Ovvie E. Hanna
1916 - 2008
O.E. Hanna, a 1951 graduate of Southern Missionary College, now Southern Adventist University, was a Seventh-day Adventist singing evangelist who served for over thirty years in the Southern and Columbia unions. Following service in the airforce during World War II, he was baptized into the Seventh-day Adventist church in the spring of 1946. At that time he married Jonnie Fay Warren and then began to work as a pastor/evangelist in the Alabama-Mississippi conference while she taught church school.
Following a move to Clearwater, Florida, in 1953, he pastored, taught and assisted in revival meetings as a singing evangelist. His success in evangelism led to more involvement and service as a pastor and evangelist in other cities in Florida, and ordination in 1960, shortly after a move to Raleigh, North Carolina. He moved to the Potomac Conference in the Columbia Union in January 1961 and then returned to North Carolina in 1965. He last served in Tennessee before retiring. He was living in Coffee, Tennessee, when he died at the age of 92.
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Sources: Obituary in the Southern Tidings, articles in the Southern Tidings, 17 April 1946- August 1998; Review & Herald, 31 May 1956 to 1 January 1979; Columbia Union Visitor, 2 April 1964 to 3 December 1964; biographical write-up in CUV, 2 February 1961.