Robert Metcalfe

1921 - 2005

Robert Metcalfe served as a Seventh-day Adventist singing evangelist in the 1940s, working in the Florida Conference in the first half of the decade and in the Canadian Conference from 1946 to 1949. While in Toronto, Canada, he had a regular Sunday morning broadcast. He was able to use his voice with two distinctly different qualities and was able to create the effect of two persons carrying on a conversation.

Herbert Hohensee, who would later become associated with the Faith for Today Television program, spent a year (1946-1947) with his wife, Marjorie, working with Metcalfe in his crusades and on the radio program, he singing solos and duets with Metcalfe, and she serving as pianist and organist. This was the Hohensees' initiation into evangelism and a fondly remembered experience for them in later years.

C. Dwight Rhodes, later a music teacher and choir director, who was attending Kingsway College near Toronto that year, heard them and remembers the duets as being "terrific." Rhodes was a member of the Gospelaires, a male quartet at KC, and worked with Metcalfe and the Hohensees when the quartet recorded some numbers for use on their radio program. He remembers that both of the men and their wives visited them during the quartet's Sunday dress rehearsals.

Metcalfe left church work for a time and became a radio station announcer and, eventually, manager for WOHI in East Liverpool, Ohio. From 1964 to 1969, he served as an associate field representative in the SDA Florida Conference. In 1979, he joined the Florida Hospital, today a network of SDA hospitals in that state, where he managed property acquisition for twenty years. From 1999 to 2000, he pastored SDA churches in Sebring and Wachula, Florida. He was a member of the East Pasco Church in Zephyrhills, Florida, at the time of his death, at age 84.

ds/2007

Sources: Obituaries in Southern Tidings, January 2006, 33 and August 2006, 30; Letter from Dwight Rhodes, 28 November 2007.