Letter to the Editor

THEN IS NOW

Dear Bruce,

A while back I ran into a lady in Ukiah who told me that she had worked with Jim Jones's wife at Mendocino County Social Services back in the late 60s. This brought to mind your brief reference to that in a disparaging commentary you had written about "hippies" in Mendoland and the pretentious idealized history thereof being promoted by the likes of Beth Bosk at the expense of the traditional blue-collar working class.

It would, therefore, be interesting and informative to the readers of your publication if a history of the People's Temple cult in Mendocino County were written. Or is this too sensitive a topic that should be allowed to be subsumed by "Mendonesia"?

I was informed that literally dozens of former Mendocino locals died in Guyana in 1978.

And what about Tim Stoen, Jim Jones's former lieutenant? Should he be forced to answer questions about his background in this cult, which was responsible for the biggest mass murder of Americans in recent decades prior to 9/11? Sure, maybe he is a fully rehabilitated upstanding citizen now, but like the ex-Nazis in post-WW2 Germany, he should be expected to account for his role in this sordid and tragic history.

Mike Reptis
Albion

Ed reply: I agree with you. There are lots of books, or at least monographs, waiting to be written about Mendocino County, Jones in Mendocino County among them. When only two Mendocino County media, this one and Jim Shields' Mendocino County Observer, function as critics, bad things happen. And continue to happen. Where else in America could a handful of crooks, all of whose names were known to law enforcement, and who included a bank manager, an accountant, a developer, and a restaurateur burn the heart of a town right out of it and get away with it? If you said Fort Bragg, Mendocino County, California, where in one night the library, the court house and a landmark hotel went up you get the tofu sandwich. The Fort Bragg cops knew within a couple of weeks the names of the young men who set the fires, and they knew that the late husband of Barbara Durigan, a Fort Bragg helping professional (of course), functioned as logistics man for the torches. Instead, and right in the uncomprehending pusses of the FBI and the ATF, one of the torches conveniently committed suicide the day before he was scheduled to talk to a federal grand jury in San Francisco, and the other arson sub-contractors went into deep hiding not far from the scenes of their crime. But darned if the statute of limitations didn't run before DA Susan Massini could get around to prosecuting the case. She investigated then investigated some more, and then she claimed there was jurisdictional confusion, implying that the state and perhaps the feds had responsibility for bringing a quartet of outback arsonists to justice. The young men who had been hired by the big shots to set the fires, and to set the successful fires and the unsuccessful attempted fires prior to the big night they leveled the Fort Bragg library, Ten Mile Court and the Piedmont Hotel, could have been arrested, sequestered and protected so they could safely implicate Vince Sisco and the rest of them. But...... But lots of bad things happen in a media vacuum, including Pastor Jones who'd headed west from Indiana because he'd read an apocalyptic piece in Esquire that said Mendocino County was relatively safe from nuke fallout because the wind currents were favorable. Or the vibes. Whatever. Jones settled in Redwood Valley. He was broke, so broke he had to find work himself, so he made a deal with the Boonville superintendent of schools (also a Hoosier) where he got a job teaching the fifth grade; in return Boonville Unified got a dozen or so additional students who lived with Jones in Redwood Valley and the attendance money that came with them. They all commuted from Redwood Valley to Boonville every morning. Meanwhile, Mrs. Jones, a nurse-social worker who may or may not have then been aware she was married to a lunatic, got herself a state job from which she could funnel dependent persons to the Peoples Temple. She and the pastor soon increased the pastor's flock by importing dependent families from around the country but primarily from Oakland and San Francisco, all of whom qualified for various forms of cash government support. Along with the welfare plunder came idealists like Tim and Grace Stoen who were committed to harmonious intra-racial living. Jones took a nice cut from all the government checks flowing to his parishioners and quickly amassed a formidable treasury to go with the several hundred captive votes he had settled in Redwood Valley. Official Mendocino County immediately assumed the prone position. Jones became foreman of the county grand jury and a kind of ecumenical icon among the local libs. Jones had gotten a bunch of his parishioners hired on by the Mendocino County Department of Social Services, then run by Uriah Heepish, neo-fascist named Dennis Denny. Peoples Temple welfare workers shoveled the full array of locally available welfare benefits out to Redwood Valley whether or not the recipients qualified for them. When the slaughter in Guyana went down Denny, whose spiritual descendants administer the department today because Denny hand-picked them as being in his psycho-social tradition, claimed he was working "undercover" on the People's Temple operatives in his department; he'd become "suspicious" of them, he said. In fact, Jones was endorsed and assisted by Denny and the rest of official Mendocino County every step of the way, including the Superior Court whose Judge Jim Luther's signature is on a lot of the guardian papers of the black children Jones murdered in Guyana. Jones' Redwood Valley compound, incidentally, featured a gun tower because Jones claimed "rednecks" were threatening him and his parishioners with drive-bys. Having amassed a lot of money, people and support in Mendocino County, Jones moved on to San Francisco where he easily seduced that city's Democratic Party bigwigs. I'd say that he was a guy with megalomaniacal tendencies who started out good but was sucked down into amphetamine-fueled psychosis. Wes Chesbro on speed, perhaps. Me and the Missus, an inter-racial couple then sharing our home with black delinquents, were once invited to Peoples Temple services by Maria Katsaris who became Jones' "mistress" and died at Jonestown. She'd accused her father of molesting her, a Jones' inspired lie of the type often resorted to by the unscrupulous and the shameless. Sex charges and accusations of racism were his stock responses to his few critics. And violence. He maintained a goon squad of young guys who'd muscle people for him. Jones had learned from the fake left of the 1960's how to put people on the defensive via sex and race. "What kinda church is it that you need an invitation and a sponsor to attend?" I asked, deploying my characteristic skepticism before Miss Katsaris and her delegation. (Which is a joke you won't get but which I make on myself because like most of us dull normals I've often been beguiled by false prophets and errant thinking too. Who hasn't?) Invoking the perennial redneck peril, Miss Katsaris replied, "We have to be careful about who gets in because a lot of people around here don't like black people. But you and your family would like Pastor Jones; he can talk for eight hours straight." Having just moved to Mendocino County from San Francisco where I knew people who could talk for eight days straight so long as they had plenty of pharmaceutical speed, I said we weren't church going people, thanks all the same. There was a lady reporter at the Ukiah Daily Journal whose name I can't recall just now who got on Jones' case pretty good before he moved to The City, but she was pretty much ignored and Jones' goons got away with threatening her life and, ultimately, got her fired, I think. Local media loved the guy. If the Rev were with us today, given his commitment to lethal multiculturalism, at a minimum he'd have a talk show on KZYX, his own desk at the MEC, drooling testimonials from the Press Democrat, and the keys to Ukiah. The credulity level around here now is the same as it was then. But Tim Stoen is a good guy. A very good guy. I'm disgusted every time I see him ignorantly linked to the Jonestown event because (1) he'd long before left the church and had tried to alert the authorities that Jones would kill his whole church, including Stoen's son who he'd appropriated for himself and hauled off to Guyana with the rest of his doomed flock. But the authorities remained mesmerized by the pastor and the unprecedented menace he presented (2) the Stoens lost their only child to Jones in Jones' amphetamine apotheosis, the grandest since Hitler's and certainly the all-time record for a single individual. Tim Stoen's paid a very high price for being young and foolish, and it's unfair to make him go on paying for a mass murder he tried to prevent. How different is Stoen from any other young person, then or now, temporarily beguiled by an unwholesome charismatic? America is replete with case histories, isn't it? And solipsistic Mendocino County with its horoscopes, crystals, confluences, solstice orgies, full-moon boogies and its torpid but prevalent mysticism, remains ripe for lesser demagogues, as the meteoric local career of the late Judi Bari dramatically demonstrates. I've known lots of dumb hippies, but I've never known a totally dumb redneck.