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 remember  how Saint 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.”

Informed that 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 One - Drowning

 

I believe the watch made the lady a liar. She vanished into the Venice, Californian surf attired in a modest one piece green bathing suit and cap.  She miraculously reappeared five weeks later and five hundred miles away, dry as a bone. She said she had been kidnapped. But in the intervening five weeks the lady had acquired new shoes, a new dress and a corset...and her old wrist watch. 

Now, why would a kidnapper risk attracting notice by entering a busy hotel, break into a locked hotel room, just to steal an inexpensive watch with a plain leather band, all for a victim they professed to despise? To me that watch on her right arm is proof the popular evangelical radio minister Aimee Semple McPherson (above) had not been kidnapped. But that remains just my personal opinion, because in 1926 the Los Angeles County Prosecutor was a major league sleaze ball.

“Through green-white breakers swift I leap,

Sun-sparkled seas by body keep;
Bearer of Gospel-Glory I
With singing angels in my sky...”

At just about 3:30 in the afternoon of Tuesday, 18 May, 1926,  a rather plainly dressed middle aged woman, wearing no makeup, walked up to the front desk of the Ocean View Hotel, in Santa Monica, California. She gave her name as Miss Emma Shaffer (above), and explained to the deskman that she was the  private secretary to Sister Aimee Semple Mcpherson.  Sister Aimee had earlier rented a room, where she changed into her modest bathing suit. Aimee also left her wrist watch on the dresser before they exited the hotel. 

After crossing the Venice Boardwalk, the two women settled on a large towel under a rented umbrella. Sister Aimee had immediately gone into the ocean for a swim, while Miss Shaffer remained onshore.  When Aimee returned, she dried herself, sat on the sand and begun to dictate to Emma notes for her Sunday sermon  Then, just before three,  she sent Miss Shaffer into the Ocean View to phone Sister Aimee's Church of the Four Square Gospel to see if there were any urgent matters which required her attention.

There were none, but when the Emma returned to their umbrella on the crowded beach, Sister Aimee was gone. Assuming her employer was taking another swim, Emma waited perhaps twenty minutes, before running into hotel and asking for help.

“The cripples to my temple crowd,

I heal them, and they shout aloud.
A thousand miles my raptures go
Upon my magic radio.”

Hotel staff searched the beach and the surf,  but there was no sign of Sister Aimee. The police were called. A tracking dog had no trouble finding the missing evangelist’s towel, but only Aimee's scent remained on the sand.  One of the most famous women in Los Angeles was missing.

It was too late to make the evening editions of the battling daily newspapers. But overnight The Los Angeles Times, and William Randolph Hearst's  Herald American assigned dozens of reporters to the "beat".  Within 24 hours 500 reporters from across the nation would be chasing this story.  The morning headlines back east shouted, “Evangelist Feared Drown.”

“What's this? A terror-spasm grips

My heart-strings, and my reason slips.
Oh, God, it cannot be that I,
The bearer of Thy Word, should die!...”

It is hard to overstate Aimee Semple McPherson's influence in 1926. One in ten of Los Angeles' one million citizens claimed to be a member of her evangelical Pentecostal Church of the Four Square Gospel (above), with perhaps three quarters of a million adherents nationwide, thanks to her nation wide radio broadcasts.

That Tuesday evening Aimee's mother, Mrs Mildred Kennedy (known as Sister Minnie), preached in Aimee's stead at the Temple on Glendale Avenue (above), delivering the same muscular vibrant faith healing fundamentalist theology, but without the theatrical flair the faithful had come to expect from Aimee. And the first public acknowledgment of Sister Aimee's absence came at the end of the service, when Sister Minnie told the congregation that “'Sister went swimming this afternoon at 20 minutes to three, and she has not come back. Sister is gone. We know she is with Jesus.”

“My daughter's voice, my mother's kiss!

My pulpit-notes on Genesis!
Oh, count the souls I saved for Thee,
My Savior-wilt Thou not save me?”

The next morning, two air planes crisscrossed the stretch of sand (above), a half dozen life boats scoured the waters. A Coast Guard Cutter even sent down divers. By noon the worried crowd was reported at fifty thousand.  The Los Angeles Times reported in its Wednesday evening edition that overnight, “To the hundreds of men and women who wait in a huddled and silent mass beneath the open sky...Through the fog-bound, chilling night and then through the weary scorching hours of the day, the followers of the evangelist have kept their places on the sand..."She can't be dead. She can't be dead....God wouldn't let her die. She was too noble. Her work was too great. Her mission was not ended. She can't be dead."...

“Ten thousand to my aid would run,

Bring me my magic microphone!
Send me an angel, or a boat…

The senseless waters fill her throat.”

“In some manner word was spread about,” reported the Times, “that promptly at 2:30 p.m. Mrs. McPherson (above) would arise from the sea and speak to her followers. The appointed time came and many arose to look further out to sea. But it passed without the miracle... At noon, search of the sea was halted as hopeless. The long seine nets stretched from boat to boat which had dragged the ocean floor since Tuesday night were taken in.

"A boat containing life guards continued the search alone for a little while longer and then also gave up. The tide was left to do its own work....Only an occasional swimmer ventured into the water near the spot where Mrs. McPherson is supposed to have been drowned during the day. The place seemed to be shunned by bathers...”

“Ten million tons of waters hide

A woman's form, her Faith deride;
While thousands weep upon the shore,
And searchlights seek…and breakers roar…”

That Wednesday, a teenage girl saw Sister Aimee struggling in the waves, and raced into the surf to her rescue. But there was no Aimee, and the girl drown. After that the desperate amateurs were replaced by professional hard hat divers, who walked the sea bed from the Santa Monica Pier to the north, to Ballona Creek, three miles to the south. One of the frantic hard hats, a diver named Ed Harrison, succumbed to exhaustion and died. That meant two had died searching for Sister Aimee, but still the search continued and no body was found.

By the first of June, the desperate Minnie (above, left) had calculated the exact location of her daughter's remains, and in defiance of California Fish and Game regulations, four dynamite charges were set off in the waters, hoping to free Sister Aimee's body from the bottom sands. Nothing floated to the surface except a few sacrificial fish. The faithful lined the bay for weeks, spaced a hundred yards apart, walking back and forth, waiting for the sea to give up her dead. 

And then, 33 days later, Aimee's body reappeared five hundred miles away, in the middle of the Mexican Sonora desert. And as was to be expected, miraculously, she was alive.

“Oh, gallant souls that grope for light

Through matter's blind and lonely night!
Oh, pity our minds that seek to know
That which is so—
And piteously have forgot
That which is not! “

Upton Sinclair, “An Evangelist Drowns”

The New Republic, June 30, 1926

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