Rev. Clifton Moore; Religious Radio-TV Pioneer

The Rev. Clifton E. Moore, who started a unique radio ministry in Los Angeles in 1948, one since copied by hundreds of other clergymen across America, has died in Irvine at 81.

Moore, a Presbyterian minister and former chairman of radio and TV for the Southern California Council of Churches and for the Los Angeles Church Federation, died Saturday at his home in the Orange County city.

He was a successful parish minister in Ohio before deciding to become a radio specialist, and he came to Los Angeles with a family and no job--just a revolutionary idea.

He had tinkered with radio broadcasting before deciding on a full-time ministry over the airwaves, a plan that was to eventually result in nominations for many of of radio and television’s top awards.

He attended the National Broadcasting Co.’s institute in Los Angeles and, after graduating, approached Dr. Louis H. Evans Sr., pastor of Hollywood Presbyterian Church, one of the nation’s largest, about a Christmas broadcast. The resulting program featured James Stewart, Dennis Morgan, Virginia Mayo and other prominent Hollywood figures and so impressed Evans that he made Moore his first minister of radio and television, a position he held for several years.

Moore eventually became director of radio and television for the Synod of Southern California for the United Presbyterian Church and then executive director of the Commission on Radio-Television-Films for the Council of Churches of Southern California.

In 1972, he was named executive director for the Religious Radio-Television-Film Assn. of Southern California.

His longest-running and most-celebrated TV programs included “Give Us This Day,” “Faith of Our Children” (which won six local Emmy awards) and “Great Churches of the Golden West” (which featured 500 churches over 13 years and received a special Governor’s Award Emmy).

In 1973, the year before he retired, Moore produced 65 programs on Channel 2, 52 on Channel 4, 26 on Channel 7 and 52 each on Channels 11 and 13, along with countless radio spots.

Moore mused about his career in an interview on the eve of retirement, saying that “my greatest success was not so much what I did, but that a warm body got into the ecumenical field in this way. . . . I was the bell cow that kind of set a pattern for it.”

A funeral service for Moore, who did his graduate work at Princeton Theological Seminary, Western Reserve University in Cleveland and UCLA, will be held at 11 a.m. Thursday at Pacific View Chapel in Newport Beach.

Survivors include his daughter, Gloria Rothschild, a sister, a brother and five grandchildren.