Longtime Radio Evangelist Harold Richards, 90, Dies

Dr. Harold M.S. Richards, a religious broadcaster once known as “the most listened-to man in America,” died Wednesday from complications that developed after he had a stroke two years ago.

Richards, who was 90, died in Newbury Park at Ventura Estates, a rest home operated by the Seventh-day Adventist Church, which sponsored his radio program, “Voice of Prophecy.”

Lillian Guild, an assistant to the director of the program, said Richards went into a coma five days ago at the home and never recovered.

Richards was born in Davis City, Iowa, in 1894 and became interested in radio evangelism in the mid-1920s, after listening to a program on a homemade crystal radio set.

He came to California in 1926, touring with his tent revivals, which drew large crowds. He asked those who visited the revivals to donate to his “radio pocket,” Guild said.

The response was overwhelming. “People gave him necklaces and even their gold teeth,” Guild said. With the proceeds, Richards in 1930 began the “Voice of Prophecy,” which was broadcast from radio station KGER in Long Beach. He ran it for nearly 40 years until his son, Harold Jr., took over as director in 1969. Even then, Richards kept a spot on the program until early this year.

“The Voice of Prophecy” is heard in more than 30 languages. It is broadcast by about 1,400 radio stations--just over half of them in the United States and the remainder scattered throughout the world. In a 1966 interview with Dan Thrapp, who was then The Times’ religion editor, Richards said that up to that date he had delivered 8,750 sermons, an average of one a day for 25 years.

He was a kindly looking man, with glasses and a small mustache, but he pulled no punches in his preaching. At the height of the world’s energy crisis in 1974, when motorists in Los Angeles fought each other in lines waiting to fill up at gasoline stations, Richards told his listeners, “The greatest energy crisis in the world today is the lack of the power of God in each person’s life.”

In 1964 he told a Southern California religious conference that the United States was becoming “a nation of religious illiterates.”

He once told an interviewer “the biggest aim in my life is to tell people the message of the Lord, and that message is that God is more alive than ever.’

At one period, more than 1,000 letters a day poured into his headquarters in Glendale. His operation extended so far that even 20 years ago it cost $2 million a year to run it. But Richards never went short of money.

“We never solicit funds, but every intelligent listener knows it costs something to keep a program on the air,” he said. About a quarter of the money he needed came from church sources, but the rest of it arrived in bits and pieces in his avalanche of mail.

Even among other churchmen he had a reputation for a “vast knowledge of the Bible,” as one of them put it. He renewed that knowledge with repeated readings. Each year he organized a New Year’s Bible-reading marathon. This was a non-stop recitation of the 1,189 chapters, 38,232 verses and 874,746 words of the Bible which, he said, usually took about 85 hours to complete.

People from all over the country competed to take part in the readings. In 1970, for instance, eight state governors were among the 80 readers.

Richards is survived by his wife, Maybelle, a daughter and three sons, including Harold Marshall Sylvester Richards Jr., who is carrying on the program.

Services for Richards are scheduled for later this week in Loma Linda and other services will be held next month in Glendale.