Jim Jones’ sinister grip on San Francisco
Privately, San Francisco political leaders expressed doubts about Jones and his strange church. One day a friend of Milk’s named Tory Hartmann dropped off some boxes of campaign brochures at Peoples Temple, so that Jones’s army could distribute them. Hartmann was immediately unnerved by the uptight, high-security atmosphere inside the temple, where sentries stood at attention outside each room, like the palace guards in the Wicked Witch’s castle. “This is a church?” Hartmann said to herself. Later, after she sped back to the Castro and told Milk about her bizarre experience, the naturally cheery politician turned deadly serious. “Make sure you’re always nice to the Peoples Temple,” he told her. “They’re weird and they’re dangerous, and you never want to be on their bad side.”
Cleve Jones, a young Milk aide, accompanied him to Peoples Temple for a couple of Sunday services. “Harvey told me, ‘Be careful, they tape everything.’ Everyone knew Jim Jones was creepy, everyone knew he was a megalomaniac. But everybody also saw this church full of black and white people — black people from the Fillmore who had been subjected to apartheid-like policies and seemed to finally be getting some respect.”
Members of Moscone’s staff were also beginning to hear troubling reports about Peoples Temple. One day mayoral aide Dick Sklar suggested to his family maid — an African-American woman who had followed the Sklars to San Francisco from Ohio — that she attend a Sunday service at Peoples Temple. “I didn’t know anything about it,” Sklar said, “but she was a churchgoing woman, and I thought she might like it. Afterward she came back and said it was the scariest place she’d ever been. They searched her, asked her questions. I had no idea.”
Moscone himself could not ignore how peculiar his political ally was. “I was at every meeting that Jim Jones ever attended with the mayor,” said Moscone press secretary Corey Busch. “I can tell you that after every one of those meetings, the reaction was, ‘This is one weird bird.’ He always wore the dark glasses. You couldn’t predict Jonestown, but he was definitely weird. In retrospect, maybe we should have seen that, but we didn’t.”
http://www.salon.com/2012/05/01/jim_jones_sinister_grip_on_san_francisco/
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Big props for pulling that out!
I love that record!
It chronicles the amazing times (both great and horrific) in San Francisco mainly in the 60s, 70s, and 80s. Interesting stuff. I lived through some of that time in the Bay Area but I was a kid so it has been good to revisit things like Patty Hearst, Jim Jones and the Moscone/Milk murders as an adult.
