Kenny DeFontes, who started out as a one-man household electrical service business in 1960, went on to build a broadcasting empire in Bermuda — but studiously avoided the public spotlight that could have come with a media career.

Mike Bishop, a veteran broadcaster, described Mr DeFontes as very determined with strong ideas, but willing to listen to others if they gave him a reasonable explanation as to why they should pursue another option.

Mr Bishop said: “He was actually a pretty progressive person in many ways and willing to try things and see how we got on with them.”

He said that he first met Mr DeFontes, like many people, when he purchased a television and video recorder from his store.

Mr Bishop said: “He was always willing to have a go at something. When he started VSB Radio, I was at ZBM, and the perception there at the time was that it would never last.

“They totally underestimated his ability to make it work.”

He said he began to work with Mr DeFontes on the Tourism Radio Station, which featured Bermudian music and tourist information broadcast from the lobby of the Bermudiana Hotel.

Mr Bishop said that while the Bermuda Broadcasting Company was run by a board of directors, at VSB it was Mr DeFontes at the helm.

He said: “If he liked something, he would go and do it, and if he didn’t, he would let you know in no uncertain terms.”

From an unassuming office in Hamilton, Mr DeFontes, who went into television and radio retail in the late 1960s, launched stations along with many notable broadcasting careers and personalities who became household names to the island’s listeners.

Mr DeFontes launched the VSB Radio-1450 country music station in 1981, adding another three radio stations in the coming years, and made the move to television in September 1990.

That operation had a tough start. Two weeks after opening, lightning knocked out its transmitter until the next year.

Its launch also coincided with a punishing global recession, to which Bermuda was not immune.

In characteristic style, Mr DeFontes said that “anyone who opens up a television station when I did needs their head examined”.

Other business ventures were less successful, but VSB Radio, which folded in 2017, set a high bar for local news programming.

The TV station also fought through a slump in advertising, streamlining its operations. VSB TV 11 kept going until August 2014.

Mr DeFontes enjoyed a long run of success through the 1980s, but was candid about the industry’s future in a 1993 interview with The Royal Gazette.

“There are too many radio and TV stations for the size of the island,” he said. “The only way we will survive is to operate more efficiently than the other operations.”

VSB radio and television both ultimately succumbed to the collapse of advertising revenues — a familiar refrain for the industry in Bermuda and abroad that became a free fall with the rise of social media.

Mr DeFontes’s beginning servicing household electrical goods came with practical skills that would serve him well in broadcasting. He was able to fix equipment from the disc jockey’s board to the antenna at Fort Hill in Devonshire.

A proud moment came in April 1978 when Mr DeFontes opened his store in Hamilton at the site that became DeFontes Broadcasting headquarters.

In July 1984, when a strike took Bermuda Broadcasting Company off the air, VSB Radio enjoyed a spell as the island's only broadcast outlet.

Another of his ventures, the Scandal nightclub on Front Street in Hamilton, where Mr DeFontes was the majority shareholder, was closed by bailiffs in 1993.

It left such a bad taste in the broadcaster’s mouth that, when asked by the Gazette, he responded: “I will not talk about it.”

Another investment, the Warwick Hotel Company, where Mr DeFontes held a 50.6 per cent stake, struggled in the overheated property market of the 1990s.

Also in 1993, however, VSB signed an affiliate deal with NBC International, picking up NBC News, a plethora of sports programmes, and a variety of movies, documentaries and special-interest fare.

Courtesy of Mr DeFontes and his team, Bermudian viewers and listeners received a range of their own programming, from cookery to news interviews and lifestyle features.

Mr DeFontes retired in 2014. He remained principal owner of VSB Television and VSB Radio after a move to sell the troubled companies went sour.

The radio side of the business limped along, buoyed by enough support from listeners to keep some of its offerings going through 2015. It finally went off the air two years later.

Mr DeFontes thanked a core group of management and staff for keeping “The Miracle on Reid Street” afloat for as long as it did.

Charles Webbe, a broadcast veteran, paid tribute upon his retirement, describing Mr DeFontes as a private person who avoided the limelight.

He said: “From his modest, windowless office on Reid Street, he ran the DeFontes Broadcasting Companies for 30 years and resisted the glitter and glamour that comes with television broadcasting.

“Kenny, or Mr D, as he was known, would readily admit to a love affair with television from the days of his childhood.”

Jamahl Simmons, the PLP backbencher, said that Mr DeFontes was his first employer in Bermuda, hiring him as a sportscaster at VSB.

He said that while at VSB, he met his wife, Sherrie, who was working at the Bermuda Broadcasting Company.

Mr Simmons said that when Mr DeFontes discovered their relationship, he called him into his office and told him: “I need to know where your loyalties lie. Can I trust you? Are you going to be able to come in and make time? You don’t want this girl confusing your head.”

Mr Simmons added: “We laugh about it to this day.”

Kenneth Edward James DeFontes, an entrepreneur and businessman who became a mogul of broadcasting in Bermuda, was born on November 5, 1939. He died in July 2026, aged 86