For the sports-minded, weekends were a washout. The grinding thousand-mile bus trips to Los Angeles left no time or energy for sports. But shorter San Francisco trips and longer trips with layovers sometimes provided opportunity for basketball—and to Stephan and his friends, that was a gift from heaven.
Temple buses returning from these weekend trips would rumble into Redwood Valley early Monday morning. Stephan would drag himself into the house, curl up with a blanket or a sleeping bag in front of the heater in the kitchen and snooze until roused for school....
Teachers in Redwood Valley, Potter Valley and Ukiah were seeing fatigued children arrive for classes without breakfast, baths, or sleep, Monday after Monday. Some youngsters dropped their heads to their desks as soon as they warmed up. Many teachers let them rest, covering them with coats, and one teacher let them snuggle up in a cloakroom.
In Potter Valley, school officials sent representatives to the homes of Temple children and found them living communally with more than a dozen people. But nothing could be done. Resources of little country schools already were strained by Temple children. Youngsters imported from the big cities showed up with hard-core behavior problems; kids turned on to shivs and sex were introduced to schools with budgets for a staff psychologist only half a day a week. Teachers accustomed to respectful country kids had to regularly handle bitter rebellion. They were told to “fuck off,” or called “goddamn bitches” by some problem kids. Some of these rough Temple kids were veteran San Francisco Bay Area juvenile delinquents, and they intimidated their classmates. In fact, a group of parents became so upset with the changing character of their schools that they wanted to bar Temple members from the PTA.
But the vast majority of Temple children were hard-working, more socially aware than the locals. They dressed at least as well and, in the case of the urban imports, often with a good deal of flair. They tended to hang around in their own cliques in the yard. Many were enlisted in the poverty lunch program.
Often a teacher named Ruby Bogner was assigned children with behavior problems, so she had many from the Temple. An independent sort who was rearing two children of her own, she used unconventional teaching methods and would not permit herself to be pushed around. Bogner had had an unpleasant introduction to the Temple and its pastor in her first teaching stint at Calpella Elementary School. One of her second graders was Jimmy Jones, Jr. Mrs. Bogner found Jimmy militantly uncooperative, seemingly hyperactive—and he tested out as a genius. She called on the parents for help. But the Joneses took Jimmy’s side, using lifelong conflicts with racism to explain his behavior.
A couple of years later, as the fall term began, Ruby Bogner was given a note by one of her fifth graders, a tall, toothy boy with straight dark hair. “You won’t like me because of my brother,” it said. “But I will try to be good in your class.” The unsolicited promise came from Stephan Jones. He made good on his word and emerged as a leader in the fifth grade class of 1970.
Mrs. Bogner encouraged her pupils to express themselves and to make themselves at home in her classroom. Her students could sit anywhere they wished, and they worked around long utility tables rather than at desks. They had so much fun together that some children spent recesses and lunch periods with her. Sometimes she bought a box of apples, and they lounged around, munching and talking. A few Temple kids came to her house to help with her yard work.
Although Stephan kept his distance and believed Mrs. Bogner disliked him, he became her favorite. His natural leadership qualities were combined with a form of fifth grade “macho.” He viewed himself as an instrument of righteousness in a poem that said, in part, “Among the blooming flowers I walk, and I am the Fist.” His teacher was impressed with his sensitivity, honesty and decency.
Mrs. Bogner relied on him in small ways and was never disappointed. If she was umpiring a class baseball game and missed a call, she would holler, “Stephan, was he safe or out?” Stephan always made fair calls, and the children accepted his verdicts. Sometimes Mrs. Bogner would let her students play teacher. Stephan, an excellent student, usually chose to teach geography and social studies. Like his father, he took charge in a classroom, covered the material with apparent ease and kept everyone on their toes. Still, he had a tendency to be condescending toward slow students, and he was inclined to get overbearing. To Mrs. Bogner’s dismay, he started giving orders to Temple kids.
Mrs. Bogner made no connection between Stephan’s sometimes domineering behavior and his father. But she noticed that he never spoke of Jim Jones in the same affectionate or admiring way that other children did of their fathers. In fact, he called his father “him”—never “father” or “dad.” It became just as obvious that he loved his mother. Whenever a problem arose, Stephan always entreated Mrs. Bogner to contact his mother, not his father. “My father doesn’t have time,” he said.
It was from other Temple children that Mrs. Bogner began to get hints of murky Temple activities that contrasted with admiring local newspaper stories. Bogner did not like what she saw in her microscopic view of the church’s future leaders.
Small things came to her attention at first. Temple children did not participate in giving Christmas gifts at school; they told her they got only three dollars each in gifts from their parents and the rest went to the church. Then some Cordell children abruptly stopped coming by her home to use her plastic swimming pool; they begged her never to tell anyone they had visited her. One of the Temple’s exceptional students, Julie Cordell, wanted a B in English changed to an A, explaining, “I don’t want to be whipped in front of the church.”
Bogner took the plea in earnest and made a special point of generally awarding Temple kids at least Bs. It was not difficult to believe there was corporal punishment. She had seen them exhausted after weekend bus trips; they told her they were stowed in luggage racks and in compartments beneath the overcrowded buses. (Jones denied it, of course, and the sheriff’s office told her they checked and found the allegation untrue.)
The teacher protected the identities of her informants. Every so often Temple kids huddled with Mrs. Bogner to ask her to clarify various mysteries of Temple life.
“Mrs. Bogner, do you believe people could be raised from the dead?” Mark Cordell asked. Another time, one asked whether it was possible to heal cancer. A third time: “Mrs. Bogner, can you change water to wine?” They were hungry for explanations for “miracles” they could not fathom, whether or not their parents and grandparents seemed to believe in them.
Once the Temple kids came to school with their hands all scratched up. One was also bruised. When Mrs. Bogner asked what happened, they said, “We were wrestling in a berry patch.” At lunchtime, she pulled one child aside and was told the truth: during a “survival drill,” they had been dumped at 11:00 P.M. at the summit of the Tomki Road area and instructed to find their way home, a few miles away. They had to descend a deep ravine to the river, then follow it back to Redwood Valley in the dark.
Though furious, Mrs. Bogner did not want to betray her source. She waited a number of months before cornering Jim Jones at a school open house. He tried to change the subject, yet she would not allow him to slip away. “Those kids were scarred and scratched, and I know what happened,” she said.
“They were wrestling in the berry patch,” he insisted.
“Knock it off.”
“They were just playing.”
“They were in a canyon! And the way they were bruised and scratched, it looks it.”
Without admitting anything, Jones said, “It’ll never happen again.” He added the teacher to his mental list of enemies.
Had Mrs. Bogner been aware of some other Temple practices, she might have been even more shocked. To harden them, Temple children were taught to swim long distances underwater, under the covered Temple pool. And Jones required them to fill out questionnaires with a number of strange personal and religious questions.
Eddie Mertle, the twelve-year-old son of Elmer and Deanna Mertle (l
ater known as Jeannie and Al Mills), was one of those who answered a sheet of thirty questions. Number 12 was, “Who is Father; do you see him as Savior, Creator, or both?” Question 13 for a child was, “What are your sexual feelings and attractions to the pastor?” Eddie answered, “None.” Questions 16 and 29 were identical, “What are your hostilities to the pastor?” Question 4 was foreboding: “When and why have you thought about suicide?” The boy replied, “I don’t think I ever have.”
The Temple’s college dormitories were born simply and innocently enough at the end of the 1960s, as communal-style housing for a few Temple youths. Ideally these rented duplexes were to provide a home environment for serious students attending Santa Rosa Junior College, allowing young Temple members to gain a higher education without falling victim to outside influences. The structure did not permit outside political activities, let alone romance and recreation outside the communal context. The dormitories amounted to an extension of Jones’s control.
The student housing project evolved from just a few men and women into a church institution with thirty to forty students. Most took up residence brimming with idealism and talked of devoting their lives to helping other people, as their leader had. They targeted socially useful careers and occupations. Like many other college-age people, they sought a resolution between political ideals and their own ambitions and interests.
In discussing ways to contribute to this miserable world’s betterment, Jim Cobb and other dorm students came up with an ambitious idea: “We could build a hospital.” The very words sent ripples of idealism through these would-be doctors, dentists, nurses, therapists. Their hospital, they decided, would never reduce a human being to a mere gallstone or root canal fee. More practically, such skills would provide the Temple with a full range of social and health services.
Temple college students lived in a middle-income Santa Rosa neighborhood. About a dozen young men roomed in a half duplex, and about two dozen young women occupied a full duplex across the street. Accommodations were makeshift and crowded—but no more austere than those for students in many college towns. The students cooked their own meals, ate communal-style, rotated the chores. They were provided with transportation to and from school in a car pool arrangement, using their own cars and Temple gas money. They tried to take the same classes so they could tutor one another and study together. In most respects, it was like other college dorms, with the tedious routines broken by cookouts, some socializing, dancing and sports, even wrestling and waterfights. Personalities ran the range from extremely serious students to cutups, from popular students to outcasts. The dorms were governed not only by peer pressure but also by an external bureaucracy. Their often-restated fealty to the Temple, however, was a source of pride as well as control. At least the Temple young people had an outlet for their activist energies, more meaningful and more enduring than many of the issue-oriented outbursts of the sixties.
All in all, the dormitory arrangement was not a bad tradeoff for those committed to the Temple. But not all students came because they were enamored of college credentials or with the concept of achieving their highest human potential for the cause. Mike Touchette, who had been perfectly happy with a post-high school job as a forklift operator, was pressured into it. Jack Beam called him one day to ask his future plans, then told him: “Well, you have a choice. Go to school or go to Vietnam. Jim had a prophecy you would be drafted.”
Although cliquishness was frowned upon, Touchette formed his closest friendships with other amiable young men who came to the dorms without real personality or drug problems. Among his best friends were Jim Cobb, who shared Mike’s interest in sports, and Wayne Pietila, a Ukiah local who knew what it was like to play a trout or to bring down a deer. Touchette himself was both athlete and outdoorsman. He was easygoing enough to roll with the dorm regimentation, and the cooperative spirit appealed to him.
Dale Parks, a dark-haired serious young man, was the dorm administrator. Cobb, bursting with ideas, idealism and talent, was a sort of leader by acclamation and conducted many of the meetings. Pietila was the treasurer, hard-working, tough and forceful enough to become leader a year later. Among the women were Jones’s adopted Korean-American daughter Suzanne, Jim Cobb’s sister Terri, Mike Touchette’s sister Mickey and Archie Ijames’s daughter Anita.
A lot of the students did their best to get a college education, to remain faithful to their social and political ideals and to enjoy life. But some fanatics lived as though Jim Jones was omnipresent, and they set themselves up as guardians of absolutism.
David W., who trained for Temple life on Hare Krishna mantras, could not cope very well with levity. Often his disapproval was nonverbal, but it was always felt. One night when the natives were bombarding each other with tennis balls in the dark, David went outside in a huff and bedded down in the backyard. To teach him a lesson, the revelers hosed him with water.
Another fellow who liked his solitude was Larry Schacht, one of the Temple’s most heralded reformed drug abusers. Although the former Texas art student had short-circuited his brain with psychedelics, Jones had decided that he would make a good Temple physician. The pastor pulled enough strings and provided enough encouragement to motivate Schacht and point him toward medical school in Mexico. During his premed studies at Santa Rosa, Schacht still would have drug flashbacks. And if people around him became too loud, he would start screaming wildly.
Eventually Schacht lost his zombielike intensity and buckled down to work, alone with his mission, his thoughts and his guitar. “What we are learning, we are learning for the love of Jim Jones,” he used to say. His odd combination of total devotion and terrible temper translated into slavish study habits.
For Jeanette Kerns, the first six months of the 1971-72 school year almost met her expectations. After moving out of the Stoen household, she enjoyed herself rollerskating and signing up for classes. At first, the Santa Rosa duplexes seemed very much like the church-operated dormitories she envisioned when she came from Florida. But she stood out among the Temple students—a blond ex-surfer with a bank account, jewelry and fashionable clothes—and the others resented her. One night in the dorm living room when the students were analyzing the problems of another Temple woman and Kerns volunteered to help her with studies, the tables turned suddenly. “Let’s talk about you, ”someone said.
A mild catharsis became an unfettered purge of pet peeves. Kerns was informed that her classical and surfing music, her dressing habits and bleached light-brown hair offended the others. From accusations of vanity, they leaped to racism. “I like my hair and I like the way I am,” she cried, fighting back. “If I was a racist, why would I live with you?”
Confused and intimidated, she unintentionally revealed her disenchantment on a holiday trip to Seattle and Vancouver. Jones turned to her at lunch one day: “You’ve been thinking about leaving, haven’t you?” He probably read it on her face or had heard about the conflicts.
Trapped between her own condescending attitudes and the dorm students’ hypersensitivity, she admitted, “Yeah, I have.” She considered the Temple people the rejects of society, and could not understand why she should take abuse from them.
“You can leave,” Jones said kindly. “But you won’t be able to finish college. Give it another try. It will be better when you get back to the dorms. You can grow from this experience. You’re a humanist.” At that time, she was flattered by Jones’s sensitivity. His encouragement worked. She resolved to try again.
At the dormitory, her popularity declined nonetheless. The students had vowed to stamp out every remnant of middle-class consciousness. Once a catharsis session developed because Jeanette was wearing her glasses too far down her nose, a sure sign of snobbishness. People began to call her names. One white woman who was accepted by the blacks because of her Jewish heritage leaped to her feet, slapped Kerns across the face, knocking off her glasses, then shoved her into a corner. Others jumped after her before it was stopped. Sobbing, Kerns ran o
ut and packed her clothes. The others blocked the doors and would not allow her outside until she calmed down.
Leaving was more difficult than it had been on the bus trip. She was more securely locked into the church because, in seeking acceptance and peace, she had donated most of her savings. The Temple was her ticket through school, her only foreseeable means to the education she had worked for years to finance. Besides, staying was the only way to really keep in contact with her mother and brother, who were church members. Locking her jaw and sweating out nightmares that caused her to jump in her sleep, she decided to get a good education in spite of her tormentors.
In addition to long church meetings, the dorm students were following another agenda. Kerns, basically conservative but against the war, found herself living among young people who talked of someday being urban guerrillas or dying for socialism. Like communards in Berkeley, Ann Arbor and elsewhere, the dorm students had study groups in Marxism and socialism. Certain leftist books were required reading. Jones had condoned and fed a more-radical-than-thou attitude among his young followers. He converted the dorms gradually into a training center for his future professionals, his socialist vanguard.
Jeanette Kerns hated the socialism classes, which Jones asked Jim Cobb to teach. Mike Touchette enjoyed them, especially discussing such issues as Vietnam and South Africa. The students also researched corporations supporting or benefiting from the war, and they studied the effects of nuclear fallout.
The church monitored the progress and content of the classes. Jones would check with Cobb for an assessment, sometimes taking him aside at weekend services. The pastor seemed pleased usually, but on several occasions he ordered actions that seemed contrary to education about socialism.
At Redwood Valley and in the college dorms, there were purges of socialist books and books that the U.S. government might perceive as subversive. In the valley, men in pickup trucks, led by Jack Beam, made sweeps of Temple residences collecting books for burning or burying. The college students were trusted to purge their own bookshelves. Although some students began to wonder why the raids never materialized and why Jones kept such a tight rein on their political education, their critical attention was not directed at Jones or his policies—not yet.
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