Drawn to a satellite dish antenna trade show in 1981, Creighton University art professor and sculptor Fr. Lee Lubbers, SJ was amazed when a vendor aimed what looked like a bed frame covered in window screen to the north and retrieved a live news broadcast from inside the Soviet Union. Inspired by the potential of what he saw, Fr. Lubbers in time would create a dynamic learning tool aimed at toppling cultural barriers worldwide.

The white Ford pickup truck cruises the rolling farmland of western Iowa. Behind the wheel is a large man. Clad in a brushed denim shirt, boots, and blue jeans with a large polished belt buckle, Fr. Lee Lubbers, SJ looks more like a John Wayne character in a baseball cap than a Jesuit priest.

A priest he is, however, and while farmers in the area concentrate on soybeans and corn, this former art professor and sculptor has planted 14 acres of local land with more than a dozen satellite dish antennas. Fr. Lubbers' SCOLA Antenna Farm harvests the heavens daily for foreign television programming. Staff technicians sort the signals and beam them back to a large telecommunications satellite for distribution to schools, college campuses, and other customers for a fee.

Today SCOLA (Satellite Communications for Learning) is a $1.6 million business dedicated to bridging the distances among different nations and cultures in the hope of fostering a friendlier global village and a better world.

"Art always allowed me to understand technology better," says Fr. Lubbers. "I utilized and was fascinated by technological elements: light, fire, sound, and eventually computers and laser beams." He carved a niche in "sculpture junk," motorized, mechanized pieces forged from old appliances, techno-leftovers, and other scrap materials. His first exhibit was in 1965 at the Sheldon Gallery in Lincoln, Nebraska, following his return from Paris.

"They were all mechanized pieces, very large, very noisy, very ridiculous, very fun," Lubbers says. That was followed by a period of computer and video art, which piqued his interest in a 1981 satellite dish antenna trade show in Omaha.

"There were about 100 antennas in the parking lot of the Holiday Inn. One of them was tracking a Russian satellite. I was seeing live television from inside the Iron Curtain. That's all I had to know," Lubbers said.

He made a bargain basement purchase from a vendor who didn't want to pack up his display model and haul it back to Montana. Fr. Lubbers set the antenna on a rooftop at Creighton, rigged it with an adjustable mount, hooked it to an Apple II computer, located the Russian signal, and began tracking the live broadcasts. At night he could phone the computer from his room and manually continue to track the TV transmissions and watch live broadcasts originating inside the Soviet Union.

"I'd track it until I got tired and went to bed," Fr. Lubbers said.

In time Francis Lajba, a maverick engineer with a Rube Goldberg streak, showed up at Fr. Lubbers' door. "He said he heard I had a tracking problem and mumbled something about God sending him," Fr. Lubbers says. Lajba returned with $92 in parts from a local Radio Shack and built an automated computerized system which tracked the Russian satellite 24-hours a day. Curiosity became enterprise.

"By the end of 1982 we had the campus on an independent cable system. By the end of '83 we had developed an automatic tracking system. Not long after, we were selling them to the big Russian language departments at major universities. It was a hard sell because they could not understand that internal Russian television was available in that way on this continent. So we built a very small demo model on the back a pickup truck. I'd drive off to places like Michigan, plug it in, find the signal, and pop, we'd have a picture," Fr. Lubbers said. In no time, schools like Harvard, Vassar, and Duke were finding up to $30,000 in their budgets to buy and install the systems.

"But only after they saw the demo. Until then they just could not believe that there was a strange system over in Siberia transmitting to these satellites almost directly over our heads."

Interest rocketed. Working out of a trailer from a campus rooftop, SCOLA expanded. Sales soared, educational grants came in, and dishes were added. More broadcasts from more countries offered more opportunities for a unique way to teach foreign languages.

"It was unthinkable that schools should be teaching languages and not utilize television from those countries to give students the opportunity to hear the languages they were learning. Our programming gives students the chance to hear a lot of a language as it is spoken," says Lubbers. "Granted it isn't as good as going to the country and living there for a while, but it's a pretty cost-effective substitute."

Other schools bought the programming. So did the U.S. government when it found SCOLA was out-tracking federal programs doing similar work.

SCOLA outgrew its Creighton site and moved in 1993 to tiny McClelland, Iowa, about 20 miles east of the campus. The happening place in the town of just over 100 residents is the Dew Drop Inn. Fr. Lubbers loves the place and fits right in with the noon crowd of farmers and workers who gather there daily to check out the luncheon special.

After some dickering and negotiating, SCOLA acquired an old, abandoned county home complex. With determination and guidance from Br. Robert Smith, SJ, a high-tech operation was retrofitted into the tired buildings. Room by room, Br. Smith began rejuvenating the worn facility. A new uplink station was built. Just outside the modest, but well-equipped structure, a 10-meter antenna sends the signals SCOLA harvests back into space to be rebroadcast to customers.

It's an odd, eclectic site to behold, with modern electronic devices planted next to a teetering old horse barn and institutional brick buildings badly in need of tuck-pointing. Yet Fr. Lubbers and his staff of about 15 somehow make the incongruous fit seamlessly together.

"What you're looking at is a marriage between technology and something else," offers Lajba, who stuck with Fr. Lubbers and is now SCOLA's chief operating officer. Asked to define the something else, he raises his hands palms upward, smiles, and shrugs as if to say: if you have to ask, I can't explain it. Lubbers tries.

"Our instincts and the Spirit have brought us this far. Everybody who works here thinks they are doing something extremely important. Most of them aren't Catholic. But they're all good, religious people or at least spiritual people. Besides being a language learning tool, what we're doing allows glimpses into other cultures," Lubbers says. "By knowing more about other peoples and cultures, we see that they too are God's people. God has helped them develop values to reach fulfillment.

"Most of us don't have a clue about Hindus or Islam. We think we know the Jews; but to what extent do we realize their way of coming to God, of promoting values in the world and seeking the same fulfillments we seek?

"Observing these values and understanding and respecting how the Spirit has led other peoples is important. It allows us to work with them for the kind of world where even these other values, in some instances, might contribute to the common aims and objectives we all have for some kind of better and peaceful world. Everything SCOLA does, ever has done, and will do, I think, in some small way contributes to that."

A concept worth tuning in to.

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