As with his followers, the immediate task for Jones was finding a job. His family could not survive simply on offerings, because members were struggling with financial problems of their own and Jones had no drawing power in his new home. As Jones had hoped, Marceline lined up a social worker’s position at Mendocino State Hospital, which would become one of the Temple’s best sources of jobs. And Jones, with his education degree from Butler University and a California teaching credential, landed various jobs as a schoolteacher. He substituted at first, generally in hamlets outside Ukiah proper, such as Redwood Valley, where his family lived, and Potter Valley. Then he taught sixth graders at rural Boonville, a forty-five-minute commute. By the fall of 1966, the polite, well groomed teacher, who had initially received good ratings from his superiors, had become a controversial adult-school teacher in Ukiah. He taught only one course each semester, and was paid five dollars an hour for six hours a week of teaching. Yet his classes in American history and government drew over fifty students each, making them among the most popular classes. Unbeknownst to officials at the time, Jones’s popularity was guaranteed, since Jones encouraged his church members—Ijames and Beam among them—to attend to get their high school diplomas.
In addition to his own salary and educational benefits to his members, the teaching job provided Jones with some standing in the community and provided a forum for his views—and to some extent, for indoctrination and recruiting. Discarding the textbooks, he instead moderated discussions, liberally sprinkled with humor and his own attacks on the U.S. government and overpopulation. Speaking of unwanted babies, he went so far as to say the Catholic church opposed abortion because it wanted to rule the world, and he advocated masturbation as a substitute for sex, describing his own technique. Some students thought that Jones promoted socialism in an oblique way. A number of students complained to the administration.
When Jones suspected the school administration had begun spying on him, he posted Temple members at the doors and locked the windows even on warm nights. Having protected himself against eavesdroppers, he went on quasi-Marxist diatribes, lectured on religion and even demonstrated bits of his “extrasensory perception.” Using reverse psychology, he said he would not allow any students to join the Temple, since he did not want to be accused of recruiting in the classroom. Yet almost a dozen students were converted.
With Christine Lucientes, his first move was a harmless compliment about her gaudy flower-print dress. Jones’s attention cheered her up. Then he made several revelations about her and her family, tidbits that she thought were family secrets. A short time later, a church member carried a message from Jones to the young woman: stop hitchhiking. Shortly thereafter, she saw the wisdom of the warning. Juvenile authorities started taking unchaperoned young girls into custody for hitchhiking.
After that, Chris Lucientes was prepared for an invitation to the Temple services. Shyly, she took a seat in the rear of a rented church and, somewhat confused, watched and listened as Jones called out people and made revelations. One by one, the people came to be blessed by Jones, touched by his gentle hands. As one Temple chronicler wrote, “She had the impression that he was only a servant standing there. One would be hard put, she thought, to read collusion, or any kind of chicanery into these holy proceedings, for looking into their eyes, even the most hardened sophisticate must confess that these men and women—and above all Jim—are honest and earnest and for real.” Thus Chris Lucientes was enlisted for life.24
Another Jones student, named Wanda Kice, decided to attend a Temple service at Church of the Golden Rule, a communal-style organization engaged in fellowship with the Temple. She was surprised to find many adult school classmates there listening to Jones preach. She too would join, and would bring in her husband and children.
The Golden Rule church in Willits presented a rare opportunity for Jones. The organization had declined from a peak of seven hundred members throughout the Far West to a mere two hundred in California alone. Still, the church was wealthy, endowed with over 16,000 acres, including Ridgewood Ranch lands, once home to the great racehorse Seabiscuit. Somewhat isolated in their utopian community, they ran a farm and a dairy, attended church services every morning, and did unto others as they would have others do unto them.
So, when Jones professed interest in starting an apostolic community of his own, they received him warmly. They allowed the Temple to use their schoolhouse for meetings until Jones could find a church of his own. During the summer of 1966, the Temple moved a piano to the Golden Rule school and started to hold services there.
Like the early visits to Father Divine, the relationship between the organizations was harmonious at first, with swimming for the children and communal dinners. But it soon became apparent that Jones had designs on the Golden Rule. Some Golden Rule members were drawn to the vibrant young faith healer who spoke of injustice in America and black oppression. Then the Temple tried to recruit more. That violation of the “Rule” made elders suspicious of Jones’s motives when he made a gradual merger move. The church board voted down the merger proposal, partly because the Temple revolved around the worship of Jones’s personality. 25
Homeless again, the Temple packed away its piano. During the fair-weather seasons, Jones conducted services in the Swinney family’s yard, claiming to use his powers to make occasional rains stop. But when winter ushered in the heavy rains, he gathered his people in his own garage—as he had in his boyhood loft—and preached to them from a chair while they sat shoulder-to-shoulder on the concrete, like children at his feet.
The Temple had become an extended family for those who had traveled west. At last, Jones had penetrated the barrier of blood relationships—and brought a sizable number through it. As father to them all, a living standard of love, Jones made the rounds to their homes in the hills and hollows, chatting, enjoying their company, listening, showing concern for their well-being and understanding for their problems. As a friend and counselor, he listened as no man could listen, with dark eyes mirroring understanding, empathy and love. Without sounding preachy, he talked about the need to help and love one another. He would break up a fight between two children, then sit down on the ground with them for a couple of hours to convey the message. No problem or concern was too small to bring to his attention; he took on a remarkable burden of caring, while demanding little in return. Only with apology in his voice would he ask members to do things for their church. “Darling, I hate to ask you this....” People did not mind helping someone work on his car, or harvest grapes or dig a septic tank. They were loving one another and loving Jim Jones.
While recruiting proceeded slowly, cautiously, by invitation only in Ukiah and the surrounding areas, the Temple settlers coaxed some of their former Indiana cohorts into joining them in the West Coast paradise of open spaces, vineyards and orchards. After a barrage of phone calls and letters, and two years of haggling with her husband, Christine Cobb gave him an ultimatum in 1967. “I’m going,” she said. “If you want to go, you can.”
James Cobb, Sr., acceded to his wife’s urgings, though it meant that the experienced steelworker would end up changing truck tires and doing maintenance work at menial wages. His oldest son, James Cobb, Jr., stayed behind temporarily in Indianapolis so he could finish the season with his high school baseball team. A decade earlier, he had been the little boy with the ear problem. Now he was seventeen, eyeing college athletic scholarships and a possible pro baseball career.
After his team was edged in state playoffs, young Cobb turned his thoughts westward. Using money from his precious coin collections, he paid for his own food on the cross-country bus trip. He reached San Francisco dreaming, as he had since the age of twelve, of walking into the San Francisco Giants training camp as an unknown eighteen-year-old and taking his place alongside the likes of Willie Mays. But having passed over the Golden Gate Bridge and threaded north through Marin County and out into miles of open farmland, he soon realized that Ukiah was indeed the “boo
ndocks,” as his high school coaches had warned him.
Worse blows were yet to come. Even a cursory look around town told him that Ukiah was as white as the whitest sections of his hometown —and inside the Temple there was not a single young black man with his interests. Still, everyone tried to make him feel welcome. Temple teen-agers took him and his sister on a tour of the town. Though the escorts talked more about the war in Vietnam than baseball, he could not help but like them. Within a few days of his arrival, his newfound friends threw a church welcoming party in his honor. Though basically shy, Jim Cobb, at Jones’s insistence, taught the dozen or so Temple teen-agers big-city dances.
“Maybe this place is all right after all,” Cobb told himself. His heart, not his skin color, mattered in this large family where everyone seemed committed to racial equality. In the context of Jones’s church, perhaps he could nurture the spirit of compassion and giving; he always knew it was inside himself, but did not know how to tap it.
“Self-sacrifice” held more appeal in the abstract than in practice. As defined by Jones, it pried Cobb away from his first love, athletics. In sermons on the evils of competition, Jones railed about brutality in sport. “If you got hurt, then you would be dumped. The coach doesn’t really care about you.” Jones used competitive sports as a metaphor for the capitalist system and inhumanity. So that none of his listeners would suspect that his antisport message was in part personal bitterness dating to childhood experience, Jones bragged of his own athletic prowess, claiming falsely that Butler University had awarded him an athletic scholarship.
Much of what Jones said made sense to Jim Cobb, but the lure was too strong. He played football while Jones preached his antisport message. Jones reluctantly let him play basketball too, and young Cobb won printed accolades. Then it was spring, time for his favorite sport. But, knowing that Jones frowned on baseball and worrying that someone would catch him, Jim Cobb could not concentrate properly in spring training. Finally, Jones brought young Cobb before the congregation: “Well, you played football, and that’s a savage game.... Then you played basketball. Okay, there’s nothing wrong with that. But baseball! Now, what are you going to do with your life?” Though it hurt him to do it, Jim Cobb, burdened by guilt, quit the team.
Jones chose an ideal area for building a closed community. Most Temple members lived isolated outside the city in a number of unincorporated bedroom communities tucked in valleys formed by the Russian River. Potter Valley and Redwood Valley shared both a timeless ambience of Americana and a conservative guarded attitude, especially toward the long-haired city people.
Redwood Valley, home to many Temple members and to Jones himself, lay nestled in modest pine- and oak-studded hills. With small vineyards, orchards and pastures, and only one lumber concern, Redwood Valley got light traffic even along its main road with its 1950s vintage food market, one tavern, car garage, barbershop. There was little population pressure—yet the old-timers who held bull sessions every afternoon in the volunteer fire department still longed for the days when everyone knew everyone on a first-name basis.
The arrival of Jones and his interracial flock in Redwood Valley aroused more curiosity than alarm at first. The Jones family took up residence less than a mile from the center of town in a roomy house with a cinder-block foundation and a view of surrounding hills. Rows of grape vines stretched from the house to the main road, a hundred yards or so away. A tributary of the Russian River cut across the back of the property.
In that idyllic setting, life inside the Jones household at first approximated the harmonious image promoted in the Temple services and in the community. The Joneses raised their children in a secure, homey atmosphere. They had love, affection, stability—and father and mother figures who embraced one another in front of their children. Marceline enjoyed relieving Esther in the kitchen and making fried chicken. Jim roughhoused with his children on the lawn. When the weather warmed up, the family took outings together, for a swim and a picnic lunch. At clear Cold Creek, they shot white water rapids on inner tubes; Jim liked to sit on his easy chair on a little island while the family dogs fussed over him.
Stephan Jones preferred Lake Mendocino because they sometimes ran into other Temple members there. Sometimes they played football; even the Jones children themselves had enough bodies to organize a game, though their father never played.
Things began to spoil their fun, however. One day, a few teen-agers were stoning waterfowl. The Jones family gave chase, and the minister collared one boy, shaking him furiously and lecturing him. Stephan was proud.
Another time, rednecks at the lake shouted “nigger” and “nigger lover” at church members. It was a discouraging awakening for people who had wanted to escape Indiana bigotry. So Jones and his followers decided they could tear out some of the vineyards in front of the pastor’s house and construct their own pool. For these midwesterners, a private pool for the children exceeded all their dreams. But Jones had taught his people the lesson that his mother instilled in him: they could do anything if only they channeled their spirit. With a borrowed tractor and hand tools, they attacked the sandy earth with the same decisiveness and dedication that would mark the Temple for years.
Once the pool, with heater and diving board, was finished, it seemed silly for the Temple to go begging for space for services in the Grange Hall and elsewhere. The Temple commissioned an architect to build a church directly over the pool. They hired a construction company for the major work, and Archie Ijames, himself a carpenter, directed a crew of Temple volunteers to complete the job. Religious people did not always make the best laborers and carpenters, however; they came late, left early, kept one eye on the clock and half their mind on the dinner table. Even the hard workers had to be waltzed through their tasks, step by step. And even then, the church wasted a fair amount of time rectifying blunders—windows put in upside down, wall panels hung incorrectly.
When it was completed, Ijames’s headache subsided. Those who had contributed their labor and money took great pride in the modern redwood building with its peaked roof. Their monument to collective action—a church with a swimming pool inside—became a curiosity around town. Yet it suited the Temple’s needs perfectly; they even installed an institutional kitchen where they could heat and serve their potluck dinners. And as an ornamental touch, plastic stained-glass-style windows with an inspirational Temple logo—a sunburst and the dove of peace—were added above the pulpit in the front and the pool in the rear. Jones had planned ahead with this imposing physical plant; it was large enough to accommodate every man, woman and child in the valley. Someday he would fill it.
The nearby two-story shake-roofed parsonage became an extension of the church. The house drummed with activity day and night. As the family dined in a spacious yellow kitchen, Jones often read the paper and took phone calls. But he still kept track of everyone, managing to convince the children that he used the powers of ESP to detect the food hidden beneath their plates, to discern when they were lying to him.
After dinner, the family usually retired to the living room. Across from the cinder-block fireplace, Jones liked to stretch out in his leathery recliner chair to read and watch television. His family joined him in watching the news and his favorite show, “Hogan’s Heroes,” a situation comedy about American soldiers in a Nazi prison camp.
The Joneses retired to separate bedrooms at the rear of the main floor, with a bathroom separating them. On the right was Jones’s room, furnished as sparely as a college dormitory. On his bookshelves, he kept the Bible and books about religions; books on Hitler, Lenin, Marx and revolution; books on nuclear war and organized crime; books about psychology and mind control. In a closet to the right of his bed, he stowed a shotgun. In a vanity, he stored his medicines.
With windows overlooking the vineyards, Marceline’s room felt more spacious and sunny. The children and older women—Esther and Lynetta—lived upstairs in more crowded quarters. The children wanted for little; they had a record
player, athletic equipment and bicycles. Like other church children, they dressed neatly with short hair; Jim Jones wanted his people to look and act like doers, not hippies.
Although the “rainbow family” symbolized the Temple’s brotherhood, a sibling rivalry developed, as Mrs. Baldwin had once predicted. Stephan, the only natural child, felt that his brothers and sisters resented him, and perhaps he resented some of them. He believed church members considered him a brat while they adored his brother Jimmy. Friction erupted sometimes into teasing and fighting. Jimmy taunted Stephan as “white trash,” and Stephan called Jimmy a “nigger.” When Jimmy tattled on Stephan for using that taboo word, Stephan would be reprimanded or spanked. Their parents tried to put a stop to it, but emotions were not as easily legislated in a family as in a church.
Home life was often idyllic for the children. Diversions abounded in that Huck Finn-like setting. A church member built a treehouse for them near the creek. The kids all swung on a rope from a thick tree limb. And among the grape vines, they played cowboys and Indians, war games and hide and seek.
Reverence for life, all life, was taught in the Jones household, primarily by Lynetta. As with Jim, something about her attracted animals. Dogs and cats would frisk about her when she walked to the berry patch or nap at her feet while she sat dragging on a hand-rolled cigarette by the camellias at the back porch—the only place Jones permitted her to smoke in his house. Although she was an activist of sorts who worked with a local senior citizens group and the Red Cross, Lynetta was a little bit of an embarrassment to Jones; he had to explain her drinking, by saying she drank beer on doctor’s orders. To explain her absence in church, he said that she had donated heavily.
Many of Lynetta’s attitudes rubbed off on Stephan. Though many boys grew up with BB guns, he did not hunt. When the creek lost its water in late summer, he scrambled down the bank with a bucket and tried to save the fish. His major chores involved the care of dogs, cats and farm animals. His favorite pet was a mongrel named Husky, but there was also a monkey named Leo, plus two family nags—Tubby and his cantankerous offspring Sonny. Sonny’s blackguard reputation was enhanced considerably when he tossed Jones off on his head. The pastor’s survival was declared a “miracle” at church; later he would claim someone drugged the horse in an assassination plot.
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