Harold I. Hansen

Who was Harold I. Hansen?

Harold I. Hansen was a major theatre professor at Brigham Young University and the director of the Hill Cumorah Pageant from 1937-1977, excluding the years during World War II in which it was not held.

Hansen was born in Logan, Utah. Hansen did his undergraduate education at Utah State University. He then received an offer of a graduate assistantship at the University of Idaho to continue studies in drama, but at the urging of David O. McKay he accepted the call he had already received to serve in the Eastern States Mission. Hansen had very much hoped to serve in Denmark. It was while a missionary in the Eastern States mission that Hansen first served as director of the Hill Cumorah Pageant. Although pageants had been produced at the Hill Cumorah the previous two years, 1937 was the first year that H. Wayne Driggs' script, which would be the basis of the pageant until 1987, was used. Thus as the first director Hansen essentially had to figure out the ways to move from the script to actual production that would remain the main outline of the production for the next half-center, or ten years beyond his retirement as director.

It was also there that he met Betty Kotter, also serving as a missionary in the mission, who he later married. They were actually married at the flagpole on the Hill Cumorah on July 16, 1940, just before a production of the Hill Cumorah Pageant, and about a year after Hansen had finished his mission. Harold would later claim this was where he and Betty first met, but she claimed the story he told of their first encounter was largely made up. They were Sealed in the Logan Temple the following month.