Jay Lloyd Sedwick, 88, cable pioneer and chairman of the Armstrong Group, died January 1 in hospice care at Newhaven Court at Clearview, a senior living community in Butler, Pennsylvania.
Sedwick began his career as an electrical engineer for Pratt & Whitney after graduation from Carnegie Mellon University in 1957.
In the early 1960s, he joined the family business, which his father, Jud, had grown from Armstrong County Line Construction, a communications contracting firm, to ownership of a string of rural telcos.
The younger Sedwick suggested Armstrong expand into the nascent cable TV industry, and its first build, a system serving Butler, Pennsylvania, expanded to systems serving Orrville, Ohio (1966), followed by Ashland, Ohio and Ellwood City, Pennsylvania, in 1969. Jay Sedwick eventually became president, CEO and finally chairman of the company.
Today, Armstrong’s cable division is the 11th-biggest cable operator in the nation, boasting more than 400,000 homes in Pennsylvania, Ohio, Maryland, West Virginia, Kentucky and New York.
According to Armstrong, Sedwick was obsessed with picture quality and created a lab in the basement of Armstrong's first office building to test amplifiers and cable using a large freezer to simulate the harsh Pennsylvania winters, research he shared with others.
He oversaw network rebuilds including the introduction of fiber optics in the 1990s and the massive channel expansion it allowed, then took the company into the broadband era at the end of his active tenure.
Sedwick was also one of the founders of the Pennsylvania Cable Association (now the Broadband Communications Association of Pennsylvania).
“Jay Sedwick was a man before his time, known for his keen engineering abilities and formidable passion for technology,” BCAP president Todd Eachus said. "As a pioneer in the cable industry, Jay helped to lead Armstrong into becoming one of the largest, family-owned cable systems in the United States and assisted in the creation of our organization.
“Jay held firm to the values of strong relationships with Armstrong's employees and close ties to the communities it serves, along with the company’s excellence for engineering. The cable and broadband industry will forever be grateful to Jay for his extraordinary talents and abilities and leadership.”
Survivors include two daughters, Cyd K. Johnston and Joy L. Moon; two sons, Jay L. Sedwick Jr. and Dru A. Sedwick (CEO of the Armstrong Group); 13 grandchildren and 13 great-grandchildren.
The family has requested that, in lieu of flowers, donations can be made to Isaiah 117 House Butler County, Pa., P.O. Box 842, Elizabethton, TN, 37644-0842 or The Blanchard House of Butler, c/o The Lighthouse Foundation, P.O. Box 366, Bakerstown, PA 15007.
