In summer of 1946 Marceline got a new roommate, a Richmond native, named Evelyn Eadler, and they became good friends. The two young women had no car and little money, but they did everything together, sharing confidences and simple pleasures. Marceline sometimes read the Bible to her. To escape the hospital environment, they would walk downtown for a nickel cup of coffee at the railroad station restaurant.
In the last year or so of her nurse’s training, Marceline began talking to Evelyn about a handsome young orderly who had helped her one day with a particularly grim task. A pregnant woman had died of trichinosis. The orderly on call, a handsome fellow named Jim Jones, had seemed visibly touched as they prepared the body for the undertaker. His sensitivity and concern, especially for the suffering of the woman’s family, instantly attracted Marceline.
Through their work, the two became better acquainted. Soon they were dating. Jim was like a breath of fresh air compared to most men. He was compassionate and gentle and principled, but seemingly humble. As he pursued her with flattering diligence, her respect for him grew. Here was a serious young man who spoke so much of truth, honesty, of helping others, who so confidently presented his analysis of social issues and world events. How could she not admire a young man who said he had been a star on his high school basketball team but quit because the coach slurred black opponents? How could there possibly be a more compatible man for her?
More than most young men, Jim Jones knew how to sell himself while courting. Already he was an actor and even a con man. He had cultivated the knack not only for perceiving what people wanted to hear but also for saying it in an appealing way with a performer’s timing. His reading and his experiences at home and on the streets of Lynn and Richmond schooled him well in human nature and provided him with a reservoir of information, insights and anecdotes. And if none of those fit a given situation, he possessed the self-assurance, imagination and theatrical ability to fabricate, fantasize or bend a thought or a story to suit his needs. And in Richmond his storytelling knew even fewer constraints because here he was virtually unknown. Around the hospital, there was no advantage to presenting himself as a would-be preacher; instead he emphasized his medical interests and general humanitarian aims.
Physical attraction aside, Marceline could not help but be drawn to the pure energy of young Jones. What she saw was a contagious personality trumpeting a wonderful dream, not fully drawn, of making a better world. Something about his presence—his musical voice, his chesty posture, his gaze, his unquestionably sincere manner, his dark hair and dazzling mind—made a believer of Marceline Baldwin. In part, she believed in his potential for greatness; in part, she went on faith that he and she together possessed the power to serve mankind. Already, Jim Jones had appointed himself a sort of ambassador of positive thinking. Like his mother, he believed he could do anything if he put his mind to it. He spoke often of pulling himself up “by the bootstraps.” He promised, in effect, a ready answer to aimlessness and inspired Marceline by presenting himself as a living example of his own message—humanitarianism mixed with ambition. The extreme contrast between his background and Marceline’s worked to his advantage. He could and did claim a more informed understanding of the downtrodden. He knew how to stir up guilt and use it to channel people in his own direction. Marceline—perhaps the first to witness Jim Jones as social critic—already was sensitive to the poor. But she found that Jim heightened her awareness of social inequalities and problems by pointing out the failings of the system, including the churches.
As she fell in love with Jim, Marceline began confiding her feelings to her roommate—and Evelyn reinforced them. Jim was very congenial whenever he paused at Evelyn’s nursing station to chat, and he did not seem to mind when Evelyn tagged along with him and Marceline on walks to downtown Richmond for coffee or a movie. After all, Jim came across to practically everyone as a pleasant, well-mannered fellow. He was good to the patients and popular among them, and that was the litmus test in the hospital.
One day in summer of 1948, between their junior and senior years of high school, Jim’s old friend Don came to work at the hospital. Jim had asked him whether he would be interested in filling in as an orderly. Don hesitated because he really wanted to keep his distance from Jim after the shooting incident. But he needed the money, and Jim said there were lots of pretty nurses, so he applied.
Don had assumed he would be an orderly like Jim, an equal, and could go his own way. But he found himself acting as Jim’s flunky. On the pretense of training, Jim had established a boss-employee relationship from the first day.
Jim had been working part time or full time for two years. He knew his way around the hospital, from the main building on the hillside to the student nurses quarters at the end of the L-shaped tunnel. Jim looked and acted the part of an important and efficient young man. He wore a spanking clean white coat, like a doctor, and took pains to keep it clean. His medical vocabulary was impressive; he knew the proper medical terms for common ailments. He had mastered the orderly’s routine, and knew how to impress the nurses, doctors and administrators.
Jim was not working at the hospital simply for monetary reasons —he could have earned more than his $30 weekly salary in a factory. The world of medicine had intrigued Jones since the day he was given that microscope. Bodily functions fascinated him. Witnessing healings as a boy, he could not help but wonder about the relationship between the body and the mind. Also, the hospital was like a community unto itself, crisp and clean, with neatly defined structures, and it appealed to his sense of order. In fact, he was thinking about a possible career in hospital administration. He could visualize himself running a place where people were healed, where he would oversee an institution in the traditionally prestigious health profession. He could satisfy his needs for leadership and could help ease human suffering while earning a good salary. Moreover, his mother could swallow a medical career more readily than a life of preaching. Already it seemed that Jim’s interest in religion was flagging. He started spending less time with his Bible.
Like the little taskmaster from Lynn, Jim hovered over Don, directing him step by step through each procedure. Jim stayed clean because Don did the physical work. Don resented Jim’s behavior, and at home in Lynn he griped to his parents. But at Reid, he was the outsider, the newcomer, so he accepted his travails in silence there.
Not all was slavery under Jim Jones. An important fringe benefit of working at the hospital were the dozens of student nurses, most a cut above the Lynn girls in appearance and maturity. And, since virtually all the doctors were married, many nursing students were willing to date younger men, even high school boys. Don went out with a couple of blond nurses and Jim’s interest in girls seemed to be on the rise too. That summer—around the time Jim came to know Marceline and Evelyn—he told Don that he was taking out from three to five young nurses.
The handsome young orderly had such a solid rapport with nurses that they collaborated with him in his pranks. At the hospital, Jim seemed happier and more comfortable than he ever had been in Lynn, and he relaxed enough to show a sense of humor. Not surprisingly, he delighted in turning the tables on his old friend Don, the athlete who had once knocked him on his duff, someone who could expose his past.
Since childhood Jim had known that Don did not like the dark. While at the hospital, he had listened to Don’s confession of squeamishness about some hospital procedures. Jim promptly assigned Don to sweep the long, dimly lit tunnel that connected the hospital with the nursing quarters. The predawn cleanup seldom was uneventful. Once Don was sweeping a dark corner and came upon a human head, and another time someone threw a limb at him from behind a door. These artificial body parts were training aids for the nurses, but the episodes were nerve-racking nevertheless.
“Let’s go get George ready,” Jim told Don one morning. The two orderlies proceeded to strip George, a man suffering from elephantiasis of the scrotum, in preparation for his bath. Jim then found some reason to coax him in
to a hall just as the nurses gathered for their morning briefing. George stepped out into the hall stark naked, his huge scrotum hanging almost to the floor. The nurses screamed and hollered.
The first time Don was called to the operating room during an emergency surgery, Jim met him at the door. “They have something for you to burn in the incinerator.” The object, longer than a loaf of bread, was wrapped in newspapers. With his arms out, his palms up and his heart in his mouth, Don received the garbage. Jim disappeared, but not before ordering Don to stay with his charge until it was totally burned.
On the elevator the paper soaked through, clung and became translucent. Don could see that he was holding someone’s gangrenous leg. Somehow, he survived the elevator ride and the walk to the incinerator. He tossed it inside and dutifully waited while his stomach did contortions. The leg was halfway consumed by flame, stinking as only burning human flesh can, when Jim arrived. “You can sit here with me until it’s completely burned,” he said.
After Jim blocked the door to the autopsy room until Don had cleaned up every last bloody tool and gory bit of flesh, Don decided to call it quits. He left the hospital, never to return. It was over between him and Jim Jones.
The first victim had escaped.
By fall of that year, 1948, Marceline was in a quandary over young Jim and needed to confide in her friend Evelyn. She was crazy about Jim, and respected him. She used the word “good” to describe his character. But there was a problem: their relationship was getting deeper, approaching a crossroads, and Jim’s age bothered her. Evelyn was startled to learn that Jim was almost four years younger and only starting his senior year in high school. He looked and acted much more mature.
Beyond young love, Jim Jones was facing other changes in the fall of 1948. After a whirlwind stay of several months at Richmond High, he had decided to move on to Indiana University at mid-term. He would be leaving his mother’s second-story apartment on Main Street in Richmond; he would be leaving his sweetheart’s hometown.
In November, Jim Jones collected his last paycheck at Reid Hospital. Though he had continued putting in long hours there while finishing his senior year, he graduated from Richmond High—early and with honors—in winter of 1948-49. It did not matter that he missed the euphoria of the last days of high school. At Richmond High, he had been more of an outsider than ever. His classmates hardly knew him—young Jones had presented himself more as a candidate for hospital administrator than as a friend. Next to a handsome picture that he would use for years to come, the yearbook carried this superficial, mildly mocking tribute: “Jim’s six-syllable medical vocabulary astounds us all.”
His courtship had reached a critical stage. The previous March, Marceline had taken the step of introducing her beau to her parents. She chose her graduation from nursing school as the occasion, and this probably tended to magnify the age factor. The Baldwins were a little concerned that a darkly handsome high school boy was sweeping their trusting daughter off her feet with his aggressive courtship; with flowers, candy, visits and phone calls. On the other hand, they always had trusted Marceline’s judgment, and she never had failed them.
In the space of a few visits, Jim nearly became part of the family. He treated Marci’s parents respectfully, but was not afraid to express his opinions. He eased their apprehensions when he mentioned he was active in a church in Lynn, though he did not say he had dabbled in “tongues.” Jim showed special attention to Grandma Lamb, who was in her eighties, and became a big brother to little Sharon, who was bedridden with rheumatic fever. In turn the family included Jim in their 1948 Christmas ritual. When the tree was trimmed and the lights turned on, Jim was genuinely dazzled. “It’s the most beautiful thing I’ve seen in my life!” he exclaimed, confiding sadly that his family had never bothered with Christmas trees.
As a more formal introduction to their family, the Baldwins invited Jim and Marceline to a dinner with relatives. Rather than dressing up for the occasion, Jim strutted into their house wearing a defiant demeanor, and what had to be his oldest clothes. It was embarrassingly obvious that he felt inferior and thought Marceline’s family uppity. Jim had misread the Baldwins; they were a hardworking, unpretentious middle-class household, not the snobby rich. The Baldwins overlooked Jim’s rudeness. And when Marceline later apologized, they acted as though nothing had been amiss.
When he arrived in Bloomington that January, Jim Jones received a university-required typhoid shot and immediately took ill. While other students bundled themselves against the cold, he sprawled across the lower bunk bed in a cinder-block dormitory near the sorry-looking creek known as Jordan River. His hair was disheveled, his face clammy. His body quaked with chills.
As he lay there, his new roommate, an eighteen-year-old named Ken Lemmons, showed up and expressed surprise that Jim was on his bed, the prized lower bunk. But Jim had a ready answer. For the time being, he said, he was too ill to move. And over the course of a couple of hours, he explained that he never would be able to take the upper bunk because he had an overwhelming fear of heights. Out of compassion, the easygoing Lemmons did not press the issue. The episode—one of the earliest signs of Jim’s hypochondria—also was a classic example of his manipulation.
Of all dormitories on the stately Bloomington campus, that was probably the worst possible assignment for a sixteen-year-old small-town boy starting mid-year. Many of the dorm residents—war veterans on the GI bill—were well into their twenties. Other residents included upper classmen from wealthy families well on their way to graduate school and careers. Again the outsider, the newcomer, Jim Jones had walked in on an established social order, a happy, sometimes chaotic place held together by 1950s-style chumminess and pranksterism. The “guys” would head out in groups to burger joints, or go drinking or girl-watching.
On his dresser at college in Bloomington, Jim displayed a picture of Marceline. His roommate was surprised to learn that this handsome, obviously somewhat older woman was planning to marry Jim in June. What did this mature woman see in an Indiana University freshman just short of seventeen who made so much of his tender age and spoke of pulling himself up “by his bootstraps”?
From the start of school, Jim had been preoccupied with his impending marriage, his future and school. Initially fellow students had taken him for a whiz kid. But Jim’s study habits were shoddy, and he spent as much time expounding his personal philosophy as studying. When his ideas were challenged, he spouted preacherly rhetoric.
Jim Jones kept a Bible in his desk at college and read it regularly, and sometimes talked of going to Bible school. Lemmons, who had been attending Disciples of Christ churches all his life, found Jim’s religious views incongruous and his knowledge of scripture full of holes. On one occasion Jim might bend the Bible to support his own unorthodox views, and on another he might recite dogma in the most rigid of terms. His tendencies were secular and social, his rhetoric primitive and evangelistic. Jim dominated conversations and was intolerant of his roommate’s ideas. Lemmons tried to get a rise out of him by asking pointed questions and introducing Hinduism, Judaism, Catholicism and Eastern Orthodox theology into their conversations. The older student was interested in the ecumenical church movement, but the small-town boy named Jones seemed blind to sophisticated points of theology. When Lemmons asked a question such as, “How do you know Jesus Christ and God are synonymous?,” Jim would simply quote scripture.
Rather than become close to others in the dorm, Jim withdrew; he disliked their immaturity, their indulgent, sinful lifestyle. While the jovial dorm crew raised hell, he sat alone in the lounge, or in his room with the door open so he could hear what was going on. At least once, after a three-day firecracker skirmish, he stood up and lambasted their immaturity. He had worked hard to finance his education; his dormmates, the professionals of tomorrow, were frivolously squandering their opportunity. It disgusted him.
Jim took sanctuary from the dormitory each weekend. He rode the bus to visit Marceline in Richmond, and
sometimes she drove him back to school. He never dated anyone but her; and, while they were apart, they had long affectionate phone conversations. In those months of planning their wedding and their lives together, she was both mother and fiancée to him. They established a joint bank account, and she helped support him.
Jim Jones referred to his prim bride-to-be with the utmost respect. To his dormmate he painted his first erotic experience—supposedly with another woman—as a trauma. He said that, while he worked briefly at a state mental hospital with Marceline, a female patient had attacked and almost raped him. Implicit in his account was a twin boast: that he was virile, and that he was sexually attractive to other women. He would repeat such boasts, obsessively, over the years.
An uneasy truce reigned in the room, though Ken and Jim occasionally had verbal jousts over religion and study habits. Then, late one night a month or so before Jim’s wedding, while Ken was asleep in his upper bunk he was awakened by a sharp pain in the middle of his back. He presumed it was a loose wire in his bed, until he started to hear hissing noises, and felt a push beneath his mattress.
A prick brought him into a sitting position. He peered over the edge of the bed. Jim’s arm was extended, and he was working a long hatpin in and out of the mattress.
“What in hell’s wrong with you?” Ken shouted, leaping to the floor. He was frightened. It did not seem a simple prank; Jim had not even cracked a smile. Ken immediately went to the counselor to complain.
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