Everything is a Gift

Montgomery, age 8.

"Every step of my life has seemed to have more challenge than possibility," he said.

Montgomery , the youngest of six children, was raised on a farm near Promise City , Iowa . He attended the same one-room country school that his father had attended. His father, who left school after sixth grade, was a coal miner and farmer who was forced to file for bankruptcy shortly after Montgomery was born.

"I think they left him with a team of horses, a cow, and six children. Those were his main assets," Montgomery said. "So, he had to work hard. We all worked hard."

The stress of pulling his young family out of poverty led Montgomery 's father to alcoholism. The alcoholism led to abusive behavior. But Montgomery 's father regained control over his drinking, and then provided pleasant memories for his children.

Montgomery accepts the prestigious National Community Service Award Emmy.

"We played a lot of games," he said. "My father was a great story teller and folk singer."

Montgomery 's father paid his first semester's tuition at The University of Iowa-$65. But his education was interrupted by his service in World War II. After the war, he returned to Iowa City and earned his bachelor's degree in sociology, as well as his elementary and secondary teaching certificates, and a master's degree in educational administration.

Montgomery calls his first teaching job a "rough start." Out of the 43 fourth- and fifth-grade students he taught in Coralville, 19 of them lived with just one or neither of their biological parents and posed unique behavioral or emotional challenges. After three years, he took a job as the elementary and junior high principal in Nevada , Iowa , and then served as curriculum supervisor for the Polk County Board of Education in Des Moines .

"I found that moving out of the classroom called for an entirely new set of skills and satisfactions," he recalled.

In 1961 he became educational director and later general manager for Channel 11, then a local educational channel in Des Moines serving Polk County . Through television, Montgomery helped studio teachers demonstrate before their colleagues new, ingenious, and stimulating approaches that motivated children and involved parents who were watching at home.

Under his lead, the channel grew until it was too big to serve just one county. Teachers and parents outside the signal area also wanted it for their children.

So, Montgomery became the driving force behind the Iowa Educational Broadcasting Network (now Iowa Public Television, IPTV). As its first executive director, his revolutionary concepts stirred up much controversy in the state.

"John was never credited with the honor he deserves," said David Brugger, former president and CEO of the Association of America's Public Television Stations. "He had the vision for a state network, the ability to motivate a competent staff, the tenacity to buck a state bureaucracy that would have liked to grow much more slowly, and great expectations of what can be accomplished for the citizens of Iowa . Nothing was too good for the people with the highest literacy rate in the country."

Des Moines Register columnist, Donald Kaul agreed. "With Montgomery 's iron-clad commitment, Iowa 's educational television network ranks as one of the nation's best," he wrote in 1973.

Montgomery continued to find success in educational broadcasting. In 1973 he became the vice president of programming for PBS in Washington , D.C. , and received the prestigious National Community Service Award Emmy on behalf of the National Academy of Arts and Sciences.

Montgomery negotiates film contracts for Encyclopedia Britannica Education Corp. in India.

"On the national scene, John was the conscience of public broadcasting for education as a mainstay of its service," Brugger said. "He brought an unseen energy and creativity to the national PBS program schedule."

"Yes, I became a good friend of Mr. Rogers and Big Bird," Montgomery admitted.

In 1979 he became president of the Central Educational Network, housed in Chicago . Later he became vice president of the Encyclopedia Britannica Educational Corporation, where he supervised film, video, slide, and filmstrip production designed for educational use in classrooms and training programs . Montgomery retired in 2002.

Looking at the photo of himself as a young boy, the man, now 77, with white hair and the same big smile, shares his philosophy of life. "Everything I have is a gift. Sometimes it's a gift from my parents, sometimes it's from America , but it's all a gift from God. I don't arrive on the scene with anything that wasn't given to me," he said. "So I have a sense of responsibility to enjoy, share, and nurture whatever I have-just as we were taught as children to eat everything that we took on our plate."