Rich Career in Telecommunications: Dan Boyette celebrates nearly three decades at GCI.

• Author: Mottl, Judy
• Position: Corporate 100 - Interview

If one were to describe Dan Boyette as adventuresome it would be fitting yet a clear and definite understatement.

After all, how many twenty-five-year-olds would pack up their lives (with $50 bucks in their pocket and man's best friend on a leash) and head to remote Alaska via a one-way ticket from New Jersey?

But that's exactly what the sixty-nine-year-old GCI vice president and general manager of GCI's TERRA Aleutians program did after graduating Nichols College with a business administration degree in 1974.

Boyette took a job with the AmeriCorps Vista national service program and his initial assignment was helping expand health services in rural Alaska communities. He made his home in Bethel, 400 miles west of Anchorage. As he recalls, when he arrived forty-four years ago, English was still very much a second language in the small village of just about 2,000 residents.

"I knew I didn't want to follow the lifestyle of a being a guy that commutes to New York City," says Boyette, on why he went north.

"There were few opportunities in New Jersey for anything remotely close to having any adventure. I wanted to do something new, something that had sort of an unprovoked good and offered the benefit of helping people. So, I signed up to go to Alaska."

In fact, in signing up with the volunteer program launched by President John Kennedy in 1965, Boyette specifically asked to be sent to a remote Alaska area and not a city like Anchorage. When he (and his four-year-old shepherd husky mix Pete) arrived in Bethel, he knew no one and his knowledge of Alaska was limited to what he had learned from maps.

At the time Alaska had hospitals in regional centers, but a true health distribution system didn't exist. Boyette spent his first fifteen years changing that scenario. He traveled throughout western Alaska, traversing the state hundreds of times over, helping to establish village health clinics.

The clinics at that time communicated with regional health centers and doctors via VHF radio, and it was communication technology (and the obvious need for improved technology in rural areas) that eventually caught Boyette's interest in a big way, paving his path to a career with GCI.

After serving Vista as a community liaison for a few years, he moved into a position in the state governor's office of communications. At the time, in 1976, then-Governor Jay Hammond had created a telecom office and was working on building 200 satellites to provide the first-ever...