“Captain Jack” Bill Dennis has an inquisitive mind, which explains why he has taken on a variety of business ventures. The Des Moines native returned home after earning his broadcasting degree from Creighton University in Omaha, and has established himself as a local flying traffic reporter, pilot, aerial photographer, the owner of an Internet and Web site development company serving customers in 45 states and the owner of a Christmas tree farm. Although Dennis left the public eye in 2001 when he retired from aerial traffic reporting on television and radio, his life is anything but slow.

Bill, why are you called Captain Jack?

When I got into radio to do the traffic updates, Captain Bill just didn’t have the ring to it that Captain Jack did. The other thing was that people in radio in the early days had a tradition of not using their real names.

How did you become the local personality for traffic updates?

I started in broadcasting in 1961 in Omaha as a TV cameraman. I came here to Des Moines as a TV director for Channel 11 in the mid-1960s and did that for about 10 years. At the same time, I was teaching radio and TV production at the technical high school. One of the teachers had a plane to sell, and I thought it was a good deal. I bought it, even though I had never flown before, and I learned how to fly. After I left Channel 11, I decided to do traffic reports for WHO radio as an independent contractor. From there, I went to television and other local radio stations, and continued it for 24 years.

At the same time you were doing that, you were pursuing other for-profit operations, too?

Ever since I was a kid, I had a big interest in photography, and I had used my skills for everything from weddings to wildlife. It was natural for me to start an aerial photography business when I took up flying. As I was flying, I started playing around with early computers to write programs to help me with the commercial work I was doing.

And you just kept learning more about computers along the way?

I am a technical type of person. Instead of reading novels, I read tech manuals. When computers first came out, I wanted to learn all about them and how to program them. The first language I learned was BASIC. I saw that the programs could save me time and money, and I started writing programs for other people in the early 1980s. I learned how to do more things, and as the Internet started, I thought that was a good direction to go. I hired some staff, and Captain Jack Communications was born from there.

There seems to be a logical transition between these things, but how about the tree farm?

In the early ‘80s, I decided to move out of the city, and when I was looking at lots, I found that for a few dollars more, I could buy a 40-acre farm. Corn had been raised here, but the conditions weren’t ideal for this land, so I ended up with the idea of raising trees. I began reading and researching about growing Christmas trees, and the farm just kept developing. The first year, we planted about 1,500 trees, and we had deer come in and eat 500 of them. We’ve learned a lot since then, and we’ve expanded to about 25,000 trees on about 55 acres.

Are there any similarities between the farm, photography and the highly technical work you do with Captain Jack Communications?

They all are challenges. I look at it that way: What’s the challenge, and is it profitable? There are a lot of things that are fun to do, but they may not make you any money. I like to know how things work. Each of the businesses kind of supports the others, and it’s this diversification that helps keep everything going.

In what ways have they supported each other?

Each one has its peaks and valleys to some extent. Like right now, we aren’t able to develop as many Web sites because companies are doing other year-end things and are not able to provide us with the images and the information that we need to put their sites together. This always happens around the holidays and goes on until January, when we’re really busy. There is also not a huge market for aerial photography right now, so it works out to have this be the busy time at the tree farm.

  There must be some overlapping of these businesses during the year. How do you manage it all?

People classify me as a workaholic. I get up early – I’m usually awake by 4 a.m. because it’s a quiet time when the phone’s not ringing and I can do my thinking and planning and analyze business decisions. But still, this time of the year is hard, so I have to hire the best staff. We have help from about 30 employees at the farm and 20 top-notch programmers at Captain Jack Communications.

Will you ever retire?

Not completely. That would pretty well take care of me. I have to have something to do. The advantage of the Internet is that you can do it from anywhere.