Off The Record

IN THE EARLY 1960′s, the Reverend Jim Jones read an article in Esquire magazine that said Belo Horizonte, Brazil, and Mendocino County, America, were the two best places to be during a nuclear holocaust. Jones, who took the possibility of plutonium poisoning and Esquire more seriously than anyone else in the world, soon set up a church in Belo Horizonte but soon returned to his home base in Indianapolis when, apparently, the Hoosier mother church nearly collapsed without his charismatic presence. Jones returned from Brazil and, in 1965, moved his small congregation and a Brazilian monkey to Redwood Valley where both were soon on exhibit. Jones was so broke when he arrived in 1965 that he had to take a job as a teacher in Boonville. He got the job through a fellow transplanted Hoosier who was then Boonville’s superintendent of schools and, like Jones, a Christian. Of sorts. But very soon, roughly three years, via a series of welfare scams and the importation of mostly black parishioners from the San Francisco Bay Area whose property Jones appropriated for himself and whose persons he used as funding units for his church, Jones was a very big shot in Mendocino County. He was foreman of the Grand Jury and a go-to guy for outback politicos. By the early 1970′s Jones left Redwood Valley for San Francisco where the Democratic Party apparatus did a lot more to advance him than any single individual did and the rest, as they say, is history. It’s clear (to me anyway) that given the porousness of today’s local, state and federal institutions — total strangers, often reinventions of themselves, are routinely elected to office, often here in Mendocino County where, from your local public radio station to your local school board, implausible persons are making decisions that affect your life, and seldom for the better. Jones is as likely in Mendocino County today as he was then.