The sad story of a boy and his Bible
The most vivid memories that childhood companions have of James Warren Jones—or "Jonesie," as they called him—are of his funeral sermons for dead animals in the Indiana town of Lynn, where he was born 47 years ago. Once, when he was 13, Jones invited a group of boys to his family's barn, recalls Harlan Swift, now a Chicago insurance executive. Amid burning candles, the aspiring preacher carefully opened a matchbox, revealing a dead mouse. "He had a service all organized," recalls Swift, "a very, very intense dramatic service for that dead mouse." A former classmate, Tootie Morton, was leery of these pet funerals: "Some of the neighbors would have cats missing, and we always thought he was using them for sacrifices."
The major industry in Lynn (pop. 1,360) is casketmaking: there are now four such factories. It was prime territory for the Ku Klux Klan, and George Southworth, now of Miami, recalls that Jones' father took part in the weekly meetings, with sheets and hoods, on a field near town. But other childhood acquaintances do not remember any link between the Klan and the elder Jones, a railroad man who worked only rarely after being gassed in World War I. Jones claimed his mother was an American Indian, but his cousin Barbara Shaffer says, "He made that up to impress somebody." He was an only child; the three lived in a one-story, tin-roofed frame house that has since been replaced by a supermarket.
Before he entered his teens, Jones picked up religion from a neighbor, Mrs. Myrtle Kennedy, who was a devout member of the Church of the Nazarene. He took to carrying a Bible, but no one made fun of the husky boy, who got into fights easily. He was a natural leader, gathering friends around him and telling them what to do.
He would preach to them, sometimes frightening his listeners with visions of a hell where, with senses undiminished, sinners burned forever. His first chance to mount a real pulpit came when he was 14 and working at a nearby hospital; some of his black co-workers invited him to bring his Bible and give a sermon at their church. "You could see there was something haywire even at that time," says Swift. But Mrs. Kennedy's daughter Thelma Manning remembers Jones more fondly: "He had a little white shaggy-haired dog. They were inseparable. I want people to know Jim Jones had a good side."
In 1945 his parents split up (his father died alone in a Lynn hotel six years later, his mother lived until 1977), and he moved with his mother to Richmond, 16 miles away. The Richmond High School 1949 yearbook shows a handsome young man with slick black hair, staring ahead with a slight smile. That year, at 18, he married Marceline Baldwin, a nurse whom he had met at the hospital where they both worked.