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Then there was the unmistakable dynamism of the preachers themselves. Graham caused such a sensation that his 1950 advent on ABC radio was foreordained. He made his TV debut the following year. Weekly shows, the basic unit of TV programming, did not begin until traveling Revivalist Rex Humbard happened by a crowd gazing into an Akron department-store window. Fashion < show? Puppets? No, a TV set. By 1953 Humbard was telecasting services weekly and in 1958 opened the splashy, 5,000-seat Cathedral of Tomorrow, the first church designed to be a TV studio. In 1955, at Humbard's urging, Oral Roberts began telecasting weekly films of himself placing healing hands upon lines of supplicants in sweat-drenched tent revivals. The nation was thrilled, or aghast, to watch hard-core Pentecostalism in the living room. Roberts, a Bible college dropout, was able to fold the tent and open his university off the proceeds.
Soon after Pat Robertson's station went on the air in 1961, he hired Jim and Tammy Bakker, who were working the revival circuit, to run a children's show. Bakker later devised and helped host what became The 700 Club. Eventually Bakker left Robertson and helped Paul Crouch launch the Trinity network, then moved to Charlotte in 1974 and became the head of the PTL network. Bakker thus had a hand in developing the three original Christian networks.
Tammy was no great singer, and Jim no penetrating interviewer, but their TV ascent was rapid. Says their avuncular announcer, Henry Harrison: "They were just a cute little couple that people felt good about watching." Soon Bakker was giddily expanding religious and charitable works at home and abroad, though shunning politics.
PTL finances have suffered continual ups and downs. In 1979, after the Charlotte Observer charged that money ostensibly raised for overseas work was diverted to expenses at home, the FCC held preliminary hearings on stripping Bakker's license to a TV station in Canton, Ohio, then let him sell it to Anti-Communist Crusader Billy James Hargis. Last month the Observer asserted that, during the FCC deliberations, former PTL executives had testified the Bakkers used donations to buy a sports car, a houseboat, a mink coat and other personal perks. Seething, Bakker produced documents to rebut the accusations and called them a plot to "destroy us." But he does live well, even as he pleads poverty on the air and lays off some 500 employees (as he did weeks ago). He tools around in a Mercedes, and he and Tammy have a $449,000 retreat in Palm Springs.