HAVING FAITH Chapter Three - Resurrection

 

I do not believe for one second Aimee Semple McPherson was kidnapped. But that leaves the question of what she was doing for the five weeks of her mysterious disappearance. It might help to be reminded of how the Catholic thinker St. Thomas Aquinas defined a lie. He said it was any statement at variance with the mind -  meaning truth was anything you believed. This is a useful definition for every saint caught sinning.

“Oh, have you heard the story of Aimee McPherson?

Aimee McPherson, that wonderful person,
She weighed a hundred eighty and her hair was red
She preached a wicked sermon, or so the papers said.”
Ballad of Aimee

Aimee's story never wavered, once she walked out of the desert and into the village of Agua Pietra on Wednesday, 23 June, 1926. She always repeated it verbatim, refusing to allow questions to interrupt the flow of her story. “I sent my secretary to the hotel to phone the temple” she always began, adding she then went into the water for another swim. As she was rising out of the surf a couple named "Rosie" and "Steve" approached, saying they had a dying child in a car nearby, who needed Sister Aimee's ministrations. As any saint would, Aimee went with the pair willingly, and was guided to a parked car near the Ocean Park Bathhouse (above), where the minister was violently shoved inside and drugged. When she awoke from her drug comma several days later,  "Steve" told her, “You've taken enough of our girls from us, so turnabout is fair play.”

After several days of waiting for a response to their half million dollar ransom note, they took Aimee for an all day drive, ending in a little adobe desert shack, where they were joined by a large Mexican man named Felip (sic).

“Now, Aimee built herself a radio station

To broadcast her preaching to the nation.
She found a man named Armistead who knew enough
To run the radio while Aimee did her stuff.

After briefly releasing their frustrations by torturing their victim with a lit cigar butt, the men disappeared. Then Rosie - or so the story ran - left to buy cigarettes. Once alone, Aimee spotted an opened can of varnish in a corner of the shack. She “wormed” her way over (above) and “commenced the awkward endeavor of cutting the rope on the can's edge.” Aimee said she figured it was about 11:30 in the morning when she was finally free. Outside, she ran until she collapsed, rested and then ran again. She kept running until she reached Agua Prieta, over twelve hours - and twenty miles - from the shack.  Or so Aimee said.

“Now, they had a camp meeting out at Ocean Park

Preached from early morning 'til after dark.
Said the benediction, then folded up the tents,
And nobody knew where Aimee went.”

Later that morning a cab drove Sister Aimee the few hundred yards across the border to the Calumet Hospital (above) in Douglas, Arizona. The hospital was quickly surrounded by crowds of the faithful and the curious.

Meanwhile, the Agua Pietra Police Chief, Silverrio Villa (above), followed Aimee's trail four miles, where he found “a small shack...

"Tracks made by her shoes were found all around the adobe, but not beyond, though a search was made as far as Gallardo, nine miles away.” It was reported that doctors told the Arizona Daily Star there were burn marks on her fingers, binding marks on her wrists and ankles, and there were blisters on the bottoms of her feet..

“Now, Aimee McPherson got back from her journey,

She told her tale to the district attorney.
Said she'd been kidnapped on a lonely trail.
And in spite of all the questions, she stuck to her tale.”

Told her mother and daughter would be arriving by train in the morning, Aimee responded, “Won't it be grand when my mother gets here. I can hardly wait to see her.” Then she suddenly asked, “Do you think I will be welcomed back?” 

She need not have worried. There were thirty thousand cheering believers waiting for her arrival (above) at Los Angeles Union Station two days later. The L.A. Fire Department showed up in their dress uniforms, an airplane flew overhead and dropped rose petals. Hearst Gossip columnist Louella Parsons lead a large press contingent. Perhaps a hundred thousand of the devout lined Glendale Boulevard (renamed the “Avenue of Triumph”) to welcome Aimee back to her temple (below).

“Well, the Grand Jury started an investigation,

Uncovered a lot of spicy information.
Found out about a love nest down at Carmel-by-the-Sea,
Where the liquor was expensive and the loving was free.”

However, the cops were suspicious about Aimee's story, even before they heard it. When word of her suspected drowning broke, an off duty Culver City police officer reported he had seen Sister Aimee riding in the front passenger seat of a sedan, heading away from the beach, just half an hour after she supposedly drowned. His wife backed up his story. 

Acerbic L.A. historian Louis Adamic, who regularly called the evangelical preacher the “Queen Aimee of Moronia.” reacted to the tale of desert survival by writing, “Aimee was no more kidnapped than I am an incognito shah of Persia.”

“They found a little cottage with a breakfast nook,

A folding bed with a worn-out look.
The slats was busted and the springs was loose,
And the dents in the mattress fitted Aimee's caboose.”

The reporters noticed that the colors on Sister Aimee's dress (above), in the closet of her room in the Calumet Hospital, had not faded in the sun, despite her half day hike. The dresses' collar and cuffs were as pure and white as if they had just come from a laundry. Nor did her corset bear any sweat stains, nor the dress scars after stumbling for hours (half in the dark) through a desert populated with plants covered in hypodermic sharp needles and stiff oily razor sharp leaves.

She was not sunburned, her lips were not cracked, and the hospital was not treating her for dehydration. Reporters interviewing the miracle woman could see none of the alleged bruises on her wrists or ankles, although they were standing two feet from her bed. Neither could L.A. County District Attorney Asa Hays (above left), nor his first assistant D.A (above right).   

Her feet may have been covered with blisters, as she claimed, but none of the reporters thought to lift the sheets to look. Her shoes, when examined were not even scuffed. In fact, closer inspection revealed grass stains on the insteps. Residents confirmed there was no grass within a hundred fifty miles of Douglas, north or south of the border. 

 “Well they took poor Aimee and they threw her in jail.

Last I'd heard she was out on bail.
They'll send her up for a stretch, I guess,

She worked herself up into an awful mess”

When newsreels of Aimee's ressurection appeared in Los Angeles movie theaters, they were greeted with cat calls and loud booing. A beat up model T Ford was spotted around Los Angeles with a chalk message scrawled across the back  “I ain't Aimee, so I'm still missing.” Also missing was the gimpy legged married gentleman (below) who had been the chief engineer at Aimee's temple.

Now, Radio Ray is a going hound;
He's a-going yet and he ain't been found.
They got a description, but they got it too late.
'Cause since they got it, he's lost a lot of weight.

Kenneth G. Ormiston had been hired in February of 1924 to help Sister Aimee set up her new radio station, KFSG, (for 'Kall' Four Square Gospel), at the Temple on Glendale Boulevard. In addition to all the technical work required, Kenneth also spent hours in the isolated third floor radio room, coaching the 35 year old Aimee on transferring her impassioned theatrical performances into the confines of radio.

Amiee was often heard giggling to Ken's quick and irreverent wit during pauses in her broadcast sermons. Ormiston had been pushed out of his position by Aimee's mother in January of 1926, amid rumors of a romantic entanglement with "the world's most pulchritudinous evangelist".  After her alledged "drowning", and without a body, naturally the cops wanted to speak to the engineer.. But it was two weeks before he came in for an interview with the cops. Then he had immediately disappeared again. And the feeling among the cops and the press was there must be a connection between these two vanishing people.

Now I'll end my story in the usual way,

About a lady preacher's holiday.
If you don't get the moral then you're the gal for me
Cause there's still a lot of cottages down at Carmel-by-the-Sea.

Pete Seager “The Ballad of Aimee Mcphearson” 1926

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HAVING FAITH Chapter Two: The Wilderness

 

"I will tell you a story, now age-old and hoary,

Engraved on the pages of time,
And one that is known not around us alone,
But in many a country and clime."

Even a century later it is easy to become transfixed by Aimee Semple McPherson. She was the shinny bauble dancing in the light, that drew all attention. But it was her mother in the shadows, Mrs. Mildred “Sister Minnie” Kennedy, who created Sister Aimee, and it was her powerful psyche that formed the child into a saint. 

Mildred Ona Peace was born in Lindsay, Ontario, of English immigrant parents in 1871. Orphaned as a child, she was taken in by members of the newly formed Salvation Army, which became her family. 

When she was 12 Mildred was “farmed out” as a servant to successful dairyman James Kennedy and his wife, who lived just west of the tiny crossroads of Salford, Ontario, Canada. James already had adult children, but his wife needed help dealing with a mentally challenged son. And six months after his wife died in May of 1886, the fifty year old James married the fifteen year old Mildred.

“Oh, God! give me strength to condemn at full length

That person whose soul is so iced
That unblushing she’d dare her warped life to compare
To the life of the crucified Christ!”

It was by all evidence a passionless existence, but the marriage provided Mildred with a modicum of financial security, and the pious Methodist James Kennedy did not exercise his rights as a husband until Mildred was 18. Their daughter Aimee was born in October of 1890. Once the child (above) was old enough, and only after the crops were in, Mildred was sent to New York City, to spend the winter working for the Salvation Army. It should have come as no surprise when at 17 , her bright and energetic daughter eloped with Robert Semple, a visiting Irish Pentecostal minister. 

“There's been too much hesitation, naming liars of the nation

So I'm going to prove that I have got the gall

Even though it may defame her, to come right out square and name her,

For she's sure the biggest liar of them all.”

Seeing personal religious passion as a path to salvation directly conflicted with the Salvation Army vision which had molded Mildred 's life.  that salvation could only be achieved through disciplined service to others.  Aimee's husband, Robert Semple was a Pentecostal, whose faith also practiced tent revivals, faith healing and calling out during services, sometimes even in “tongues”, a religious gibberish which Aimee became adept at interpreting. 

Two years after leaving Salford, in 1909, the young couple arrived in Hong Kong, to begin a ministry to China. Shortly after arrival, however, they both contracted malaria, and Robert Semple died. A month later the widowed Aimee gave birth to a daughter she named Roberta (above).Borrowing from her husband James Kennedy and her Salvation Army family, Mildred was able to wire Aimee enough money to get her to back to New York, where the Salvation Army immediately put her to work.  

“While the battle still is raging, which big liars are all staging,

To determine who the biggest liar is,

Aimee tells us, on the level, she's decided that the Devil

Wins the trophy in the biggest liar quiz.”

While Mildred continued to commute each spring back to Ontario, Aimee (above left) remained in New York, where she met Harold Stewart McPherson (above right), a clerk. They were married on 5 May, 1912, and moved to Rhode Island, thus escaping Mildred's judgmental eye. The next year the McPhersons had a son, they named Rolph. Then, Aimee suffered a nervous breakdown, which left her with obsessive\compulsive disorder,  followed by an attack of uterine cancer, which  left her sterile. About this same time Mildred Kennedy left her husband and moved back to New York City permanently. Then in 1915, Aimee also left her husband, and after dropping Rolph off with her mother, took Roberta and hit the revival circuit. 

“But I rise to challenge Aimee, to prove she can't gainsay me

When I nominate a liar of reknown

For I claim to know a liar whose a bigger falsefier

Then the Devil Aimee seeks to hand the crown”

A critic would describe Aimee Semple McPherson in front of the congregation. “Her rather harsh and unmelodious voice has yet a modulation of pitch which redeems it....In her pose, her gesture, her facial expression, her lifted eyebrows, her scintillating smile, her pathetic frown...She sweeps her audience as easily as the harpist close beside her sweeps the wires in soft broken chords while she preaches.” By 1916 Sister Aimee was successful enough to ask her mother for help.

Turning her back on the Salvation Army, the 41 year old Mildred spent the next six years traveling with her daughter and two grandchildren, together, 24 hours a day, crisscrossing the nation in their “Gospel-mobile”.  Aimee would preach at night, and drive all day - even changing flat tires.   

Mildred handled what little money there was, because, as she would say later, “My daughter is like a fish on the beach when it comes to handling money. I don't believe if you put an add in the newspapers you could find anybody dumber when it comes to business.”

“Knowing quite a bunch of liars, I have picked one who aspires

To out lie all the liars in the game.

Aimee's Devil isn't in it with my entry for a minute

As a liar she's achieved a world wide fame.”

Any critic attempting to describe Aimee Semple McPherson's success had to mention her sexual appeal, and most hastened to assure readers it was not merely physical. “Aimee's mouth is very large indeed, her nose long and bumpy, her eyes small and ever shifting. She is generous breasted, and broad hipped... Her legs belong to the school known as “piano”.”

The “Miracle Woman's” appearance was not improved by her fundamentalist faith, which denounced as a sinner any woman who wore make up or cut her hair. And yet there was an undeniable sexuality that touched her listeners, or at least her critics.  

“When my entry starts to lying, Aimee's Devil starts to sighing

And confesses he's no longer in the race.

She's the queen of all the liars, and as a liar never tires,

When she lies the Devil drops to second place.”

The 1920 boom times led Sister Aimee (above, center) and Mildred (above, left, in hat) to Los Angeles, where they began to raise money to build a “Temple” of their own. Mildred bought the land, and a business convert drew up papers incorporating the Angelus Temple. Control over the new building and entity was divided equally between mother and daughter, 50/50.

The Echo Park structure opened to much fanfare in 1924.  After spending $25,000 to set up her new radio station KFSG - Kall Four Square Gospel - Aimee hired the experienced radio engineer Kenneth Ormiston to set it up. 

The twin broadcast towers rising from the temple roof were added to the rotating cross visible from fifty miles away.   But the radio towers brought her voice to an audience across the nation.

Mildred grew concerned about the growing intense relationship between Sister Aimee and Ormiston, and in January of 1926 she saw Ormiston released from his contract, while mother and daughter took a three month tour of Europe and the holy lands - which also raised funds for The Temple..

“Admiration she engendered, but she's never yet been tendered,

Recognition of her powers as a liar.

So I write this little jingle for the purpose sole and single

Of extolling my prize winning falsifier”

However Mildred's (above, left) sources in the temple reported that during the tour Ormiston's (above, right) wife had filed a missing person's report on her husband. And with Aimee repeatedly slipping away from the her, Mildred must have at least suspected the engineer had accompanied them to the holy land, staying just out of her sight. Shortly after their return in March, Mrs. Ormiston contacted Mildred and threatened to name Aimee in the divorce proceedings. Evidently a financial arraignment was made, providing Mrs. Ormiston with passage for the scorned wife and her child to her native Australia.

It was less than a month later, on 18, May 1926, that Aimee took her now infamous and supposedly fatal swim. Did Mildred ever believe her daughter had drown? In any case, Mildred must have been near panic. The only thing that could have destroyed the first financial independence Mildred Kennedy had known in her entire life, were the rumors circulating about her daughter's “miraculous” disappearance in the sea and rebirth, in the Arizona desert. 

“There's been too much hesitation, naming liars of the nation

So I'm going to prove that I have got the gall

Even though it may defame her, to come right out square and name her,

For she's sure the biggest liar of them all.”

As the furor around Aimee's bizarre saga grew, fueled by a grand jury investigation, the evangelical Reverend Bob Schular began to openly call his cross town competition a liar. After ignoring her rival revivalist for weeks, Aimee finally promised a Sunday sermon she had titled, “The Biggest Liar in the World”.

That Sunday evening, the Angelus Temple in Echo Park was packed, and hundreds of thousands of the curious tuned in to the lady preacher's radio broadcast. What they heard was vintage Aimee, folksy and positive. The biggest liar in the world, Aimee told her listeners, was the devil. Expecting open warfare, Schular instead found that Aimee and Mildred had no intention of sharing their publicity with him.  So Schular responded the only way he could, in the pages of his own magazine.

I am going to name a lady with a record long and shady

One who in this world has caused a lot of strife

Now I know your laughing hearty - but I do not mean that party,

For the one I have in mind is the Devil's wife!

Charles H. Magee "The Antics of Aimee...The Poetical Tale of a Kidnapped Female"

First Published in “Bob Shuler's Magazine” 1926

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