OLDS — Longtime Royal Canadian Legion Branch #105 chaplain Harold Hunter has passed a milestone: more than 55 years of running a gospel radio show.
He began doing the show back in about 1968 in a radio station in Drumheller.
Then, when he retired after 37 years at a church in Three Hills and moved to Olds, he carried on a gospel music program he’d begun there.
He’s been that 30-minute show from a room in the basement of his home ever since. It’s broadcast on 96.5 FM in Olds.
“It’s hymns, gospel music. Southern gospel – some contemporary stuff, but mostly southern gospel and traditional hymns, type thing,” Hunter said during an interview with the Albertan.
“I just play songs and make a few comments. There’s no preaching or anything like that,” he said.
“I do all the taping here and I just take the copy into the station and they put it on.”
Hunter chooses songs from a collection of records and CDs.
When he used to do the show live previously, he’d occasionally do a shoutout to someone – for a birthday or some such occasion.
Not anymore.
“I’m not getting into that here because you do it a month (in advance) and in the meantime, they might have died. By the time the program gets on, they’re gone, so I just don’t take a chance with that,” he said.
Similarly, Hunter used to do shows with themes around big events like Thanksgiving, but not anymore, because they fall on different dates each year.
He sticks with gospel music, no rock and roll or other genres.
“I found that my audience over the years was probably 50-plus,” he said.
“You know, a lot of people, the young ones, they listen to rock stuff. They don’t listen to the other stations. Where the older folks, before they went to bed on Sunday night, they turned the radio on.”
He discovered just how loyal his audience can be.
“I was at a funeral here – not that long ago – and a lady from Sundre said, ‘you’re that man that’s on Sunday night on that program.’ I said, ‘yeah.’
“She said, ‘I must tell you, I go to church from time to time, but my husband doesn’t go. But on Sunday night, the lights go out and the phone comes off the hook and he sits down and that’s his church. He wouldn’t miss that for the world. That’s his program.’
“So you never know out there who’s really tuned in.”
Hunter was born on a farm about 25 miles northeast of Drumheller.
The family later moved to Drumheller. Hunter did various jobs in that town. However, it was while working for a radio station there that the connection with broadcasting and the potential of a gospel music show was born.
He said in the Drumheller area, the coverage was a little stronger and that had an impact.
“Man, I could walk in oh, a hundred miles away and they’d say ‘oh, come on in.’ They may never have met me before but they heard the broadcast and I was an instant friend. It was a tremendous thing for the ministry, for the church.”
Initially, Hunter’s dream was to become an RCMP officer.
“Police was in my mind; RCMP, and I had asked them about it. But you know what turned it around? I would have had to learn to swim. I said ‘forget it, I’ll drown,’” he said with a laugh.
“So that was the end of that dream. I ended up going to college in Medicine Hat. I went into the ministry.”
Hunter grew up with a Plymouth Brethren background.
“They’re actually from England. They met in little school houses and just had small assemblies, that kind of thing,” he said.
He preached for two years in Saskatchewan, then moved to Three Hills in 1967. That’s when and where the gospel music program began. Hunter served a congregation there for 37 years, before retiring and moving to Olds in 2004.
He loved being a preacher.
“I’d go back and do it again,” he said. “I just enjoyed meeting people. I’m a P.R. type of person. The hardest thing in my mind was sitting in my office and preparing sermons and so on. I wanted be out where the people were.
“I was a people person who wore it on a shoe. I probably did up to a thousand visits a year in peoples’ homes and hospitals and all kinds of stuff.”
Hunter pulled out a drawer in a filing cabinet.
“Here’s all my sermons,” he said. “There’s 2,000 of them in here. All those drawers are full of them.”
They date back to 1965 when he first began preaching in Saskatchewan.
Harold and Amy raised three children: two sons who live in Drumheller and Calgary and his daughter Leanne, who lives in Olds.
Hunter said a while ago he told Leanne that he was about to go through all those sermons and “dispose of them.”
Initially, she urged him not to, but when he counted them up, that appeared to change things.
“She’s not sure she wants them now,” he said with a laugh.
“But yeah, they’re all there. Most of them are hand-written. I wrote out pretty much all by hand in those days.”
Hunter said he never did “fall in love” with typewriters, and generally got his wife to type them, and later word process them on computer.
Hunter was asked if his sons or daughter – or anyone else – will continue broadcasting the show when he decides to retire from it.
“I don’t know. I don’t think anybody will carry on the broadcasting. I think that that will probably be the end of the era when that comes. But as long as I have life and breath I enjoy doing it,” he said.
“I’ve got about a three-year rotation now so that if something did happen, I could go on for three years and still not have to re-tape any. I have them rolled, catalogued them down in here.
“I’ll go as long as I’m able to do it. I enjoy doing it.”
