanical to electronic, that's where I came in, because I had been I'd gone to school.
(02:01):
Where did you go to school?
DeVry Institute of Technology in Chicago.
And then I did a year out in Phoenix, Arizona.
But I wasn't planning on coming back here and working here.
I had my sights on IBM and we were developing a new technology called an ATM at the time.
And I would have been in on the ground floor of that had I not come back here.
(02:24):
Do you regret that?
Yeah.
Now.
When did when did Big Rapids Business Machines open up, first open up?
Well, we moved up here in 68.
But officially, I'm going to say probably 70.
Somewhere through there, we bought the building in 71 from Charlie Fairman.
And it was a drugstore, which we had to get rid of all that stuff.
(02:45):
It was the first drugstore in the area, right?
Yes, it was the Pease Pharmacy.
I was told by several people that come in, they'd say Woodbridge Ferris teaching Top
Taggart upstairs.
And one of the and I found a book in there with prescriptions from the early 1800s, 1900s.
You can see it over at the Historical Museum by the courthouse over there.
(03:07):
We donated it to that rather than Ferris.
It should still be over there.
I haven't been over there to look, but you know, it had weeds in it.
It had actual stuff that he'd.
It was the holistic version of pharmacy back then.
It wasn't this oil Rockefeller style pharmacy.
And back then, this was in the 1800s.
(03:30):
And they had holistic versions, natural herbs and Coca-Cola.
Tell us, how did you get from 1970 to the 90s before the Internet?
Continuing to grow the business with cash registers, mostly.
I mean, a lot of the old businesses in the area can remember.
(03:52):
In fact, I got pictures of all of them because every time my dad sold a cash register, he
would take a picture of the person, the owner of the store or a restaurant or whatever.
That's how we grew the business, you know, as much as he could up until everything went
from mechanical to electronic.
And what was that?
About early 80s, things started going, everything was going electronic.
(04:15):
So you went from that big, heavy national cash register with the paddles popping up
to a digital, like a calculator on a drawer.
And my dad didn't know anything about electronics.
That's when people started coming in wanting a computer because computers weren't out yet.
They were around, but they weren't available commercially.
They were still between MS-DOS and CPM.
(04:39):
Didn't sell a lot of them, but they were expensive.
They were $4,000 or $5,000 for a computer back then.
Yeah, when they first came out, the Compacts and the IBMs.
Gateway and all that stuff.
But the Internet came out.
Computers were getting cheap.
Throughout the 90s, I want to say, people would come in and ask, you know, what's this Internet?
Because I was on the Internet in 86.
(05:01):
To dial up and get on, there wasn't anybody around here.
How did you go from the Big Rapids Business Machines to bringing Internet in?
When did Tucker Communications first start?
When I was selling computers, we were right on the ground floor of that too.
Computers led to knowing people knew about the Internet.
They just didn't know how to get it.
(05:23):
Or they really didn't know that much about it then.
So there was a lot of training and education there.
Every time somebody walked through the door, they were like, what's this Internet thing?
And they wanted it.
Could you get Internet here?
No. At that time?
At that time.
Ferris had their merit network.
They had a few modems down at Ferris, but it wasn't open to the public.
(05:44):
If you didn't know anything about it, you had to be faculty or staff, is usually how that went.
I just decided, you know, there's something here.
There's low-hanging fruit.
It was 96 when I went live.
Because I didn't have any money.
And then the server, that thing cost me $13,000 and to add 128-megaram stick in it was $2,500.
(06:09):
So you can imagine how expensive this whole ordeal was.
Then I needed modem racks, I needed routers.
You got to have DNS servers or else your people don't know where to go.
There was a lot.
And then they wanted websites.
And I didn't know anybody how to design them.
So I was designing them.
I made up a whole bunch of websites.
At that time, almost everyone was self-taught because it's so brand new.
(06:32):
They didn't have these degrees in web design and degrees in server management and all those things.
Because it was all new technology at that time.
Yeah, like programming the router, you know, Cisco OS.
I just learned it all on my own.
It's like learning with a fire under your rear end.
So what inspired you to start Tucker Communications?
(06:54):
Again, the number of people that come in the computer shop asking about it and where to get it.
Get internet.
Yeah.
And again, Grand Rapids is probably the closest place, which would have been long distance for anybody.
Yeah.
Can you describe the early days and the challenges faced with Tucker Communications in those early days?
(07:15):
Well, learning the technology is still a bit of a learning curve, even with what I knew.
And doing it by myself was a big problem.
It was many, many long hours.
Sometimes no sleep at all for two days, you know.
Yeah.
And finding anybody with any knowledge of this to help me out wanted $60 an hour or $100 an hour, that kind of a thing.
(07:41):
What was your initial vision for Tucker Communications back in 1996?
That it would be a tech company.
We would grow this area.
This would be our headquarters and then expand in other areas with the wireless side of it.
I was getting calls from overseas even thinking that we're over there.
And I wasn't because I was in that who's who book.
(08:03):
Yeah.
So that's why it was Tucker-USA because I wasn't sure if there was going to be just a UK or EU or something at the end of it.
That was something that would have came later.
I was just happy to take care of my own backyard, you know, my own town, expand and grow from here.
So with the dial-up, you had that in 1996.
(08:24):
And who was your provider?
Who was your uplink to the backbone of the networks?
That was AT&T, Sprint and MCI.
Back then is when the government split up.
They broke up Bell.
Bell, AT&T Bell.
And everybody started selling all these plastic phones.
You'd see them at Wal-Mart and all that kind of stuff.
(08:45):
That's where all that came from.
The Bell wasn't in charge anymore.
Yeah.
And now it's all back together again.
Yeah.
And now it's all AT&T.
Yeah.
AT&T or Verizon.
Yeah.
It's basically those two.
Did you do both dial-up and DSL or just dial-up?
No, dial-up was how I started.
DSL wasn't really out yet.
(09:08):
It was there in metropolitan areas, but it wasn't available anywhere else until probably it was late 90s, early 2000, I think.
Somewhere in through there.
But it was a dial-up thing.
And you had to own the phone lines, the own the phone numbers that came in.
And believe it or not, everywhere you dialed, it was long distance and you paid for that.
So if I wanted customers in Reed City, I had to get Reed City phone numbers down here.
(09:33):
I had a full T1 of 832 numbers all coming to me down here in Big Rapids.
I was going to try to get Chippewa Lake and Rodney and all that, but they don't have a switch out that way.
In fact, Big Rapids wouldn't have the switch we had, which was an ES7.
We wouldn't have that technology in town if it wasn't for Ferris.
Ferris has a lot of phone numbers up.
(09:56):
And so as a result, we got an ES7.
When I got into DSL, I had an OC3 and they had an OC12.
OC, optical cable?
Optical carrier.
Oh, carrier. Okay.
So I had 28 T1 capabilities going into a hundred and something T1 capability.
And then from there it goes out.
But Chicago was one of the NAPs. They call it a network access point.
(10:20):
I also had my own IP addresses, IP blocks, they call them.
Unlike a lot of the kind of fly by night ISPs, they would just resell whatever charter, whoever they had at the time.
They just resell their IP addresses, which is really tacky.
And you didn't have the control like you should.
How did the community initially respond to your services?
(10:43):
They liked it. They were glad that it was there.
Very happy to have the dial up or something.
They all wanted to see what it was, you know, curiosity at least.
Plus the service, you know, I was already service orientated from the computer shop, taking care of customers that way.
So when it came to the Internet questions and problems and that, it was just a natural to take care of that too.
(11:06):
How did you feel when the company began to take traction?
Good. You know, I knew we were on a wave.
We were riding something that nobody really knew where it was going to land other than it wasn't going away.
But, you know, human greed is what caused the dot com bubble to burst there in the beginning of 2000.
And that put a big dent in it, but I was growing 500 percent, you know, a year back in those early days.
(11:33):
Yes. Then when once cable came around, they finally realized they had to pull all new cable though in town.
They had to get that RG6 stuff that would pass one gig.
So that set them back a year.
But after that, it was downhill for the dial up side of it.
But I could sort of see that writing on the wall anyway.
That's why I got into wireless.
Once you brought the Internet to the general area, all these other businesses started wanting to get on the Internet.
(11:59):
It's the Internet boom essentially.
It started right around the time Grand Rapids was doing it.
In fact, I used them as a benchmark with my progress.
Everything I did up here was the same thing they were doing down there.
The only difference was they had a million people to draw from and I didn't.
I had like 10,000.
But it was the same amount of effort, same amount of equipment.
(12:20):
So had I been in a more metropolitan area, I would have been a millionaire.
Because a lot of them all sold.
Shortly, four or five years later, the people that started those businesses sold them for millions of dollars, but not up here.
So you're doing all this dial up stuff and at some point you transition into the wireless stuff.
Because that's what we have in Green Township.
(12:41):
Obviously, that happened in 2011.
There's some history prior to 2011 that got us to that point of where this wireless stuff came from.
So how did you go from dial up to wireless?
Well, once it became commercially available, I...
Which part? The wireless?
The wireless...
The radio manufacturers, people that could make a radio do what we wanted to do.
(13:04):
You can do everything else from boating to airplanes and all that, but not for what we're doing, which is called fixed broadband.
Fixed point, yeah.
So it was 99 when I finally got everything up on our tower.
I had to actually get a tower here at the shop.
Oh, yeah, okay.
That was old Harry Albright brought that over.
(13:26):
He helped me a lot with a lot of things. I liked him.
He passed away a few years ago and then his son passed away during the pandemic.
I knew him too and he was a friend of mine.
Anyways, he put the tower up, I have at the shop, and then I did have to expand from there.
And that's where the water tanks come in.
(13:47):
So you put this tower up and it was basically to broadcast the signal.
Correct. And now those were access points up on that tower.
And then when I go to a customer's house, I put up what's called the CPE or customer premise equipment.
And that radio then talks to the access point, which then carries your signal into my building and out the fiber.
(14:09):
So as I expanded that, I needed to get out.
You wanted to grow. You wanted to expand further reaches.
And the wireless was able to get you to be able to expand to places you couldn't with the actual wire of DSL and dial-up, right?
And these were customers that, you know, they bought these houses and they're beautiful houses out in this pristine land,
but go anywhere and there's no broadband Internet at any at any of these places.
(14:33):
I would go by where I heard the loudest, you know, the squeaky ear gets the grease and Green Township was one of them.
But before I segue into that, I had to get on the water tank here in town, the one out on Perry Street.
Yeah. And that's when the city approached me and said, would you like to get south of town?
(14:54):
Yeah. Yeah. That's that's what he said. And I'm like, OK, yeah, sure.
And that's when this barter thing was struck.
And so you had you had a barter agreement with the city back in 2007.
I have the emails that say that.
So how did that go with the city? Are you first of all, are you allowed to have a barter agreement with a government entity?
(15:19):
I didn't know at that time I was questioning that. In fact, the city attorney was there and he didn't say a word.
And you was the city attorney, your attorney at that time. Yes, he was. Same guy.
Wow. That seems a little conflict of interest, doesn't that?
You would think so. But we were all friends and, you know, we all wanted to win, win out of this.
(15:41):
And so I got on the water tank and they got free Internet.
But sharing resources, you know, bartering resources.
And I find out later that any barter agreement with a municipality or government entity is is a big no no.
That's that's like taboo. But the city approached you.
That's about getting on the water tower because they wanted to offer that to you so you could get south of town.
(16:06):
Yes. Now, what was wrong with that? Looking back, there's plenty wrong.
I wasn't going to look a gift horse in the mouth. And it still cost me money.
They were getting what was equated.
It was a 10 meg circuit or a 10 meg connection to me at that time was three thousand eight hundred dollars a month.
(16:28):
If you look up in the United States, how much 10 meg was you go from having the the dial up and then this wireless stuff comes out
and you want to start expanding because the area didn't really have really any Internet service beyond yourself.
And who else was around here?
Well, eventually, the pioneer started a dial up service.
(16:53):
For what reason? I have no idea. They had no clue what they were doing.
What was that called? What was that startup? Netport.
In fact, they hired away some of my employees and the technology was changing pretty rapidly.
But I had the dial up and wireless at the same time.
They were both running because dial up lasted quite a while.
(17:16):
People out in the area that just didn't have nothing.
I couldn't reach them with the radios. We did eventually.
So at some point around 2007, the city, the city of Big Rampage approached you.
Their I.T., the director of I.T., actually information technology coordinator for the city of Big Rampage, reached out to you.
(17:39):
And I'll quote this directly.
Are you still interested in getting to the other side of town?
I think I have the city manager convinced that we can swap services and not have any money passed on.
Example, you get on the tower in return and we get our Internet access in return basically for free.
(18:00):
That's from the again the information technology coordinator of the city of Big Rapids.
It sounds about right.
And so explain that whole just that one portion of the email back in 2007.
Well, he understood that I couldn't get on that side of the hill with my wireless south of town.
Well, and West. OK.
(18:22):
And that water tank was ideal. It was perfect.
They were getting fifteen hundred a month, I believe, from other vendors like AT&T.
I think Nextel was up there.
So this was a price point.
They wanted to populate these tanks.
They were getting so much money, it was like a money tree.
(18:44):
It was a money tank.
But for me, I wasn't going to give them any money.
I was given an Internet service that they were then able to give to the county.
So they were getting double dip in there.
But I just looked the other way.
Oh, so they they after you hooked them up with the water tower,
they took the Internet that you were supplying to them to the city building and sent it over to the county building,
(19:10):
which is a completely different entity.
Correct.
Wow. They did that behind your back.
Well, they didn't give me any notice.
They weren't supposed to be doing it. That's not how you find out about it.
Because I would go. The county would call.
They have Internet problems.
So they set it all up themselves without you.
Then the county people would call you.
(19:33):
And you found out that they're getting Internet, which is technically your Internet,
but they're getting it through the city.
Right. That seems messed up.
I was also hired to do some wireless stuff for the county directly.
The services building down by the pizza place.
Yeah. Anyway, the county services building.
Yes. They had a tower behind them and a little radio behind on that that apparently some other company out of Grand Rapids put up.
(20:02):
And the county paid upwards of twenty two thousand dollars for this link.
Wow. Where was it being sent to?
Back to the county. Well, actually the sheriff's tower.
There's a tower. So from the county to the sheriff.
Yes. And that was done through who I don't know who the company was, but they put it up and disappeared.
And so because I was involved in wireless, the county administrator called and said, what can you do for us here?
(20:27):
Who was an administrator at the time?
Paul Bullock.
And he had showed me an invoice of twenty two thousand and some change for what I would have probably charged, you know, six thousand bucks for.
Wow. So I did some stuff there on the water tank.
I shot another link from the tank to the services building.
I did the airport link to the Bejornicin tower and a couple of things for, you know, city in the county.
(20:52):
The emails further say I have an email out to the city manager, find out how he wants to handle this.
Let's work on the tower one tower at a time.
I assume the Bejornicin and the Perry, right? Yeah.
OK. And unfortunately, we can't give the second tower away.
What does that mean? Understandable.
You know, that means that he's not going to give it for a barter.
(21:13):
OK. But I'm trying to find out how much leeway I have with this project.
I would like to do this as quickly and neatly as possible without having to jump through the hurdles that we would normally have to go through.
I also don't want this to be too to be too public.
Not sure if I can keep it out of the public eye as the city commission might need to have to prove this.
They did. I always gave more than I got from doing business dealings like this.
(21:40):
The email goes on. I'm sure this will all work itself out as we all go on.
I just want to make sure I can have all my bases covered in a timely fashion so I can get moving on the project at the same time.
I also want to make sure that I don't set a precedent that others can fall back on and say you let Tucker do it this way.
Why do I have to do it this other way? Yeah.
(22:03):
So I was just going along with him. I wasn't going to make it public.
I wasn't going to stir the pot, you know, rock the boat, whatever.
At the same time, I wasn't an attorney either. So I don't know.
I didn't know what I was getting myself into, but I wouldn't think it was going to be too malicious.
Considering what the pioneer wrote about me was all lies, you know, saying I owe the city $80,000 and one day and next thing I know I owe him $85,000.
(22:32):
Whatever. This all lies.
Back on that in that 2007, before you even got on the water tower, this is just leading up to the water tower.
I can't offer you space without consent from the commission.
Personally, I don't see any problems with this lease. But again, I can't give you the go ahead until it becomes legal.
Also, I will send a copy over to Eric Williams for him to modify it to fit your organization.
(22:59):
Basically, we have to treat it as a paid lease.
My suggestion is that we charge $1300 per month and then you bill us $1300 a month.
Unfortunately, we can't barter and exchange of checks will have to take place.
I hope this will all work out and I'll get started working on the lease.
Basically, as the time progressed in 2007, he found out that he can't do a barter agreement.
(23:22):
So to get around that, he wanted you to invoice him for $1300 for the Internet service.
And then he's going to invoice you $1300 for space on the tower.
Yeah, I don't know if that ever happened. Yeah, I didn't. I don't recall.
Again, I wasn't the bookkeeper. I don't recall us exchanging checks.
(23:43):
Well, they seem to try to do something. Look like they're doing something.
That was an attempt right there. Yeah. Yeah. In hindsight. Yeah.
But they couldn't keep a lid on it. Obviously, that was because these ghouls that come in that I hired,
it was my mistake hiring Mr. Wrong, if you want to call him, kept going down there and stirring it up
(24:04):
and making it worse, telling everybody I owe all this money to the city.
And he didn't know what he was talking about. I fired him and he wouldn't shut up and go away.
So he mentions Eric Williams in the these emails, who was the city attorney at the time.
That's correct. And did he have any involvement with your business at the time in 2007?
(24:26):
Yes, he was a stockholder of my company.
So he was both he was the city attorney writing the agreement as well as a shareholder. That's correct.
That seems like a conflict of interest right there, doesn't it? Yeah, it does now. It didn't then.
But the city went along with it. And so did he. And he was an attorney.
(24:49):
So anyway, this goes on. You're on the water tower. Everything is moving smoothly. You're expanding.
Did you did you expand? Yes. Oh, yeah. Where did you go from there?
We went a lot of people south of us down by, you know, Stanwood area or north of Eight Mile Road, the fire department, Austin, I think.
(25:10):
Towns whatever the fire department there by Nestle was the last shot when I tried to get up on their building.
And they would have had to put a tower up because he brought a hundred foot ladder for me to go up and try to get signal from that.
And then we went west and we got on the Ameritech or AT&T tower. Right there on 131. On 220th by Quality Car and Truck.
(25:36):
And yeah, that's right by 131. Yeah.
And but yeah, we were one of the tenants on that tower there on 220. You look now, there's like seven people up there, seven layers of antennas.
And I think we're the second one from the top and were well that nobody's went up and took him down.
Still up there. They are. They're still there. Yeah. Right by. Who is going to climb that tower and take that stuff down?
(26:03):
I had to hire new electric to bring their rigs over here. So who's paying the rent on those towers? Nobody.
Just sit there. Ameritech is not saying a word. No. American Tower is who owns it. Yeah. Not Ameritech. Nor does AT&T own it.
Yeah. And then from there, I shot the Green Township and that's how that all went. So as we get into that, everything's working out.
(26:29):
You're expanding. Did you expand eastward? Yeah. Oh yeah. We got we got on the CMU tower,
which is a 940 foot tower east of us out by Chippewa Lake. It was a direct shot to this tower. Here in this building? No. To the one on 220. Oh, OK.
That's a long ways out there. Yeah. That's a high tower. Yeah. And I climbed all these towers, too, by the way.
(26:52):
I had gone to school and got trained on it to become certified tower climber as well as a rescue certified and an instructor certified. Yeah.
So we're on the CMU tower. We shot to Diamond Lake and on Diamond Lake, everybody on that lake wanted Internet.
We couldn't go fast enough. And we got Tubbs Lake. They had a campground. So we had to light the campground up.
(27:17):
And, you know, it was just going like crazy. Yeah. And so, yeah, east and west. When did you get the hospital over by Canadian Lakes?
That was a separate thing. That was a private link for the hospital. And they were paying upwards of thirteen hundred dollars a month for some T1 lines out there.
(27:38):
They had an office out there in Canadian Lakes. And I said something about just shooting a wireless link from the hospital's tower out there.
And that came about. I had to go see Paul Bullock again. And that was that was when it was not Spectrum or whatever it is now.
That was when it was Mccosta County General. Yeah. So, yeah, we shot from that hospital tower.
(28:03):
And because there was a county tower on Arthur Road right there where you turn and Rodney, you make that curve by the gas station.
You just go down a little ways. There's a road that goes back in there and there's a county tower back there.
So it's a county owned tower. Yes. So I had to go talk to Paul about that and get the key and get on that tower.
And I went up. That was two hundred and some odd. So I shot from the hospital to that tower.
(28:28):
And then from that tower, I shot another link that I needed to pull this time. I needed to call Terry at the high deck Wheat Lake and get a pole set.
I let Tom Battle handle that. And that's where we put the other radio. It brought the link to that location.
It was I want to say around 80 Meg connection link at that site. That doesn't mean they were getting 80 Meg of Internet.
(28:49):
That's just what the bandwidth was capable of going beyond that link alone. Right.
And whatever the hospital had at the time, which I think might have been like a 10 Meg or something.
That's what was being fed out there as well. And, you know, it's it was still up and running last I knew.
But so you expanded south and you expanded west and you expanded east and north and north.
(29:12):
And this whole time I see that in like 2005, you guys were trying to get into Paris in 2007.
You were trying to get in Paris. That's kind of what the water tower they were offering to see if you could use the water tower to get up there and all that.
And then let's fast forward to 2010 when this whole green township thing kind of started taking off.
And so and that's where we'll have to pause our journey through the digital revolution of Macosta County.
(29:37):
In our next episode, we'll dive deep into the unfolding saga of Green Townships Internet Odyssey.
And we'll explore the intricate story of the water tower issue that led to a pivotal moment that shaped the future of Internet services in our community.
And how did these developments lead to the downfall of Tucker's Company?
And what tangled web of events led to the current state of the Internet services in Green Township?
(30:05):
This this we call collaborating evidence.
They are not going to stop. They're not going to stop.
They're not going to stop until they uncover every lie, every deception, every legal, every web, every immoral action.
(30:39):
They are not going to stop. They're not going to stop.
There's the door. Thank the board for bringing us together.
Hello and welcome to another long report. I'm your host Chris Long and we're here with Kevin Tucker, the pioneer of bringing internet to
(00:08):
Mecosta County way back in the day in the 90s. And in order to fully understand the history and the story of the Green Township internet situation
that's been going on for so long, you have to go to the source. You have to go all the way back and understand the history from the person who brought it here in the first place
(00:29):
and then the story of how his company was stolen, he was ousted and all the things that has happened over the last 10 years.
I'm setting my own clock.
Communist Party of China.
Red flags are everywhere.
We will be held accountable.
We're not Chinese owned.
They are not going to stop. They're not going to stop.
Oh, this is not a dumb deal.
If the door is that way.
(00:50):
Thank the board for bringing us together.
And now the act you've all been waiting for.
Professional picketers.
And if you don't like it, there's the door.
Well, I was born in Lansing, Michigan in 1959 and went straight to Alaska after that.
(01:14):
We had just annexed that place as a state after a few years up there, probably five.
My mom and dad separated and she came back here.
She met my dad and he was from the cost.
He had his own business down there in Lansing with state contracts and repairing office machines, typewriters, the calculators.
And this was back in the 60s.
(01:35):
Yeah.
So we're talking like IBM Selectrix and things like that.
The old, old typewriters.
The adding machines and all that was all mechanical.
Yeah.
The national cash registers, those great big things.
Oh, yeah.
Called them boat anchors because they were so heavy.
Yeah.
You know, we had some stores here in town.
Yeah.
When it went from mechanical to electronic, that's where I came in, because I had been I'd gone to school.
(02:01):
Where did you go to school?
DeVry Institute of Technology in Chicago.
And then I did a year out in Phoenix, Arizona.
But I wasn't planning on coming back here and working here.
I had my sights on IBM and we were developing a new technology called an ATM at the time.
And I would have been in on the ground floor of that had I not come back here.
(02:24):
Do you regret that?
Yeah.
Now.
When did when did Big Rapids Business Machines open up, first open up?
Well, we moved up here in 68.
But officially, I'm going to say probably 70.
Somewhere through there, we bought the building in 71 from Charlie Fairman.
And it was a drugstore, which we had to get rid of all that stuff.
(02:45):
It was the first drugstore in the area, right?
Yes, it was the Pease Pharmacy.
I was told by several people that come in, they'd say Woodbridge Ferris teaching Top
Taggart upstairs.
And one of the and I found a book in there with prescriptions from the early 1800s, 1900s.
You can see it over at the Historical Museum by the courthouse over there.
(03:07):
We donated it to that rather than Ferris.
It should still be over there.
I haven't been over there to look, but you know, it had weeds in it.
It had actual stuff that he'd.
It was the holistic version of pharmacy back then.
It wasn't this oil Rockefeller style pharmacy.
And back then, this was in the 1800s.
(03:30):
And they had holistic versions, natural herbs and Coca-Cola.
Tell us, how did you get from 1970 to the 90s before the Internet?
Continuing to grow the business with cash registers, mostly.
I mean, a lot of the old businesses in the area can remember.
(03:52):
In fact, I got pictures of all of them because every time my dad sold a cash register, he
would take a picture of the person, the owner of the store or a restaurant or whatever.
That's how we grew the business, you know, as much as he could up until everything went
from mechanical to electronic.
And what was that?
About early 80s, things started going, everything was going electronic.
(04:15):
So you went from that big, heavy national cash register with the paddles popping up
to a digital, like a calculator on a drawer.
And my dad didn't know anything about electronics.
That's when people started coming in wanting a computer because computers weren't out yet.
They were around, but they weren't available commercially.
They were still between MS-DOS and CPM.
(04:39):
Didn't sell a lot of them, but they were expensive.
They were $4,000 or $5,000 for a computer back then.
Yeah, when they first came out, the Compacts and the IBMs.
Gateway and all that stuff.
But the Internet came out.
Computers were getting cheap.
Throughout the 90s, I want to say, people would come in and ask, you know, what's this Internet?
Because I was on the Internet in 86.
(05:01):
To dial up and get on, there wasn't anybody around here.
How did you go from the Big Rapids Business Machines to bringing Internet in?
When did Tucker Communications first start?
When I was selling computers, we were right on the ground floor of that too.
Computers led to knowing people knew about the Internet.
They just didn't know how to get it.
(05:23):
Or they really didn't know that much about it then.
So there was a lot of training and education there.
Every time somebody walked through the door, they were like, what's this Internet thing?
And they wanted it.
Could you get Internet here?
No. At that time?
At that time.
Ferris had their merit network.
They had a few modems down at Ferris, but it wasn't open to the public.
(05:44):
If you didn't know anything about it, you had to be faculty or staff, is usually how that went.
I just decided, you know, there's something here.
There's low-hanging fruit.
It was 96 when I went live.
Because I didn't have any money.
And then the server, that thing cost me $13,000 and to add 128-megaram stick in it was $2,500.
(06:09):
So you can imagine how expensive this whole ordeal was.
Then I needed modem racks, I needed routers.
You got to have DNS servers or else your people don't know where to go.
There was a lot.
And then they wanted websites.
And I didn't know anybody how to design them.
So I was designing them.
I made up a whole bunch of websites.
At that time, almost everyone was self-taught because it's so brand new.
(06:32):
They didn't have these degrees in web design and degrees in server management and all those things.
Because it was all new technology at that time.
Yeah, like programming the router, you know, Cisco OS.
I just learned it all on my own.
It's like learning with a fire under your rear end.
So what inspired you to start Tucker Communications?
(06:54):
Again, the number of people that come in the computer shop asking about it and where to get it.
Get internet.
Yeah.
And again, Grand Rapids is probably the closest place, which would have been long distance for anybody.
Yeah.
Can you describe the early days and the challenges faced with Tucker Communications in those early days?
(07:15):
Well, learning the technology is still a bit of a learning curve, even with what I knew.
And doing it by myself was a big problem.
It was many, many long hours.
Sometimes no sleep at all for two days, you know.
Yeah.
And finding anybody with any knowledge of this to help me out wanted $60 an hour or $100 an hour, that kind of a thing.
(07:41):
What was your initial vision for Tucker Communications back in 1996?
That it would be a tech company.
We would grow this area.
This would be our headquarters and then expand in other areas with the wireless side of it.
I was getting calls from overseas even thinking that we're over there.
And I wasn't because I was in that who's who book.
(08:03):
Yeah.
So that's why it was Tucker-USA because I wasn't sure if there was going to be just a UK or EU or something at the end of it.
That was something that would have came later.
I was just happy to take care of my own backyard, you know, my own town, expand and grow from here.
So with the dial-up, you had that in 1996.
(08:24):
And who was your provider?
Who was your uplink to the backbone of the networks?
That was AT&T, Sprint and MCI.
Back then is when the government split up.
They broke up Bell.
Bell, AT&T Bell.
And everybody started selling all these plastic phones.
You'd see them at Wal-Mart and all that kind of stuff.
(08:45):
That's where all that came from.
The Bell wasn't in charge anymore.
Yeah.
And now it's all back together again.
Yeah.
And now it's all AT&T.
Yeah.
AT&T or Verizon.
Yeah.
It's basically those two.
Did you do both dial-up and DSL or just dial-up?
No, dial-up was how I started.
DSL wasn't really out yet.
(09:08):
It was there in metropolitan areas, but it wasn't available anywhere else until probably it was late 90s, early 2000, I think.
Somewhere in through there.
But it was a dial-up thing.
And you had to own the phone lines, the own the phone numbers that came in.
And believe it or not, everywhere you dialed, it was long distance and you paid for that.
So if I wanted customers in Reed City, I had to get Reed City phone numbers down here.
(09:33):
I had a full T1 of 832 numbers all coming to me down here in Big Rapids.
I was going to try to get Chippewa Lake and Rodney and all that, but they don't have a switch out that way.
In fact, Big Rapids wouldn't have the switch we had, which was an ES7.
We wouldn't have that technology in town if it wasn't for Ferris.
Ferris has a lot of phone numbers up.
(09:56):
And so as a result, we got an ES7.
When I got into DSL, I had an OC3 and they had an OC12.
OC, optical cable?
Optical carrier.
Oh, carrier. Okay.
So I had 28 T1 capabilities going into a hundred and something T1 capability.
And then from there it goes out.
But Chicago was one of the NAPs. They call it a network access point.
(10:20):
I also had my own IP addresses, IP blocks, they call them.
Unlike a lot of the kind of fly by night ISPs, they would just resell whatever charter, whoever they had at the time.
They just resell their IP addresses, which is really tacky.
And you didn't have the control like you should.
How did the community initially respond to your services?
(10:43):
They liked it. They were glad that it was there.
Very happy to have the dial up or something.
They all wanted to see what it was, you know, curiosity at least.
Plus the service, you know, I was already service orientated from the computer shop, taking care of customers that way.
So when it came to the Internet questions and problems and that, it was just a natural to take care of that too.
(11:06):
How did you feel when the company began to take traction?
Good. You know, I knew we were on a wave.
We were riding something that nobody really knew where it was going to land other than it wasn't going away.
But, you know, human greed is what caused the dot com bubble to burst there in the beginning of 2000.
And that put a big dent in it, but I was growing 500 percent, you know, a year back in those early days.
(11:33):
Yes. Then when once cable came around, they finally realized they had to pull all new cable though in town.
They had to get that RG6 stuff that would pass one gig.
So that set them back a year.
But after that, it was downhill for the dial up side of it.
But I could sort of see that writing on the wall anyway.
That's why I got into wireless.
Once you brought the Internet to the general area, all these other businesses started wanting to get on the Internet.
(11:59):
It's the Internet boom essentially.
It started right around the time Grand Rapids was doing it.
In fact, I used them as a benchmark with my progress.
Everything I did up here was the same thing they were doing down there.
The only difference was they had a million people to draw from and I didn't.
I had like 10,000.
But it was the same amount of effort, same amount of equipment.
(12:20):
So had I been in a more metropolitan area, I would have been a millionaire.
Because a lot of them all sold.
Shortly, four or five years later, the people that started those businesses sold them for millions of dollars, but not up here.
So you're doing all this dial up stuff and at some point you transition into the wireless stuff.
Because that's what we have in Green Township.
(12:41):
Obviously, that happened in 2011.
There's some history prior to 2011 that got us to that point of where this wireless stuff came from.
So how did you go from dial up to wireless?
Well, once it became commercially available, I...
Which part? The wireless?
The wireless...
The radio manufacturers, people that could make a radio do what we wanted to do.
(13:04):
You can do everything else from boating to airplanes and all that, but not for what we're doing, which is called fixed broadband.
Fixed point, yeah.
So it was 99 when I finally got everything up on our tower.
I had to actually get a tower here at the shop.
Oh, yeah, okay.
That was old Harry Albright brought that over.
(13:26):
He helped me a lot with a lot of things. I liked him.
He passed away a few years ago and then his son passed away during the pandemic.
I knew him too and he was a friend of mine.
Anyways, he put the tower up, I have at the shop, and then I did have to expand from there.
And that's where the water tanks come in.
(13:47):
So you put this tower up and it was basically to broadcast the signal.
Correct. And now those were access points up on that tower.
And then when I go to a customer's house, I put up what's called the CPE or customer premise equipment.
And that radio then talks to the access point, which then carries your signal into my building and out the fiber.
(14:09):
So as I expanded that, I needed to get out.
You wanted to grow. You wanted to expand further reaches.
And the wireless was able to get you to be able to expand to places you couldn't with the actual wire of DSL and dial-up, right?
And these were customers that, you know, they bought these houses and they're beautiful houses out in this pristine land,
but go anywhere and there's no broadband Internet at any at any of these places.
(14:33):
I would go by where I heard the loudest, you know, the squeaky ear gets the grease and Green Township was one of them.
But before I segue into that, I had to get on the water tank here in town, the one out on Perry Street.
Yeah. And that's when the city approached me and said, would you like to get south of town?
(14:54):
Yeah. Yeah. That's that's what he said. And I'm like, OK, yeah, sure.
And that's when this barter thing was struck.
And so you had you had a barter agreement with the city back in 2007.
I have the emails that say that.
So how did that go with the city? Are you first of all, are you allowed to have a barter agreement with a government entity?
(15:19):
I didn't know at that time I was questioning that. In fact, the city attorney was there and he didn't say a word.
And you was the city attorney, your attorney at that time. Yes, he was. Same guy.
Wow. That seems a little conflict of interest, doesn't that?
You would think so. But we were all friends and, you know, we all wanted to win, win out of this.
(15:41):
And so I got on the water tank and they got free Internet.
But sharing resources, you know, bartering resources.
And I find out later that any barter agreement with a municipality or government entity is is a big no no.
That's that's like taboo. But the city approached you.
That's about getting on the water tower because they wanted to offer that to you so you could get south of town.
(16:06):
Yes. Now, what was wrong with that? Looking back, there's plenty wrong.
I wasn't going to look a gift horse in the mouth. And it still cost me money.
They were getting what was equated.
It was a 10 meg circuit or a 10 meg connection to me at that time was three thousand eight hundred dollars a month.
(16:28):
If you look up in the United States, how much 10 meg was you go from having the the dial up and then this wireless stuff comes out
and you want to start expanding because the area didn't really have really any Internet service beyond yourself.
And who else was around here?
Well, eventually, the pioneer started a dial up service.
(16:53):
For what reason? I have no idea. They had no clue what they were doing.
What was that called? What was that startup? Netport.
In fact, they hired away some of my employees and the technology was changing pretty rapidly.
But I had the dial up and wireless at the same time.
They were both running because dial up lasted quite a while.
(17:16):
People out in the area that just didn't have nothing.
I couldn't reach them with the radios. We did eventually.
So at some point around 2007, the city, the city of Big Rampage approached you.
Their I.T., the director of I.T., actually information technology coordinator for the city of Big Rampage, reached out to you.
(17:39):
And I'll quote this directly.
Are you still interested in getting to the other side of town?
I think I have the city manager convinced that we can swap services and not have any money passed on.
Example, you get on the tower in return and we get our Internet access in return basically for free.
(18:00):
That's from the again the information technology coordinator of the city of Big Rapids.
It sounds about right.
And so explain that whole just that one portion of the email back in 2007.
Well, he understood that I couldn't get on that side of the hill with my wireless south of town.
Well, and West. OK.
(18:22):
And that water tank was ideal. It was perfect.
They were getting fifteen hundred a month, I believe, from other vendors like AT&T.
I think Nextel was up there.
So this was a price point.
They wanted to populate these tanks.
They were getting so much money, it was like a money tree.
(18:44):
It was a money tank.
But for me, I wasn't going to give them any money.
I was given an Internet service that they were then able to give to the county.
So they were getting double dip in there.
But I just looked the other way.
Oh, so they they after you hooked them up with the water tower,
they took the Internet that you were supplying to them to the city building and sent it over to the county building,
(19:10):
which is a completely different entity.
Correct.
Wow. They did that behind your back.
Well, they didn't give me any notice.
They weren't supposed to be doing it. That's not how you find out about it.
Because I would go. The county would call.
They have Internet problems.
So they set it all up themselves without you.
Then the county people would call you.
(19:33):
And you found out that they're getting Internet, which is technically your Internet,
but they're getting it through the city.
Right. That seems messed up.
I was also hired to do some wireless stuff for the county directly.
The services building down by the pizza place.
Yeah. Anyway, the county services building.
Yes. They had a tower behind them and a little radio behind on that that apparently some other company out of Grand Rapids put up.
(20:02):
And the county paid upwards of twenty two thousand dollars for this link.
Wow. Where was it being sent to?
Back to the county. Well, actually the sheriff's tower.
There's a tower. So from the county to the sheriff.
Yes. And that was done through who I don't know who the company was, but they put it up and disappeared.
And so because I was involved in wireless, the county administrator called and said, what can you do for us here?
(20:27):
Who was an administrator at the time?
Paul Bullock.
And he had showed me an invoice of twenty two thousand and some change for what I would have probably charged, you know, six thousand bucks for.
Wow. So I did some stuff there on the water tank.
I shot another link from the tank to the services building.
I did the airport link to the Bejornicin tower and a couple of things for, you know, city in the county.
(20:52):
The emails further say I have an email out to the city manager, find out how he wants to handle this.
Let's work on the tower one tower at a time.
I assume the Bejornicin and the Perry, right? Yeah.
OK. And unfortunately, we can't give the second tower away.
What does that mean? Understandable.
You know, that means that he's not going to give it for a barter.
(21:13):
OK. But I'm trying to find out how much leeway I have with this project.
I would like to do this as quickly and neatly as possible without having to jump through the hurdles that we would normally have to go through.
I also don't want this to be too to be too public.
Not sure if I can keep it out of the public eye as the city commission might need to have to prove this.
They did. I always gave more than I got from doing business dealings like this.
(21:40):
The email goes on. I'm sure this will all work itself out as we all go on.
I just want to make sure I can have all my bases covered in a timely fashion so I can get moving on the project at the same time.
I also want to make sure that I don't set a precedent that others can fall back on and say you let Tucker do it this way.
Why do I have to do it this other way? Yeah.
(22:03):
So I was just going along with him. I wasn't going to make it public.
I wasn't going to stir the pot, you know, rock the boat, whatever.
At the same time, I wasn't an attorney either. So I don't know.
I didn't know what I was getting myself into, but I wouldn't think it was going to be too malicious.
Considering what the pioneer wrote about me was all lies, you know, saying I owe the city $80,000 and one day and next thing I know I owe him $85,000.
(22:32):
Whatever. This all lies.
Back on that in that 2007, before you even got on the water tower, this is just leading up to the water tower.
I can't offer you space without consent from the commission.
Personally, I don't see any problems with this lease. But again, I can't give you the go ahead until it becomes legal.
Also, I will send a copy over to Eric Williams for him to modify it to fit your organization.
(22:59):
Basically, we have to treat it as a paid lease.
My suggestion is that we charge $1300 per month and then you bill us $1300 a month.
Unfortunately, we can't barter and exchange of checks will have to take place.
I hope this will all work out and I'll get started working on the lease.
Basically, as the time progressed in 2007, he found out that he can't do a barter agreement.
(23:22):
So to get around that, he wanted you to invoice him for $1300 for the Internet service.
And then he's going to invoice you $1300 for space on the tower.
Yeah, I don't know if that ever happened. Yeah, I didn't. I don't recall.
Again, I wasn't the bookkeeper. I don't recall us exchanging checks.
(23:43):
Well, they seem to try to do something. Look like they're doing something.
That was an attempt right there. Yeah. Yeah. In hindsight. Yeah.
But they couldn't keep a lid on it. Obviously, that was because these ghouls that come in that I hired,
it was my mistake hiring Mr. Wrong, if you want to call him, kept going down there and stirring it up
(24:04):
and making it worse, telling everybody I owe all this money to the city.
And he didn't know what he was talking about. I fired him and he wouldn't shut up and go away.
So he mentions Eric Williams in the these emails, who was the city attorney at the time.
That's correct. And did he have any involvement with your business at the time in 2007?
(24:26):
Yes, he was a stockholder of my company.
So he was both he was the city attorney writing the agreement as well as a shareholder. That's correct.
That seems like a conflict of interest right there, doesn't it? Yeah, it does now. It didn't then.
But the city went along with it. And so did he. And he was an attorney.
(24:49):
So anyway, this goes on. You're on the water tower. Everything is moving smoothly. You're expanding.
Did you did you expand? Yes. Oh, yeah. Where did you go from there?
We went a lot of people south of us down by, you know, Stanwood area or north of Eight Mile Road, the fire department, Austin, I think.
(25:10):
Towns whatever the fire department there by Nestle was the last shot when I tried to get up on their building.
And they would have had to put a tower up because he brought a hundred foot ladder for me to go up and try to get signal from that.
And then we went west and we got on the Ameritech or AT&T tower. Right there on 131. On 220th by Quality Car and Truck.
(25:36):
And yeah, that's right by 131. Yeah.
And but yeah, we were one of the tenants on that tower there on 220. You look now, there's like seven people up there, seven layers of antennas.
And I think we're the second one from the top and were well that nobody's went up and took him down.
Still up there. They are. They're still there. Yeah. Right by. Who is going to climb that tower and take that stuff down?
(26:03):
I had to hire new electric to bring their rigs over here. So who's paying the rent on those towers? Nobody.
Just sit there. Ameritech is not saying a word. No. American Tower is who owns it. Yeah. Not Ameritech. Nor does AT&T own it.
Yeah. And then from there, I shot the Green Township and that's how that all went. So as we get into that, everything's working out.
(26:29):
You're expanding. Did you expand eastward? Yeah. Oh yeah. We got we got on the CMU tower,
which is a 940 foot tower east of us out by Chippewa Lake. It was a direct shot to this tower. Here in this building? No. To the one on 220. Oh, OK.
That's a long ways out there. Yeah. That's a high tower. Yeah. And I climbed all these towers, too, by the way.
(26:52):
I had gone to school and got trained on it to become certified tower climber as well as a rescue certified and an instructor certified. Yeah.
So we're on the CMU tower. We shot to Diamond Lake and on Diamond Lake, everybody on that lake wanted Internet.
We couldn't go fast enough. And we got Tubbs Lake. They had a campground. So we had to light the campground up.
(27:17):
And, you know, it was just going like crazy. Yeah. And so, yeah, east and west. When did you get the hospital over by Canadian Lakes?
That was a separate thing. That was a private link for the hospital. And they were paying upwards of thirteen hundred dollars a month for some T1 lines out there.
(27:38):
They had an office out there in Canadian Lakes. And I said something about just shooting a wireless link from the hospital's tower out there.
And that came about. I had to go see Paul Bullock again. And that was that was when it was not Spectrum or whatever it is now.
That was when it was Mccosta County General. Yeah. So, yeah, we shot from that hospital tower.
(28:03):
And because there was a county tower on Arthur Road right there where you turn and Rodney, you make that curve by the gas station.
You just go down a little ways. There's a road that goes back in there and there's a county tower back there.
So it's a county owned tower. Yes. So I had to go talk to Paul about that and get the key and get on that tower.
And I went up. That was two hundred and some odd. So I shot from the hospital to that tower.
(28:28):
And then from that tower, I shot another link that I needed to pull this time. I needed to call Terry at the high deck Wheat Lake and get a pole set.
I let Tom Battle handle that. And that's where we put the other radio. It brought the link to that location.
It was I want to say around 80 Meg connection link at that site. That doesn't mean they were getting 80 Meg of Internet.
(28:49):
That's just what the bandwidth was capable of going beyond that link alone. Right.
And whatever the hospital had at the time, which I think might have been like a 10 Meg or something.
That's what was being fed out there as well. And, you know, it's it was still up and running last I knew.
But so you expanded south and you expanded west and you expanded east and north and north.
(29:12):
And this whole time I see that in like 2005, you guys were trying to get into Paris in 2007.
You were trying to get in Paris. That's kind of what the water tower they were offering to see if you could use the water tower to get up there and all that.
And then let's fast forward to 2010 when this whole green township thing kind of started taking off.
And so and that's where we'll have to pause our journey through the digital revolution of Macosta County.
(29:37):
In our next episode, we'll dive deep into the unfolding saga of Green Townships Internet Odyssey.
And we'll explore the intricate story of the water tower issue that led to a pivotal moment that shaped the future of Internet services in our community.
And how did these developments lead to the downfall of Tucker's Company?
And what tangled web of events led to the current state of the Internet services in Green Township?
(30:05):
This this we call collaborating evidence.
They are not going to stop. They're not going to stop.
They're not going to stop until they uncover every lie, every deception, every legal, every web, every immoral action.
(30:39):
They are not going to stop. They're not going to stop.
There's the door. Thank the board for bringing us together.
Popular Podcasts
Stuff You Should Know
If you've ever wanted to know about champagne, satanism, the Stonewall Uprising, chaos theory, LSD, El Nino, true crime and Rosa Parks, then look no further. Josh and Chuck have you covered.
Dateline NBC
Current and classic episodes, featuring compelling true-crime mysteries, powerful documentaries and in-depth investigations. Follow now to get the latest episodes of Dateline NBC completely free, or subscribe to Dateline Premium for ad-free listening and exclusive bonus content: DatelinePremium.com
New Heights with Jason & Travis Kelce
Football’s funniest family duo — Jason Kelce of the Philadelphia Eagles and Travis Kelce of the Kansas City Chiefs — team up to provide next-level access to life in the league as it unfolds. The two brothers and Super Bowl champions drop weekly insights about the weekly slate of games and share their INSIDE perspectives on trending NFL news and sports headlines. They also endlessly rag on each other as brothers do, chat the latest in pop culture and welcome some very popular and well-known friends to chat with them. Check out new episodes every Wednesday. Follow New Heights on the Wondery App, YouTube or wherever you get your podcasts. You can listen to new episodes early and ad-free, and get exclusive content on Wondery+. Join Wondery+ in the Wondery App, Apple Podcasts or Spotify. And join our new membership for a unique fan experience by going to the New Heights YouTube channel now!