Statistics released at the time of his Radio Aotearoa dumping recorded him as taking 13,000 calls a month from his nationwide audience. Membership of his Ruru Club ran into the many thousands.
By his reckoning he was too popular for his own good. "Commercial jealousy closed me down. I was blacked out by the faceless ones," he says of his Radio Aotearoa demise.
But Papa Ruru is not the type to get his tail feathers in a spin. He figured if he couldn't come to the listeners via radio they could come to him in person, so he took his show to packed marae around the country.
He estimates more than 10,000 turned up when he broadcast from Tama (Tamatekapua meeting house) at Ohinemutu. That they did prompted the then relatively new broadcaster, Radio Te Arawa, to snaffle him up for itself.
Papa Ruru was back on his perch informing and entertaining on night-time radio beaming across the region. Again, the people came to Papa Ruru.
"We were broadcasting from the State Insurance building in Hinemoa St. We lived there for a while and there were always so many people staying from all over I could have opened a marae - of course it was strictly illegal."
Papa Ruru is amused the building's become an upmarket apartment complex.
Now retired, he has a thousand tales to tell of his night-time radio years but we take him back far further - to his upbringing as the adopted son of the late Bishop Fred Bennett and his wife who whangaied him when his father was presumed dead on Monte Cassino's bloody battlefield.
"My mother was pregnant when he joined the Maori Battalion so his brother took me on as one of his own, but it turned out my dad, Albie [Bennett], wasn't dead but in a prisoner of war camp. He'd been shot down by a German machine gun; the first bullet hit him in the head, the second bounced off two coins and a Bible in his pocket next to his heart. He always said he owed his life to two lire, the Good Word and an Italian doctor."
Growing up with the bishop's own large family, Hori, as he was then known, spent a slice of his early years in Hawke's Bay, returning to Rotorua for the final four years of his secondary schooling.
"I was at the high school when it was co-ed, in the 1st XV, the 1st XI, the school's senior athletics champ, senior champ in tennis and swimming so I guess there's a bit of glory there."
It was glory well-deserved. At 14, Hori could have shown a few World Cup cricketers a thing or two. In a match against Takapuna Grammar, he took seven wickets for a measly two runs.
Also an academic achiever, his ambition had been to enter law and he spent a brief period at Victoria University before the two parted company.
"I tossed a coin, said if it's heads I'll work for the government, if tails come up it will be the police."
Tails it was, his musical talents taking him into the seamy life of an undercover cop.
"I was always a singer, could play most instruments so the bosses put me in coffee bars and night clubs to find drugs; it was 1960 and they were quite new to New Zealand. I didn't know the slightest thing about them, I was innocence personified, but they thought I ought to be able to bust open some drug cartel."
That didn't quite happen during his three years as a "special duties officer" (police speak for undercover cop), but he did learn a lot about life; the knowledge compounded when he moved on to the tough territory of Auckland's Wharf Police.
His entertaining gigs continued. "I was even in the police choir."
Hori gives thanks to his mother for his musicality. "She bought me a guitar when I was a kid, paid for music lessons. I was an all right singer so got into Guide Kiri and Guide Kiddo's concert parties."
Rotorua was a popular location for film-makers - bit parts in movies came young Hori's way.
From the police, Hori went to the Mt Wellington Borough Council in an advisory role. "We opened the second Citizens Advice Bureau in the country." The job took him to Brisbane's Expo and he's spent time in West Germany on a Rotary scholarship.
Seconded from the council to Maori Affairs - "the council still paid my wages" - he was a prime mover in building a marae on Mt Wellington.
As the project wound down, Radio Aotearoa was winding up. Cue Hori Bennett channelling Papa Ruru.
"Since then my life hasn't exactly been clouded in privacy."
PAPA RURU HORI GEORGE BENNETT
Born: Rotorua, 1942.
Education: Early years Rotorua Primary and in Hawke's Bay, Napier Boys' High, Rotorua High School.
Family: Four daughters, "many" moko (grandchildren), four tuarua (great grandchildren).
Interests: Family, music, golf, "I got to a 1 handicap at the Grange [Auckland]", reading "I live in a veritable library", train buff.
Personal philosophy: "If something's got to be done it can be done just as well by Maori."
