In Zion

So long as the world bought Zion candy bars, Zion cookies. Zion lace, Zion books and Zion cement it could smile as it would at Wilbur Glenn Voliva's dire prophecies and belief that the earth is soup-plate shaped. But it could not dispute the grim, lap-jowled prophet's absolute mastery of his own tight sectarian world of Zion City, Ill., on the lake shore 40 mi. north of Chicago. Owner of its communal industries and General Overseer of its Christian Catholic Church, Prophet Voliva banned tobacco, liquor, cinemas, profanity, immodest dress and chewing gum from his realm and ruled its 6,000 inhabitants body & soul.

But Depression came and the outside world stopped buying so many candy bars and cookies. Zionites grew restive, grumblingly drifted off into new sects. Year ago Prophet Voliva's world cracked under him when Zion's industries, once worth $10,000,000, went into receivership (TIME, June 12). Last week that world was heaving in open rebellion.

For a quarter-century Zion's town officials have been Voliva puppets. Last fortnight voters went to the polls, scratched three independents into the school board. Wrathfully last week Overseer Voliva tossed back a vengeful thunderbolt. Closing his parochial school (enrollment : 950), he declared that the town's two public schools (enrollment: 500) could take care of his ousted pupils or shut down too.

Next day the public schools opened as usual, laid plans to run extra shifts for the parochial pupils. Threatened with tar & feathers, Prophet Voliva declared himself a two-gun man ready to kill at the drop of a hat. Then he announced that he would reopen all but the lower grades of his parochial school, require every pupil to take an oath of allegiance to him. Satan and his imps would try to destroy the world sometime in September, he said, and he needed an organization "like Hitler's" to combat them.

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