Rain pounds the asphalt one early December afternoon as about 250 people dash inside the RBC Center to get to the annual luncheon for long-term employees of Capitol Broadcasting Co. At the sign-in desk, everyone gets a noisemaker, including, to no one's surprise, the boss.

Jim Goodmon takes his toy into the banquet hall and works the room like he just got elected class president, joking with one person, clapping another on the back, laughing all the while. He approaches a table of employees and rattles his noisemaker. All faces turn up to his, and everyone is smiling.

He feigns seriousness, then he grins and says, "Now let's raise some hell."

In unison comes the reply, "Yeah!" and the noisemakers resound.

The luncheon program reports that in 2003, Goodmon passed his 35th year with Capitol Broadcasting, but the way he counts it, his tenure actually approaches half a century. As president, he has led his television and radio stations through broadcasting's accelerations in technology, programming and operation. To Goodmon, 60, the work has never gotten old. In fact, it has never really been work.

"I'm still amazed that you can send pictures over the air," he says. "Really. I'm amazed."

A sheer delight in life animates everything Goodmon does as a businessman. He has led a host of public and private campaigns for civic improvement throughout the Triangle, often stoking them with his money or with grants from a family foundation. At an age when many people would long to retire, he has shouldered some of the most significant tasks of his life, for his community and for his industry.

He is directing the ambitious rehabilitation of the American Tobacco plant in downtown Durham. At a cost of close to $200 million, the restoration aims to create 900,000 square feet of office, retail and living space from the old cigarette factory next door to the baseball palace the city of Durham built for Goodmon's Durham Bulls Triple A team. He sees the American Tobacco project as a cradle for fresh products and medicines and ways of thinking -- in other words, the future.

Goodmon also is challenging a fundamental shift that he says will darken the years to come in broadcasting. The networks want to buy more local TV stations, and the federal government is inclined to permit them, which would drive out local owners, such as Goodmon.

Virtually alone among broadcasters, he repeatedly raises his opposition because "democracy is at stake."

"What we do is not frivolous," he says. "It makes a difference, and it's important."

He urges his industry to reclaim its bedrock principles, which he embraced as a boy: The airwaves belong to the American people. A government broadcast license is a public trust. With that unique power comes the responsibility to put the community first, always.

"You need to have awe for what you do. You need to respect what you do," Goodmon says. "There ought to be a little more awe and respect in broadcasting."

The Goodmon home just inside the Beltline near North Hills Mall shelters one cat, two dogs and six television sets receiving in high definition, a transmission form that Capitol Broadcasting pioneered. On Goodmon's hip hangs a Blackberry computer-cell phone. He likes his dress shirts monogrammed, his cars luxurious, his milk for latte at 160 degrees.

Around Capitol Broadcasting's headquarters on Western Boulevard, the 6-foot-1 Goodmon strides through the halls with a gap-toothed smile, eternally in a hurry. "I have a short attention span," he says, and his daily schedule forever mutates with appointments and meetings.

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