TV trailblazer Dickson, 90, dies WABI legend ‘started it all’ in Maine

Walter Dickson, a broadcast pioneer who literally brought television to Maine in 1953, then stayed for 44 years as engineer, manager and president of WABI-TV 5 in Bangor, died this week after a brief battle with cancer. He was 90.

“He started it all,” said Don Colson, a longtime news anchor at WABI and one of Dickson’s contemporaries in the 1960s. “I remember when [WABI-TV] first went on the air, I walked to town [in Castine] and watched the TV in a store window … in the snow.”

Dickson, who was born in Hancock County and lived for many years in Eddington, had had a long career in broadcast as a radio engineer before he developing a vision for television in Maine. Through that vision, WABI-TV became the first television station in Maine.

It was Dickson who threw the “on” switch at the facility in 1953.

“We didn’t have much money in those days,” Dickson said earlier this year in an interview with the Bangor Daily News. “Governor [Horace] Hildreth owned the station then and he gave me $100,000 to build a TV station. I paid a University of Maine professor $40 to design a support structure for the WABI tower on Copeland Hill.”

He retired in 1982 as WABI president.

George Gonyar, who worked at WABI for several years, remembered Dickson as a friend and visionary.

“He lived through the era of change in television,” said Gonyar, who retired in 1991 as general manager of WABI. “He took [WABI] through all the development, from black and white to color, from one camera to several, from film to videotape. He had us on the cutting edge of every development.”

Gonyar said he met Dickson in 1948 when both worked at WABI radio.

“He came up to me and told me he was the guy who could fix anything,” Gonyar said. “He was right.”

Longtime broadcaster George McHale, known around the state as George Hale, called Dickson the consummate engineer and leader.

“He was a straight shooter, never played games, gave it straight from the hip, you knew exactly where he stood,” McHale said. “He did things that were important, he did things that were right, but he always had that common sense about him.”

Earlier this year, WABI renovated its newsroom at 35 Hildreth Ave. Station manager Mike Young announced during the rededication ceremony that the master control room would be named for Dickson.

“He was quite a guy,” WABI anchor Craig Colson said. “He was there before I started, but everyone knew who he was and he would come back every year and hang around the office.”

An avid fisherman and hunter, Dickson was the first president of the Maine chapter of the Atlantic Salmon Federation and for many years was a member of three Penobscot River salmon clubs. A pool on the Penobscot River in Eddington is named for Dickson.

“We used to go on some fishing trips, and we’d exchange ideas back and forth on salmon fishing,” said Malcolm Coulter, a longtime friend. “He was very active and always working hard for salmon habitat.”

Coulter said Dickson’s family is planning a memorial scholarship in his honor.

A funeral service for Dickson will be held at 11 a.m. Thursday, Dec. 22 at Brookings-Smith Funeral Home in Bangor.