While Jones allowed the Stoens a richer, more comfortable life than he allowed other members, he pushed the lawyer toward greater commitment. The minister was aware of the lawyer’s materialism. But he allowed the couple to keep their books, stereo and nice furnishings. The public rationale was that it was only fitting for the county counsel’s home to be adequately outfitted. More important, Jones wanted the couple happy so he would not lose Stoen’s talents. Therefore, he increased the burdens gradually.
Initially, the Stoens went to the church just once a week, in addition to mass birthday parties (for everyone with a birthday that month). At the behest of Jones, Stoen set up a church legal clinic to help with divorces, criminal cases, welfare problems and other legal matters. He played church lawyer after services, and showed an amazing capacity for work. He also gave Jones legal advice.
Stoen was enamored of the principle, “The greatest good for the greatest number of people,” and soon it kept him away from home with increasing frequency. The Temple’s human service organization needed him. He viewed the Temple as a model for a utopian community to be emulated throughout the world. His idealism was fulfilled by the church’s love and respect for the aged and weak, the caring for the children and needy—all within the political context. The onetime anticommunist who had been horrified by the Berlin wall was venturing behind an even more insurmountable organizational wall.
Within a year of joining, Stoen wrote a required essay, purging himself of negative stereotypes he previously had associated with socialism. “Until two months ago,” he began, then rewrote, “Until I turned of age, socialism was for me a very unnerving word.... So imbued am I by the Rotary luncheon speeches praising free enterprise and condemning socialism as mutually exclusive and slavery-invoking, that it’s been the greatest deterrent to a full acceptance of the values held by Peoples Temple.... ”
“Socialism ... sees the individual as existing on behalf of the community.... He is not an elitist.... Economically, he resents the accumulation of money into the hands of an unresponsive elite (capitalists)....
“The socialist wants the means of production nationalized.... He wants the wealth of the country redistributed so that everyone has his basic needs met....”
Stoen had become a true believer. But it was more than an eclectic definition of socialism that inspired his commitment. The intellectual side of him took comfort in the pastor’s personal makeup. A naive Bible-pounder could never have drawn a Tim Stoen. Jones was a perceptive, pragmatic diamond-in-the-rough, a little crude in language and manners, yet boundlessly compassionate. He possessed the qualities Stoen admired, particularly the rhetorical skill to engage crowds and cajole politicians. But Stoen saw Jones in Christian terms too—as nearly the Second Coming, the greatest miracle worker and healer since Christ.
ELEVEN
Children of the Sixties
An air of revolution hung over Berkeley. The long siege raged on, and the scars of past battles could be seen everywhere. Along Telegraph Avenue, just south of the University of California campus, the Bank of America had bricked up its windows. Some stores had been “trashed” so often that no one would sell them glass insurance. Slogans emblazoned the sides of buildings and the plywood over broken windows. Nearby, “Peoples Park” dried up behind chain-link fencing erected by the authorities. On campus, political rallies were an almost daily occurrence. Che, Mao and Ho Chi Minh were heroes, while Reagan, Johnson and Nixon were abominated.
Yet in the years since the 1964 Free Speech Movement, protests had not attracted all of the 27,500 U.C. students. On most days, the majority hiked to classes, sometimes through tear gas, while hundreds of their contemporaries attended rallies, marched or skirmished with police.
In the fall of 1964, while Mario Savio entreated his fellow students to throw their bodies on the university machinery to stop it, other students poured into Memorial Stadium Saturdays to watch the Golden Bears throw their bodies against gridiron rivals. At half time, the Cal Marching Band charged like an army onto the field, strutting in blue uniforms, flying gold braid. With their regimentation and rolling drums, band members were considered the epitome of the politically uninvolved, a throw-back to the traditions of the 1950s.
The student director of the band that fall, a tall, dark-haired junior named Bob Houston, fit the stereotype. He was studious, not a protester or boat rocker. And he was a fine musician. In addition to baritone horn, he played piano, trumpet and guitar. Though conservative in style and manner, and never particularly assertive, he impressed his peers with his musical talents, his positive attitude and his dedication.
Out of uniform and off the stands, Bob Houston was just another anonymous face from the band, another young white liberal middle-class kid lugging his books through Sather Gate, perhaps interested in the protests but otherwise occupied. Actually, Bob Houston was an unusually busy student—for besides rolling up good grades, he was a husband, father, railroad worker and high school music instructor.
Bob had married his high school sweetheart, a tall brunette named Phyllis Tuttle. She was the daughter of Bob’s Boy Scout troop leader. It had been their first romance, and it culminated in elopement in 1962. Within two years, Phyllis and Bob were parents of two daughters. The marriage, considered premature by both sets of parents, was not trouble-free. The family lived in married student housing during the Free Speech Movement and the early years of antiwar and antidraft protests. Often Bob would walk to campus, attend a full day of lectures, practice with the band, then ride his motorcycle across the bay to San Francisco, where he worked in the Southern Pacific railroad yards. Phyllis resented Bob’s absences and felt stifled being a housewife. When she was depressed, she would ignore the housework. Bob would come home drained and find the house in turmoil. They would argue; the babies would cry.
The couple had married too young and in the wrong circumstances, but they survived the first difficult years. Bob graduated in 1966 with a degree in education. Hoping to teach music someday, he enrolled that year at San Francisco State University and began work toward his teaching credentials. He and his family moved to an apartment on Lincoln Way, across the street from Golden Gate Park. The nearby Haight-Ashbury district was bubbling over with young hippies and acid rock. In the park, free concerts were thrown by groups such as the Jefferson Airplane and Grateful Dead. Though not captivated by them, Bob and Phyllis were tolerant of the new trends. To friends they seemed happy-go-lucky, non-judgmental. They loved music of all kinds, from classical to popular; and they played records often or entertained each other on piano or violin. Their common goal was Bob’s teaching credential; it would give them mobility, a better life and happiness. But it also meant hard work. While studying at State, Bob continued to work in the railroad yards.
The Southern Pacific railroad yards were a familiar landmark near the Potrero Hill area of San Francisco. For generations, kids had flattened pennies on the tracks there. It was a relaxed place to work, especially night shifts, a sort of endless parking lot, with switchmen and lanterns and a glittering panorama of the downtown skyline. Trains here were usually pulled from track to track at the speed of a lame dog. Bob Houston liked the job because the salary was good. He could catch up on his sleep during slow periods, and he could pick his own hours.
In the mid-1960s, no neighborhood of Berkeley had been entirely insulated from political fury, not even the bucolic hills north of campus. Up there, in a brown-shingled house with a bay view, a tennis court and a swimming pool, lived biochemist Laurence Layton with his wife Lisa and their four children. The two older children were on their way to science careers. Teen-ager Larry had been quickly drawn into the hip scene and antiwar movement, while his vivacious younger sister, Deborah, was still in grade school.
The family history reflected the turmoil of the twentieth-century world. Lisa Phillips Layton, the daughter of a prominent Jewish family form Hamburg, had played with Rothschilds and Berensons as a child. In 1935, the year an uncle of hers won t
he Nobel Prize, she escaped her native Germany just before her parents were taken off to the concentration camps. She fled to the United States. At Penn State she tutored a brilliant young biochemist named Laurence Layton. And soon they fell in love and married. Layton, a Quaker from a once prominent West Virginia family, began climbing the ladder of professional success. Yet this very achievement provoked a series of arguments between him and his wife.
Lisa Layton had been attracted to her husband’s Quaker beliefs because they embodied her own pacifism and contempt for affluence. But, as Layton moved from one university to another during the 1950s, he was often asked to work in war-related areas, even helping develop various kinds of nerve gas, missiles and satellites. Lisa, whose mother had committed suicide after surviving the death camps in Nazi Germany, insisted that her husband get out of weapons research altogether. Finally, in 1957 the family moved to Berkeley, where Layton’s studies at the Department of Agriculture laboratory attracted international attention.
In California, the family seemed to have everything—wealth, fame, education, intelligence. They attended a Quaker church in Berkeley. Lisa and the children, however, developed a guilty conscience over their personal good fortune.
Larry, a slight pale-looking boy with feelings of inferiority, had been a manageable little child who entertained himself in his playpen. As the third born, he did not get as much attention as his older siblings. While his older brother and sister followed their father into the sciences, the humanities attracted Larry. After a rather anonymous four years at Berkeley High School, where he was a member of the Young Democrats club, Larry did what was expected of him—he went on to college, at the University of California at Davis, near Sacramento. At this time Davis was considered a safe harbor for the politically naive. But Larry was not one of these. A loner whose beard and heavy brow made him look older, whose sandals gave him a bohemian air, Larry Layton did not fit in. His vocal antiwar politics and dogmatic manner grated on most of the others in his dorm. He hung out mainly with another Berkeley High graduate, and they sometimes laughed together about the political neanderthals in their dorm.
In 1966, when Vietnam teach-ins, draft counseling and draft card burning came to the Central Valley campus, Larry Layton regularly attended rallies against the war. One day, he watched a draft card burning with a young woman named Carolyn Moore, daughter of the Methodist minister on campus. Unlike Layton, Carolyn Moore almost inherited a tradition of activism; her father had helped down-and-outers in the San Francisco Tenderloin and participated in civil rights and antiwar protests. Although she took her politics equally seriously, she had a fun-loving side —and had drawn a bead on her life’s goals. She made the dean’s list, had studied French for a year in Bordeaux and was working hard toward her secondary teaching credential.
The petite young woman, who even looked French with her dark hair in a twist, fell in love with Larry Layton. Her humor and need to verbalize softened his almost withdrawn personality. Her certainty about her teaching career contrasted with his lack of personal direction and seeming inability to put himself fully to work. Her parents, Barbara and Rev. John Moore, attributed his problems, his personal weakness, to his use of drugs, though they otherwise found him to be pleasant.
In 1967, Carolyn and Larry were married. While Larry continued undergraduate studies, Carolyn worked to support them both and to finish a fifth year of college for her credential. By 1968, she was ready for her first teaching job. Larry, who was trying to slip through the Selective Service with a religious deferment for his Quaker background, needed an alternative service job as a conscientious objector. They began looking....
When the first hippies and long-haired college graduates and dropouts showed up in Mendocino County searching for land, houses to rent and jobs, the locals welcomed them about as readily as a flash flood. They were viewed as outsiders, deviants, invaders, the very people then-Governor Ronald Reagan had taken to task for tearing up the campuses. The last place the locals wanted them was in the educational system, where they could infect the local children with their ideas.
The Potter Valley school system was decidedly provincial. Outsiders were always suspect and were sized up carefully, especially the two new teachers who appeared on the first day of school in 1968. One was Carolyn Moore Layton, who taught French and modern dance. The other was a music teacher from Berkeley, a tall austere man with long sideburns.
At Potter Valley, Bob Houston finally earned his grade school nickname, “The Little Professor.” The former University of California band leader’s first teaching assignment proved immensely satisfying, though he had sacrificed a great deal to get his credential and though his teaching load was heavy. In addition to economics and civics, he taught classroom music, gave instrumental instruction and supervised the school chorus and band.
As much as he enjoyed children and his work, the teaching climate did not suit him entirely. Even Bob Houston, with barely shaggy hair and a reserved manner, found himself unfairly classified as a hippie. He began to feel vulnerable, defensive and lonely.
That year, a woman teacher who wore her dark hair in braids and played guitar had some brushes with the school administration; it seemed that some parents objected to her innovative grade school teaching techniques. Bob Houston identified with her and came to her defense, which did not endear him to the administration. He thought it cost him renewal of his teaching contract. But by taking this stand, Houston had changed the direction of his life.
His courage had attracted the attention of the other new teacher, Carolyn Layton. They commiserated in the hallways. Their world views were similar, and each seemed sensitized to the poor, the disadvantaged, the maligned. When the Laytons joined an unusual church in Redwood Valley, Carolyn mentioned it to Bob, who had attended church all his life and had shown particular interest in the liberal Episcopal policies of the late California Bishop James Pike. The church described by Carolyn Layton seemed to offer Houston a solution—it was an organization with humanistic values and relevance to the times. This church did not suffer from the reactionary malaise that touched almost every institution in the rural area. And it was unusual in another respect; membership was by invitation only.
When Carolyn Layton asked Bob to bring his family to a Peoples Temple barbecue, he was flattered. It was about the most hospitable invitation he had received in that area. Also, he and Phyllis had been bound too closely to their home, and needed some outside activities to revive their stagnant marriage. In their reclusive existence alongside Highway 20, Phyllis’s frustrations over their premature marriage and parenthood had intensified. Bereft of real friends, she felt imprisoned by her children and by a husband insensitive to her needs. She was an excellent candidate for a women’s liberation group.
The barbecue at Peoples Temple provided the Houstons, including the little girls, with the most fun since their move from San Francisco. Rather than being frozen out, as in Potter Valley, they were welcomed warmly to what seemed like a pleasant and vibrant country church with a swimming pool and open space, horses and other animals for the children. The church offered camaraderie: brothers for Bob, sisters for Phyllis and playmates for their two daughters. Bob particularly appreciated the interracial aspects. He immediately took a liking to Jones’s two longtime assistants—philosophical Archie Ijames and wise-cracking Jack Beam. Phyllis welcomed the outlet; she met other young women frustrated by the role of housewife and mother.
The Houstons, the Laytons and other refugees of the 1960s knew little of the church’s history, although they heard that Jim Jones had been harassed in Indiana. They were seduced by the mix of big-city blacks and whites—mostly midwestern fundamentalists and Ukiah locals—and by Jones himself, who seemed a combination of Martin Luther King, Jr., Billy Graham and Mario Savio. Rev. Jones avoided the piety that kept many people away from religious institutions; he talked about social issues more often than he quoted the Bible, and called his religion apostolic socialism—“apostolic” f
or the church-oriented, “socialism” for those with social goals and political objectives. He issued warnings of impending disasters while simultaneously providing an ingenious plan for the survival of his chosen people: they would store provisions—water and foodstuffs—in a deep cave where they could weather the blast and fallout of nuclear war. These white children of the sixties were shown only the compassionate facets of Jim Jones’s personality, and on that basis, they allowed the church to annex larger and larger portions of their lives.
Other members began calling on Bob Houston for help with projects, and he seldom turned them down. He always had enjoyed structural group activities. But he had not learned that Jones would tap and drain his spirit of self-sacrifice, would take whatever he was willing to give. Soon he was playing in the Temple band and helping out with Temple publications. He donated his income as a music therapist at Mendocino State Hospital to the Temple. And in return he and his family were given comradeship and a church apartment in a ranch-style complex that housed a Temple-owned laundromat and other church facilities.
The church effectively cut them off from their families, though the Bay Area was only two house away by car. Once, however, in 1969, Phyllis’s family drove up to Redwood Valley to visit, primarily so her brother, Tom, could introduce his fiancée.
Inadvertently, Phyllis’s relatives had intruded on the Temple’s increasingly closed community, and Phyllis, through her brusque and decidedly cold manner, told them so. Her brother and father were hurt by her attitude, appalled by the filthy condition of her sparsely furnished living quarters, which reeked of dog feces. When they asked Phyllis about the absence of furnishings, she said they had all been donated to the church. So had her 1960 Valiant. The church had everything.
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