Ten years after what was supposed to be his retirement, veteran radio announcer David Lopes reaches a significant milestone today 50 years on the air at Bermuda Broadcasting Company.He never got to enjoy early retirement in 2002. He instead went right back to work on his 6am to 10am shift.Mr Lopes is the company's longest-serving employee and has outlasted equipment and co-workers.He saw the station switch from AM1340 to FM89 during equipment upgrades a few years ago; vinyl discs are no longer played, nor are eight track tapes or cassettes.With more radio stations in the past, there's also more competition.Mr Lopes has changed with the times and in his 70th year isn't thinking about retiring for good.“Retirement age was 60 with the ZBM plan and you could either go five years early or five years later and I was 59 at the time and decided to take retirement and don't regret it,” he explained. “I was prepared to either continue on or say goodbye if that was how it was going to be, but they wanted me to stay and I was prepared to stay and I'm still there. Definitely no regrets.“When I look back in my career in radio it is almost like a blip. When I look ahead I don't see a finish line, and I'm not looking for a finish line.“So long as people want me there and my health holds up I'll continue on.“So many people in broadcasting abroad have called it quits in this past year and I guess it is looking at me somewhere down the road but I'm not looking at it.“I really feel sorry for somebody like [CBS' ‘60 Minutes' presenter] Andy Rooney who retired and within three weeks he was dead. Why retire, to sit at home in a chair and wait to die? That's not me. The bottom line is I thoroughly enjoy what I do.”Not that the veteran announcer would be bored in retirement.He regularly farms on his family property and since 1959 has been delivering fresh milk to Dunkley's prior to starting his morning shift. He wakes with the chickens around 4am and, after his shift ends, is back tending to his farm.“I've been working for ZBM for 50 years but was delivering fresh milk to the dairy for over 50 years so that early shift fitted in with one I was doing before, in my high school days,” he explained.Harness racing is a passion for Mr Lopes who races at Vesey Street and now has his grandsons Tyler and Brandon competing, too.“Their sister Brianna will celebrate her 11th birthday [today],” he revealed. “She loves the farm, likes to come here and help with the feeding. She's my kind of girl.”Mr Lopes started at the station about a year out of high school after working briefly in real estate and then as a teller at the Bank of Butterfield.He had to work hard to prove himself worthy of the job at ZBM for which he had no experience or qualifications.He remembers “taking a newspaper and standing in front of the mirror and reading it every day to get that monotone out of my voice”.“I was a shift announcer filling in wherever I was needed when ZBM finally agreed to take me on,” he said. “Gordon Robinson, who was the manager at the time, and Pat Dunch decided to give me a shot and it wasn't until February of the following year [in 1963] that I took over the morning show on what was then ZBM2.“The guy who was doing it got sick and I filled in for him and Trevor Critchley was the programme director at the time and he said ‘you like doing that shift don't you?' and I said ‘yeah, it fits in with my lifestyle a lot better'. He said ‘the guy who has been doing it wants out and wants to work afternoons, so you take it over'. That's how I got started.”Mr Lopes has left his mark on radio over the years and was the first host to invite guests into the studio for morning chats. He also introduced a talk segment years ago. As one might expect considering the times we live in, he now has a computer in his studio to help carry out various tasks.“Virtually all commercials are loaded into a computer which I do first thing in the morning,” he said. “And in some cases I even read the news. That's good and also bad.“When I started, with a small operation like ZBM, you got a chance to do everything read the news, sports, commercials and now everything is specialised.”In a bid to add new features to radio, Mr Lopes suggested to management that they introduce a talk show.“About 15 years ago we had a meeting and things needed to be revitalised because it was lagging a little bit and I suggested maybe we should do talk,” he recalled. “My opinion is there is too much talk radio right now, every station has a talk show and you've got the same people calling up and I think it is too much.“The best day is Fridays because people do like to talk about the old times. I even have school teachers calling saying they urge their children to listen on Fridays so they can learn a little bit about Bermuda's history.”He added: “Since ZBM2 went off the air and we went on to FM89, which was a business decision, even though I still do a bit of talk I try to entertain, educate and inform people.“The computer comes in very handy for that because every day I try to pick a story that The Royal Gazette would run in the Well I Never column and other humanitarian stories. I go looking for that stuff every day and try to keep it as brief as I can.“Interviews are something else I started in the early 1980s when Wendy Davis was reading the news in the morning. On May 12 — 1982 or ‘83 — I asked Wendy if she knew what day it was and she looked a bit surprised that I would ask her that on the air and said no she didn't know.“I said ‘today is ZBM's birthday, that ZBM started broadcasting on May 12, 1946'. We started to chat back and forth on various topics and when Wendy moved on I started having people come into the studio for interviews. Most radio stations in Bermuda now do morning interviews.“There are more radio stations and in a small community like this I'm not sure they are all going to be able to survive.“The advertising pie is only so big and that is shrinking anyway. That's one of the reasons why I try to do something a little different in the morning.”