Messiah from the Midwest

The sad story of a boy and his Bible

The most vivid memories that childhood companions have of James Warren Jones--or "Jonesie," as they called him--are of his funeral sermons for dead animals in the Indiana town of Lynn, where he was born 47 years ago. Once, when he was 13, Jones invited a group of boys to his family's barn, recalls Harlan Swift, now a Chicago insurance executive. Amid burning candles, the aspiring preacher carefully opened a matchbox, revealing a dead mouse. "He had a service all organized," recalls Swift, "a very, very intense dramatic service for that dead mouse." A former classmate, Tootie Morton, was leery of these pet funerals: "Some of the neighbors would have cats missing, and we always thought he was using them for sacrifices."

The major industry in Lynn (pop. 1,360) is casketmaking: there are now four such factories. It was prime territory for the Ku Klux Klan, and George Southworth, now of Miami, recalls that Jones' father took part in the weekly meetings, with sheets and hoods, on a field near town. But other childhood acquaintances do not remember any link between the Klan and the elder Jones, a railroad man who worked only rarely after being gassed in World War I. Jones claimed his mother was an American Indian, but his cousin Barbara Shaffer says, "He made that up to impress somebody." He was an only child; the three lived in a one-story, tin-roofed frame house that has since been replaced by a supermarket.

Before he entered his teens, Jones picked up religion from a neighbor, Mrs. Myrtle Kennedy, who was a devout member of the Church of the Nazarene. He took to carrying a Bible, but no one made fun of the husky boy, who got into fights easily. He was a natural leader, gathering friends around him and telling them what to do.

He would preach to them, sometimes frightening his listeners with visions of a hell where, with senses undiminished, sinners burned forever. His first chance to mount a real pulpit came when he was 14 and working at a nearby hospital; some of his black co-workers invited him to bring his Bible and give a sermon at their church. "You could see there was something haywire even at that time," says Swift. But Mrs. Kennedy's daughter Thelma Manning remembers Jones more fondly: "He had a little white shaggy-haired dog. They were inseparable. I want people to know Jim Jones had a good side."

In 1945 his parents split up (his father died alone in a Lynn hotel six years later, his mother lived until 1977), and he moved with his mother to Richmond, 16 miles away. The Richmond High School 1949 yearbook shows a handsome young man with slick black hair, staring ahead with a slight smile. That year, at 18, he married Marceline Baldwin, a nurse whom he had met at the hospital where they both worked.

Jones briefly attended Indiana University in Bloomington, but left for Indianapolis to preach and later form his own church. He went to night school at Butler University there, and ten years later he finally won a degree in education. At matriculation, he listed his religion as Unitarian, and for a time linked himself to the Methodists, but the first church he founded, called the Christian Assembly of God, had no affiliations. It was in a poor neighborhood, and he won worshipers by distributing free food and helping people find jobs. He raised money by importing monkeys and selling them for $29 apiece. He eventually made enough to pay $50,000 for an old synagogue in a black neighborhood.

He had one son and adopted other children, ultimately eight in all, including blacks and Koreans. He once heard an affluent black doctor at an adoption agency reject a child because he was "too black." Snapped Jones: "Well, I'll take him then." The mayor appointed him the first full-time director of the Indianapolis human rights commission. Jones became increasingly embittered at the racism he encountered. His wife was spat upon while walking with their black child, and when one of his Korean children was killed in a car accident, he later said, he could find white undertaker to bury her.

These frustrations were accompanied, in late 1961, by a kind of vision of a nuclear holocaust destroying Indianapolis. Having read a magazine article listing a selection of the best places in the world to avoid an atomic war, Jones took his wife and three children to one of them, Belo Horizonte, Brazil. Belo Horizonte did not present many opportunities, however, so Jones moved to Rio to teach at the American school there. "Jim was no fanatic," said a woman who befriended him there. "He had no wild streak at all. They were just normal, rather naive and provincial Mid westerners. They led a simple life, and Jim's main concern was always for those people he saw suffering. He used to stop children in the street and talk to them, help them if he could."

But the church in Indianapolis, now called the Peoples Temple, was suffering from a lack of a charismatic leader, and Marceline was homesick, so Jones decided to return. He affiliated with the Disciples of Christ, a 1.3 million-member denomination, and in 1964 was ordained a minister by that group. But he still considered Indianapolis narrow and racist. A good friend, the Rev. Ross Case, also of the Disciples of Christ, had moved from Indiana to California, and Jones decided to follow him. He eventually brought more than 100 supporters to Redwood Valley in Mendocino County, north of San Francisco. Robert Kauffman, a former bank executive from nearby Ukiah, recalls that Marceline Jones walked into his bank and opened an account of nearly $100,000.

Once established, Jones and his faithful began making evangelistic forays to San Francisco and beyond. He again bought an old synagogue, this one in the run-down Fillmore area of San Francisco's inner city. Using it as his headquarters, he opened an infirmary, a child-care center, a carpentry shop and kitchens for feeding the neighborhood poor. His services were dazzling, with soul and gospel music and dance groups. He attracted increasing numbers of black parishioners (the Peoples Temple was more than 80% black). He involved them in liberal causes, busing them to protest demonstrations, making them canvass for politicians he favored, and ordering them to undertake letter-writing blitzes.

He took them on pilgrimages, one of which brought eleven busloads to Indiana and Florida (to visit his then-retired spiritual mentor Myrtle Kennedy); another brought part of his flock to Washington, D.C., where he had them pick up trash on the Capitol grounds. Editorialized the Washington Post in August 1973: "The hands-down winners of anybody's tourists-of-the-year award have got to be the 660 members of the Peoples Temple . . . who bend over backwards to leave every place they visit more attractive than when they arrived."

Politicians were particularly impressed. Governor Jerry Brown came to the Peoples Temple. San Francisco Mayor George Moscone, who received important help from Jones in his close 1975 election, appointed him to the city's housing authority in 1976. (Said the mayor about last week's horror: "I proceeded to vomit and cry.") The sheriff and district attorney were temple visitors, but Lieutenant Governor Mervyn Dymally outdid them all by dropping in on the 27,000-acre plantation in Guyana that Jones had acquired in 1974.

Vice President Walter Mondale recognized Jones' help in the 1976 campaign and invited him aboard his private plane.

When Jones helped a rally for Rosalynn Carter in San Francisco by busing in 600 loud supporters, he was rewarded with a "Dear Jim" thank-you note hand written on White House stationery. Jones claimed to have received appreciative letters from Senators Hubert Humphrey and Henry Jackson, and HEW Secretary Joseph Califano, among others.

The temple swelled with new members--up to 20,000, Jones claimed. But his services became stranger and stranger. Jones would "heal" parishioners by pretending to draw forth "cancers" that actually were bloody chicken gizzards.

And his megalomania soared.

Said his old associate the Rev. Case: "Jim stopped calling himself the reincarnation of Jesus and started calling himself God.

He said he was the actual God who made the heavens and earth." Jones ordered his followers to buy, and sell to the public, small pictures of him to ward off evil. He demanded for

the temple's coffers all members' savings and earnings, amassing a fortune that a former member estimates at $15 million. Discipline gave way to brutal beatings. It was a progression perhaps foreshadowed way back in Indianapolis when the young preacher once threw his Bible to the floor and yelled at his associates, "Too many people are looking at this instead of looking at me!"

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