Henry Loomis

Henry Loomis (April 19, 1919 – November 2, 2008) was an American broadcasting executive and physicist. He was director of Voice of America from 1958 to 1965, and president of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting from 1972 to 1978.

Early life Loomis was born on April 19, 1919, in Tuxedo Park, New York.

Career In the navy, he was on the staff of the Commander in Chief Pacific Fleet Headquarters in Pearl Harbor. Loomis was responsible for the creation of training materials for radar, and worked with pilots and officers on ships to help overcome their wariness of the technology and develop their skills in its use. Loomis was awarded the Bronze Star Medal and left the navy with the rank of lieutenant commander.

He served for 13 years on the board of the not-for-profit Mitre Corporation, which was affiliated with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and worked with the Central Intelligence Agency and United States Department of Defense after graduating from Berkeley.

As Director, Loomis had transmitters erected in Liberia and the Philippines, and in four other countries that had not been previously reached by their signals. These new broadcasting stations were announced in 1959 as additions to the eight stations that existed at the time, as part of a 5-year, $40 million expansion of services. The broadcasting power of the Voice of America was also increased. President John F. Kennedy in a 1962 visit to the headquarters of the Voice of America, emphasized the importance of journalistic integrity, stating that "You are obliged to tell our story in a truthful way, to tell it, as Oliver Cromwell said about his portrait, to paint us 'with all our blemishes and warts,' all those things about us that may not be immediately attractive."

As part of an effort to help make English a world language, Loomis oversaw the introduction on October 19, 1959, of the use of Special English, in which news is read slowly using a limited vocabulary of about 1,500 words with a simplified grammar and short pauses between adjacent words to make word boundaries more easily discernible. The target audience for Special English is people who have learned English in school, but are less than fluent and do not speak it in daily usage.

In February 1962, Loomis announced the addition of three new short-wave radio transmitters that would allow it to better compete with Radio Moscow and Peiping Radio, and to help reach through the jamming of its signal.

Under Loomis, the Voice of America reported on the pressing stories of the day, including round-the-clock coverage in Spanish and expanded English-language reporting during the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962. The VOA broadcast Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.'s I Have a Dream speech live around the world in August 1963 during the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom. Loomis, then deputy director of the United States Information Agency, was named to replace John W. Macy. Jr., who had been the first head of the Corporation when it was established in 1969, and had been a longtime advocate of centralization of public broadcasting. Loomis removed control over programming from the Public Broadcasting Service, decentralizing control and redistributing the funds to local stations.

In December 1977, Loomis announced that he would step down as president when his term ended in September 1978, or would leave earlier if a successor was selected. Loomis resigned in 1978 in a wave of centralization back to PBS under the Carter administration.

Death Loomis died on November 2, 2008, aged 89, in Jacksonville, Florida, owing to complications of Alzheimer's disease, Parkinson's disease and Pick's disease.