The Jones children enjoyed special status in the church. In turn, they were expected to set a model of brotherhood, as sons and daughters of a man revered as prophet or God. Stephan resented sharing his father with Temple children who hung all over him and called him “Father.” Jim Jones was his father, as Stephan sometimes reminded his playmates in no uncertain terms.
From his youngest days, Stephan could remember the crackling energy of Temple services, even ones in Indiana where people climbed through the windows and craned over each other to see the miracle worker who simply was his dad. In Ukiah, he tired of the repetitive marathon sessions. He, his friends and brothers would sneak away from services whenever possible; they would go play somewhere else or climb on the church roof and drop pebbles on the unsuspecting. But the hours of church tedium were more often than not part of the family routine. The children, like others in the church, were given duties. Stephan was named a microphone boy, one of those who hustled a microphone to worshipers so they might make a testimonial to Jones or ask a question. His arms ached and his dedicated expression faded into a grimace whenever he held the mike for the long-winded. And that irreverence infuriated his father.
Escaping was no easy matter. Even if the children had homework to do, they were kept inside the church. Tables were set up around the wrought-iron pool railing, and the children were forced to study with the tempting odor of chlorine under their noses. And there were other distractions too. One night as Jones claimed to communicate with the departed, an eerie howl came out of a vent that ran across the church center beam. Some of the children may have been frightened, but Stephan knew the identity of the “lost spirit”—Patty Cartmell’s daughter Tricia—and how she climbed up there. As Jones’s son, he would be privy to many secrets.
TEN
A Dream of Love
It was not merely that he was handsome in a clean-cut way, nor that he had the manner and appearance of someone who would succeed, nor that his apartment showed good taste and breeding, nor even that he seemed to project goodness. There was a measure of fate involved in their meeting. She and a friend had been hiking along the Lower Great Highway, parallel to the dunes of San Francisco’s Ocean Beach, singing to themselves, “Hey ho, nobody home, eat nor drink nor money have I none, Yet I will be me-er-er-ry....” Suddenly she stopped in front of a garden; she could not help exclaiming how beautiful it was and calling out a compliment to the apparent owner, a good-looking young man standing on the porch. Though a girl friend stood beside him, he was struck by the beauty of the dark-haired young woman in a lavender blouse. At first sight, there was some indefinable chemistry drawing Tim and Grace together; months later chance again would give them the opportunity to meet.
Grace Lucy Grech, a slender, dark-eyed young woman whose brown complexion blended the best of her Mexican and Maltese heritage, was the youngest of four in a family of survivors. She had grown up conscious of the arduous economic journey her parents had traveled, both before and after her birth. Her mother—a native of Guadalajara—came to the United States, married a butcher and ended up working as a seamstress in San Francisco’s Apparel City garment industry.
The family had lived on a hill above Farmer’s Market, where Grace picked up a few cuss words and a mild South of Market Street twang. Then her family stepped up to a better neighborhood, the Sunset-Parkside District out toward the ocean. In that white working-class neighborhood and around Catholic churches, Grace was made to feel inferior over her dark skin and she soon identified with unpopular kids. In her junior year in high school she suffered rejection by her longtime boy friend and was emotionally devastated. Yet with characteristic energy and a positive attitude, Grace Grech immersed herself in school activities at Lincoln High. She was elected vice-president of her eleventh grade class. And in her senior year, she made basketball cheerleader. Though her grades—Bs and Cs—would have qualified her for college admission someplace, she was not really encouraged. When she told her parents about college 106 hopes, they suggested that she go to night school. So she put in eight-hour days downtown as a secretary and attended San Francisco City College at night.
In the fall of 1969, an energetic co-worker coaxed her to march one Saturday against overpopulation and pollution. Grace hardly qualified as an activist, but these were not the most controversial issues of the day. The protest terminated at Civic Center, opposite the City Hall dome. Amid a scatter of countercultural booths, a rally got under way. While her friend Susan went off for literature, Grace tried to listen to the speakers, but a thirtyish man with horn-rimmed glasses interrupted her. “Hi,” he said. She took one look at him and thought to herself: Why do strange men think they’re doing me a favor trying to pick me up? Grace largely ignored the fellow; neither realized they had seen each other before, near the ocean.
When Susan returned, she and the talkative stranger hit it off. His name was Tim Stoen; he said he was in private law practice nearby; he had taken a break from work to attend the nearby rally. He mentioned he was planning to run for Congress as, of all things, a liberal Republican.
When Susan left, Stoen hung around, trying to break through Grace’s coolness. Finally he invited her for a Coke. Having nothing better to do, she went along to a cafeteria near Hastings Law School, then to Stoen’s law offices. His framed diplomas—from Wheaton College in Illinois, from Stanford Law School—put her at ease.
As he told her about himself, Stoen mentioned that he lived in Berkeley. She said she had never seen the Harvard of the West—though she had lived in the Bay Area all of her life—and on the spot he invited her to visit. When they got to his car, she could see why he had kept alluding to it in their conversations. Soon they were whizzing across the Bay Bridge in the stylish new burgundy Porsche Targa.
In Berkeley, the young lawyer showed her around Telegraph Avenue with its boutiques and street gypsies. As they passed one store, he said, “This is where I bought my crystal.” At another, he said, “I buy my clothes here.” Several people called Tim’s name as they walked.
The little tour impressed her less than the furnishings in his South of Campus apartment. She feasted on his art books—exquisitely photographed and printed volumes of fine paintings and objects like nothing she had ever seen. She craved “culture.”
Before too long, other people trickled in, and when a handful had arrived, Grace asked, a touch embarrassed: “You having a party?”
“No. I just tell my friends they’re always welcome.”
These people from First Presbyterian Church, where Stoen belonged to a social action group, tried to draw Grace into their boring shop talk about religion and religious projects, but the nineteen-year-old kept her nose buried in the art books. Later, when the others left, Stoen turned down the lights and put on gentle music. Grace stiffened: how prudent had it been to go home with a worldly thirty-two-year-old bachelor? But rather than having to fend off his hands, she was entertained. He read poetry to her, treated her with respect and kindness, and took no liberties. Instead of dropping her off at a seedy bus station, he drove her home.
Grace, like a lot of urban teen-agers, was a little toughened around the edges, but she had a soft heart and was not beyond naivete. Although she could see through Stoen’s obvious efforts to impress her, she was flattered by his attention. She felt herself falling for this lawyer a dozen years her senior. After a couple of dates, she knew he was special. He was the first person to value her highly, to take enough interest in her to read to her, to teach her. In their Pygmalion romance, Stoen tried to shape Grace as he had shaped himself. For all his breeding, Timothy Oliver Stoen lacked the street smarts of Grace. The child of religious, middle-class parents from Littleton, Colorado, he had been reared with money, attention and recognition. He was blessed with a good mind, and he used it with Protestant perseverance. He had gone through high school and college as a scholar, athlete and devout Christian. He even joined Campus Crusade for Christ. During a year in England on a Rotary Foundation scholarship,
he went behind the Berlin wall with a missionary spirit. “The first thing that I noticed was the blank expression on the faces of everyone,” Stoen told the Rotary Club upon his return to Littleton. “You could tell they were just waiting for the day when they might have some freedom....”
Stoen did not switch modes of idealism—from small-town conservative to urban liberal—until after he graduated from Stanford Law School and gained admittance to the California Bar in 1964. For almost a year he worked in an Oakland real estate office, then he joined the Mendocino County prosecutor’s office in Ukiah. In 1967 he left with the intention of doing legal aid work for flower children in San Francisco’s Haight-Ashbury. Instead Stoen’s charitable instincts took him across the bay to Alameda County, where he adapted his ultrareligious world view to the leftist political climate. He wore a beard and rationalized the purchase of his Porsche as a useful status symbol in the ghetto. He was as ambitious as ever. While representing some black militants—apparently none of note—the young Republican lawyer seriously considered running for the U.S. Congress on an ecology platform. The Democrats, he reasoned, should not get all the liberals by default.
Stoen had first encountered Peoples Temple in Mendocino County in 1967 when, on someone’s advice, he had called on the Temple to help renovate the local legal aid offices. Two dozen cheerful and industrious Temple members showed up the following Sunday morning. And Stoen soon was sending people to the Temple for drug and marriage counseling.
The church’s good deeds and Jones’s character overwhelmed the young attorney, and caused him to revise his definition of religion. For Stoen the clincher was seeing Jones with his sleeves rolled up, scrubbing a toilet in a Temple building. Over the next two years, even while he lived in Berkeley, Stoen drew closer to the Temple. He and Jones became personal friends, and Stoen would drive to Redwood Valley for services, sometimes bringing along friends and girl friends.
At that stage of his life, activist Christianity presented the perfect resolution of Stoen’s fundamentalist background and his political and social liberalization. Jones was selling precisely that. With each visit, Stoen became more taken with Jones’s broad knowledge of current events, the activism of the ministry, the climate of love and perhaps the church’s political potential. He also witnessed a faith healing by Jones, who was then the foreman of the county grand jury. Stoen rationalized the healings, attributing them to the power of love. In any case, the hocus-pocus was eclipsed by the political line, against racial hatred, poverty and the Vietnam war. At the end of 1969—the year Berkeley became a war zone over Peoples Park and Third World student rights—Tim Stoen began to integrate his personal life and his church life.
Smitten as she was, Grace Grech was taken aback when Tim Stoen asked her to meet his friend the “healer.” Both her inner-city savvy and her Catholic upbringing were offended by such claims. Nevertheless she climbed into the Porsche for that first two-hour drive to Redwood Valley.
She wanted the time with Tim, not the religion. Yet she could not help but feel warmth among the varied interracial congregation that sang hymns about brotherhood and embraced one another. She wondered about the man who pulled together this spectrum of humanity. “Is Jim Jones good-looking?”
“Not really,” Tim said. “He’s okay.”
Hearing that, she mistakenly assumed that the man in the pulpit spewing fire with a socialistic fervor was Jones. Then Jack Beam gave way and a very handsome man with hair as black and shiny as coal tar bounded onto the blue-carpeted platform. Applause reverberated from the white linoleum floors to the skylights, as though a rock star had taken the stage. Quieting them with his gentle hand motions, Jim Jones invited his people to greet their neighbors. Everyone hugged. Grace saw at once that Jones emphasized the real world, not the Bible and moldy, pious phrases. Instead of preaching, he unfolded a Sunday newspaper and led a discussion of current events.
Despite those initial positive impressions, Grace Grech could not swallow the hokum that followed. Jones called out names, telling people about their lives. He made prophecies. Then, in ritualistic fashion, he called up a woman said to have cancer and sent her to the bathroom. When she reemerged, Jones claimed that a malignant tumor had been passed from her bowels—and that she now was cured. Grace was as shocked by Tim’s acceptance of the “miracle” as by the display itself.
She also found Jones’s money pitch repugnant, all too similar to the squeeze Catholic priests put on their parishioners. And when the services ended, and the adults were conducting a business meeting, she was appalled to see that children were left to fall asleep on the cold floors. Unbeknownst to Grace, the Temple had been putting the rush on Tim for some time.
In the final push, Jones sent college students Jim Cobb and Mike Cartmell—then two leaders of the church youth group—to visit Stoen at his Berkeley apartment. Cobb and Cartmell were amazed to discover that Stoen was more than willing to cast off his bachelor pad, fancy car and potentially lucrative private practice for a struggling church in the sticks. He wrote Jones a letter on January 9, 1970, as he prepared to join the Temple:
Dear Jim,
Mike Cartmell suggested I write and formally ask certain questions in my mind as I plan to move to Ukiah.
First what factors should one employ in purchasing a car—new vs. old, big vs. small, American vs. foreign?
Second, what factors in buying clothes?
Third, what type of furniture? Should it be sturdy but as unpretentious as possible...? Or is it okay to have nice furniture if shared...?
Fourth, what about possessions like books and records... an expensive stereo system... expensive paintings, art books? What do [I] do with them?
Fifth, is it best for us to completely refrain from alcohol, including a glass of wine before bed? Is it harmful to an antimaterialist lifestyle for us to ... [go to] night-clubs?
I hope you won’t be offended by these questions, Jim, for I know the mere fact I ask them shows how important these aspects of materiality are to me. I have, however, decided to live up to the standards of the communal Christian church as set forth in Acts [of the Apostles] ... to donate everything I have.... I can no longer be the same person, seeking power and pleasure, as I have blue-printed myself to be....
Sincerely,
Tim Stoen
P.S. In your opinion, could I do more good for the church by becoming Assistant District Attorney (civil) or by becoming Directing Attorney of Legal Services? Please advise.
In the end Stoen rejoined the district attorney’s office in Ukiah, in the civil division, as county counsel. In a way, it was a circular move for the ambitious attorney. He not only advanced his career little, he also undertook a major image change on behalf of the Temple. People who remembered him in the mid-sixties as a rather hip, bearded legal aid attorney were surprised to see him in three-piece suits. As an ambassador of Jim Jones, Stoen had adopted a straight-arrow image.
A short time after his letter to Jones, Stoen asked Grace to share his life. “Are you willing,” he asked, “to give one year of your life for a good cause? ... And after that, I’ll be running for [Congress]. Would you be willing to campaign and be a politician’s wife?” Stoen evidently felt confident enough of Grace’s devotion to attach conditions to their marriage. She was willing to accept him on his terms. She appreciated him for nurturing her, for telling her what a decent and interesting person she was, for helping her with her vocabulary. When he proposed, she did not agree to commit her life to socialism or a church. Emotionally myopic, she saw only Tim Stoen when she promised a year of her life to the Temple. The time would fly, she thought. They had years ahead, and someday would have a home and children of their own.
From the start, however, the man she loved seemed to place a higher priority on pleasing the Temple than her. Grace’s parents had wanted a Catholic wedding; Jones insisted it would be a Temple wedding and Stoen acquiesced. The bride-to-be had wanted an elaborate traditional ceremony, one to remember, but knew the T
emple would frown on that.
Though not storybook material, the wedding did turn out to be a gala affair by Temple standards. Jones had decided it was an ideal way to introduce the church to Tim Stoen’s many friends in the legal community and among local political bigwigs. More than three hundred people watched Grace and Tim exchange vows on June 27, 1970, in the Redwood Valley church. With Jones officiating, the couple read vows tailored to their relationship. Tim’s words imparted a Christian yet mildly socialistic tone: “This is what life is all about—to share, for that is love and that is joy....” Stoen talked of his marriage to Grace in terms of the need to reduce the gap between the haves and have-nots, and the need for peace among nations.
With the Temple band playing, young and old dancing, the newlyweds cut their cake and toasted their marriage with nonalcoholic punch. Some of the church hurried outside to ride Sonny and Tubby. For the adults, the wedding was more than just a good time. The marriage of the country’s new assistant district attorney amounted to a social event in Ukiah and warranted local newspaper coverage.
The couple took a one-night honeymoon at the quaint old Mendocino Hotel on the bluffs of the Pacific. Tim promised Grace that she did not have to work, that she could get the college education she had always wanted. They embarked on marriage full of optimism.
Grace Stoen’s education began at home, in their little rented house on Road E near the Temple. Each night, they talked and read to each other, learning together; they read Guy de Maupassant’s short stories, Paul Ehrlich’s The Population Bomb and Eldridge Cleaver’s Soul on Ice. Tim sent Grace to piano lessons so they both could play. And they took ceramics and first-aid classes together.
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