“I love television news, and I love this job, but this new challenge came calling,” Steve, 47, says. “I’m well looked after here and I wasn’t looking around, but it’s an opportunity to grow and expand my game.”

The decision took awhile, he says. “I looked out over the newsroom and I thought, I’ve loved my time here, I’ve done every job in here, and loved every second of it, and yet I knew I was ready for a new challenge.”

From his start at the station in 1982, Steve worked overnight radio, then became a part-time and then full-time news reporter, then weekend sports anchor. I remember it well, as I started at CFRN within a month of Steve.

He came from CKRD Red Deer; I came from CFCW Camrose. We trained together on the radio news desk and then worked together in the news and public affairs division for the next 15 years. I watched as Steve rose through management ranks as assignment editor, sports director and senior executive producer.

“There was lots of, “Oh, he’s the bosses’ son,’” remembers Bruce, still spry and sharp at 78. He was manager of news, sports and public affairs back then. “That’s why he had to work harder to prove himself, and that’s what he did.”

Bruce knew firsthand the experience of following in big footsteps, as he succeeded his father Bill running the newsroom at the station, Edmonton’s first television outlet, started in 1954 by broadcast pioneer Dick Rice. Bill joined the Sunwapta Broadcasting outfit just two years after it opened from its headquarters on Stony Plain Road and 184th Street.

He ran the news operation for the next nine years, until he fell ill. When Bill died in February 1965, Bruce was in Saskatchewan, working as Public Relations Director for the Saskatchewan College of Physicians and Surgeons, who were battling the Tommy Douglas government over its Medicare plans.

The way Bruce tells the story, Dick Rice approached him right after Bill’s funeral, and asked if he might be interested in taking up where his father had left off. He accepted, and CFRN got Bruce Hogle, and thankfully Saskatchewan got Medicare and so did the rest of Canada.

“It was a heck of a job in those early days,” he remembers. “We had freedom to do the stories that mattered, and Dick Rice made it clear right from the beginning that I was a manager on par with the radio station manager and the television station manager. He told me they wouldn’t dictate what stories we could cover and what we could and couldn’t say, and they didn’t. With the freedom to do the job, news showed it could generate substantial ad revenue, and it did.”

Bruce also assumed the mantle of his father’s on-air editorials, and he delivered them with a panache that was distinctive and thought provoking. “It took me awhile to get the hang of it,” he remembers. “I knew I would be compared to my father, so I waited for three months to do them.”

For the next 20-some years, his “Minitorials” were a fixture on CFRN’s supper-hour Eyewitness News. In 1989, Bruce became general manager of the radio stations and from 1991 to 1996 served as general manager of CFRN-TV. He then “retired” to run Bruce Hogle Communications.

Bruce was a founding member of the Radio and Television News Director’s Association of Canada (RTNDA) and served as its president in 1974-75. In 1998, he was inducted as a Member of the Order of Canada in 1998 and was named one of the “100 Edmontonians of the Century” in 2004 for his significant contributions to the broadcast media and community.

Earlier this summer, it was announced that Bruce is to be inducted into the Canadian Association of Broadcaster’s Hall of Fame this coming November. He will join some great Edmonton broadcasters who share the honour, including Dick Rice, ITV (now Global Edmonton) founder Dr. Charles Allard, CFCW/CKRA-FM pioneer Hal Yerxa, CHQT (now Cool 880) founder Lew Roskin and legendary CHED station manager Jerry Forbes.

The senior Hogle laments the loss of individual station ownership and the unbridled power of conglomerates that now control most of Canada’s mainstream radio, television, print and even some web content. “It is a concern, what is happening,” he says.

Speaking at an Edmonton luncheon recently, Bruce said of journalists: “I think we have a deep responsibility to say what has to be said to cover what needs to be said.”

For his part, Steve says the state of the news business wasn’t a major factor in his decision to move on September 7th. “I’m unbelievably grateful for the opportunity and I’ll never forget the people I’ve worked with, the people I’ve met beyond the building and the viewers we serve,” Steve says.

“I am leaving with mixed emotions, for sure. I’m just absolutely thrilled with the opportunity from the Alberta Research Council, but I know I will miss the people here at the station.” Hogle will hand the reins over to managing editor Glenn Kubish, and is confident he will do, as he says, “a bang-up job. He’s cut from the Hogle cloth, you know.”

Steve’s 24-year-old son Zack is working in media arts and may well continue the tradition somewhere down the line. But for now, the run at CFRN is over, the streak complete at a half century plus one.