Kay Koplovitz, founder of USA Network and a leading female entrepreneur in the country, grew up in the 1950s and '60s in South Milwaukee and attended high school there.

After earning her bachelor's degree at UW-Madison, Koplovitz received her masters from Michigan State, doing her thesis on the potential for use of satellite communication for commercial TV, unheard of at the time.

Over the next decades, Koplovitz founded what became USA Network, the Sci-Fi Channel and now runs a firm that links venture capitalists with female entrepreneurs and others looking to start businesses. She is the author of "Bold Women, Big Ideas," which she wrote to inform and inspire women entrepreneurs.

It's been "a life journey," which she has thoroughly enjoyed. Koplovitz sat down with OMC before delivering a keynote luncheon address at the recent Wisconsin Entrepreneurs Conference at the Hyatt Regency Milwaukee.

OMC: Tell me about your early years in Milwaukee. Your parents told me you took over your kindergarten class.

Kay Koplovitz: I grew up in South Milwaukee and went to kindergarten in Cudahy. That's true (about taking over the class). It actually wasn't even my class. I was three at the time and for some reason unknown to me to this day I decided that was where I was supposed to be.

OMC: So, you went to South Milwaukee High School?

KK: Go Rockets. We could never beat Whitefish Bay, though. I've always been a big sports fan. I remember the Braves years here very well. I became a huge baseball fan and a big Henry Aaron fan. I can still recite the lineup of the team that won the World Series.

OMC: You live in New York now and travel the world. Have you stayed in touch with Milwaukee?

KK: My parents still live here, so I get here a couple times a year. I'm aware of what is changing here. I see it when I come to town. Milwaukee is like Pittsburgh and other towns that were heavy manufacturing. They have to make changes to keep up. You have to reinvent yourself.

You have to have the knowledge base. There are a lot of fine educational institutions in Milwaukee and Wisconsin so that helps. There is a lot of educational DNA here.

OMC: Where did you head after high school?

KK: I went to Madison. I was a science major and interested in communications. So I took courses in that field, too. Between my junior and senior year in college, I went to Europe. At the time I was primarily interested in partying and fun, like most college students. But, I did attend some lectures. I wanted to learn something along the way too.

I happened to be in London when a gentleman was giving a lecture on geosynchronous orbiting satellites. You might say, "gee, that's really sexy a topic when you are 20 years old." But, this was the '60s, and it was something that was not familiar to people yet had the power in increase communications around the globe. It would make it much easier to communicate, even beyond the border of despotic governments. You have to remember this was the Cold War. The world was quite different, and of course we had only three broadcast networks.

He was talking about how they (satellites) would be the next powerful tool in communications. I thought this was such a powerful message. I was so motivated by his message that I just decided that was what I was going to do. I was going to figure out how to launch a program network via satellite. I didn't know how I was going to do all that, of course. By the way, this gentleman was Arthur C. Clarke, the science fiction writer. He is probably the best science fiction writer as far as grounding his work in science. He was a scientist before he started writing.

I came back and I thought about it. After I graduated from Madison, I actually came here to Milwaukee and worked as a producer at WTMJ. I was the first woman to do that. I was in an environment where people thought that was great. I figured "these people are very nice, but they don't see me as the manager of this station or as the president of a company, or as the president of NBC, and that's what I want to be." So, I left here.

I had applied for graduate school. I wanted to write my masters thesis on satellite communications. It was a very esoteric thing at the time. I had plenty of professors at Madison who would have taken that as a topic, but I wanted to go to another school to get that experience.