Dorothy Does California

My mother Dorothy, circa 1977

"Ooh, you've got to sit down and watch this movie me," my mom said. "It's called The Disappearance of Aimee. It's history, about a lady I saw when I was a little girl..."

It was 1976, I was home from college and looking for a bit more excitement than an evening watching The Hallmark Hall of Fame.

My mom, Dorothy, scowled back; she'd noted my eye-roll. "Listen, you love movies, and this one's got Faye Dunaway as Aimee Semple McPherson and Bette Davis as her manipulating mother. It's California history--with popcorn and chocolate." She waved the Jolly Time can and Ghirardelli candy bars at me.

Hmmm. Tempting. I 'm a history geek, a chocoholic and a movie nut--this movie had interesting casting, too. I checked my watch. Made-for-TV movies are usually done by ten. Plenty of time to party afterwards. I grabbed the popcorn bowl. "How'd you met this Aimee lady that I only sorta heard of?"

Dorothy Maxine Pond, was born on a farm, though she was never much of a "farm girl." That farm was in Polk County, Missouri, on the north side of the Ozarks. The nearest town was Halfway, Missouri. "Because it's half-a-da-way 'tween Bolivar and Buffalo," (as if you didn't know). Population hovered around an even 100 then, about 173 nowadays. She was born April 18, 1923. "The seventeenth anniversary of the 1906 Earthquake in San Francisco," Mom always pointed out; she wanted to people to know that she was, in an odd way, a California girl from the very start.

Word has it that my maternal grandpa Roy wasn't much in love with farming. His wife's two brothers, Van and Zan, didn't much care for the farm life,either. They'd lit out for the golden hills of "Cal-lee-for-nigh-yay" where there was word of opportunity for a better life. The brothers found success, they bragged, earning good money in the oil fields of Kern County. While my mother was still a toddler, her parents loaded up a worse-for-wear Model T and headed west to settle in tumbleweed-strewn town called Taft.

After eight years driving trucks for Standard Oil and seeing three more children into this world, my grandparents were still just scrapin' by in that parched village. The family story is that my grandparents decided to attend what they called a "tent revival" show that was all the rage in those days. The religious production featured the famous faith-healer Aimee Semple McPherson. She was widely known as "Sister Aimee," a former Pentecostal minister who now preached her brand of religion which she called "the Foursquare Gospel."

Sister Aimee had largely forsaken the tent revival circuit by the time the Pond family came to catch her worship service. The Foursquare Gospel was now to be heard in their own cathedral, the Angelus Temple, which still exists on Glendale Boulevard in the Echo Park neighborhood of Los Angeles (not far from Dodger Stadium, a more recently-built temple of sorts).

Sister Aimee may have been a native Canadian, but she a true convert to the flash and dash showmanship that epitomized America in the Roaring 20's. With the advent of the Great Depression in the early 30's, she modified her presentation a bit. Gone were the ""talking in tongues" fits, replaced by a choir of more than three hundred and even a live camel brought in to demonstrate exactly how difficult it would be to pass the dromedary through the proverbial eye of any needle. The miracles of healing through faith were made the centerpiece of her evangelical services. By the time my grandparents brought their four children to the Angelus Temple, the Sister Aimee show was the hottest live ticket in Hollywoodland, performing weekly to sold-out audiences numbering in the tens of thousands. She was a national phenomenon, rivaled only by Eleanor Roosevelt and movie stars like Mary Pickford and Clara Bow as the most famous woman in America.

As my mother told the story, the sermon-as-circus was all a bit too much for my staid Baptist grandfather. He was skeptical enough of the faith-healing demonstrations and the histrionic services, but he lost it during the offertory. In most Protestant churches , the offering is a reflective, somber time with ushers solemnly delivering felt-lined wooden or metal plates that are passed, parishioner to parishioner, so that donations may be discretely made according to one's means. Grandpa Roy had never been to a Catholic service where straw baskets are thrust down each row by the ushers to facilitate individual giving from even the most tightfisted. Sister Aimee took the process to a whole new level.

In the Angelus Temple of the Foursquare Gospel, ushers cajoled offerings from everyone by their own adaptive methodology. While the organ softly played, ushers came to each row with metal unlined offering plates at the end of long rods. All the while, Sister Aimee paraded back and forth across the stage, waving her Bible and wailing, "No coins, please! The Lord does not ne-e-e-ed to hear the evil sound of money in his house!" Translation: "You cheapskates better drop nothin' but dollar bills in that plate!"

"That was it for your grandfather," my mother told me during a commercial break from The Disappearance of Aimee. "We left. It was an affront to his faith. He said, 'California is a sinful place; I will not raise my children in this God-forsaken state!' We packed up and moved back to Missouri by the end of the month."

"But, I thought your father hated farming?" I asked.

"Yes, he was more of a mechanic, really. He hated to farm."

"So he moved his whole family almost two thousand miles, to a job he hated? Just to make a point--in 1931, during the Great Depression, in the midst of the Dust Bowl era?"

"So he always said. Now shush, the commercial's over. More popcorn?"

She was messin' with me. The old cat-and-mouse game my mom loved to play: She loved to make me puzzle out the truths in her personal history to gain insight into her past while sharpening my empathetic skills. The story was basically true, or her father believed it to be true. But logically, it couldn't be. It was a tale he spun to cover his true motivation.

"Grandpa Roy masked his questionable choice with a veneer of sanctimony, to make himself feel better, trying to impress his critics."

"Shh! Movie's on..." Mom wanted me to unravel the mystery without bashing her own father. .This called for more popcorn and a healthy bite of Ghirardelli chocolate.

I knew that my grandfather  hated California and I'd heard the "sinful California" slam attributed to him before. It was family legend, which my mother swore was true. Yet Grandpa's time-worn tale didn't make sense. Faye Dunaway's portrayal of a two-faced Aimee Semple McPherson was one of a sexy, wanton woman putting on a big act for her gullible audiences. There were many skeptics back then, along with her legions of followers. Yet Grandpa's story made him seem like he was the only one wise to that charlatan's act. But in reality, he was not the sharpest tool in the shed.

"That was good. Faye Dunaway really captured Sister Aimee's character, just the way I remember her. And I love anything with Bette Davis," Mom said as the credits rolled.

"How well do you remember Sister Aimee's carnival?" It had been forty-five years.

"I was eight, but it was so dramatic, not like any church service I'd ever seen before. She was pretty memorable, it stuck with me all these years. Don't you have to meet your friends?"

"So your father..." I continued while Mom grinned; this was the best part of the night. She knew she could keep me with her a little while longer while I searched for the key to this mystery. It was just a variation on Twenty Questions, a brain-teaser. Mental gymnastics was the sport we enjoyed the most; we played it together.

I persisted. "He had no money for a farm. You were dirt-poor. He hated farming, yet he returned to Missouri where he'd been miserable, and he made a big, sanctimonious show of it..."

"It's getting late, Dave. Your friends will wonder where you are."

"I'm close, aren't I?" She looked smug. "When you were born, the farm, near Halfway--did your father still have that farm to go back to?"

"No--and yes."

I had it. The  clue to understanding my grandfather's mind, why he embellished his tale with his imperious dismissal of Sister Aimee and all things California. "Your other grandfather, the paternal grandfather...did he die that same year?"

She nodded. I'd visited that humble farm and seen the old farmhouse. It was just down the road from my great-uncle Wilbur, my grandfather's brother. Uncle Wilbur lived on his own share of the subdivided family farm. "It was an inheritance. So your father hated to farm, but he couldn't turn down free land..."

"Well, there were taxes..."

"It seemed 'unmanly' or something...to do something he hated, because it was for the money, so to speak. He didn't want to admit that, so he made it seem like he was successful enough in California to make free choices, choices made with higher ideals than he really possessed? Carrying on like he was a martyr..."

"Perhaps.Though that sounds a bit harsh."

My grandfather died when I was two. He was a rather stern, grim-faced guy. I knew he was hard on my mother. They never got along very well; "About as well as oil and water," she'd told me. It was a relationship much like like the one I had with my divorced dad. Yet, my mother had given me her father's name as my middle name. She curried his approval until the day he died.

I pulled on my coat. "I guess your dad  was a bit of a charlatan himself, wasn't he?" Mom didn't answer the slight to her father's memory, but she didn't refute my conclusion, either. The depths of my mother's experience were somewhat clearer now. Her sad, isolated life with an unhappy, frustrated father who spun a web of thin little lies to embellish his meager life story, a litany of misguided wrong turns and fruitless dead ends.

"Just one more thing that bothers me, Mom. You've always said you were hell-bent to get back to California, no matter what..."

"And I did. I kept the faith."

"Yes, yes you did." I gave her a hug goodbye. My mother returned to California in her twenties, enticing her two younger sisters away from Missouri, abandoning their father and that sad little farm. "But, Mom, I've seen Taft...that's like the worst part of California. What was so wonderful here that compelled you to move back, once you were old enough to break away?"

She pulled back, shook out her curls, and took a deep breath. "The Pacific Ocean. I love my walks along the beach, you know that. Once I saw the Pacific, I knew California had to be my home."

I took hold of the doorknob, then stopped and turned. "Didn't you once tell me that when you were a little girl, you almost drowned in the ocean? That's why you never learned to swim. It was your father who saved you..."

"You've always listened to my stories, honey--that's why I love you so much. Now good night!"

"So there's more to this story, then?"

"There always is," she said, beaming. "Isn't there?"

To be continued...