Minimus, this subject came up on one of your threads a couple of years ago, and I think that the incident I related then bears repeating now, so I'm going to write about it again. Excepting the child abuse cases (of which there were many) this is perhaps the worst, the most scandalous event that I have ever known about, anytime-anywhere. In this area, it has entered the realm of mythology-----------------even after nearly 30 years, people still remember and talk about it. And what I am about to relate, as bizarre as it may seem, is the absolute truth--------unadorned and unembellished. For the sake of brevity, I'm even leaving out quite a few details. And I hope that I don't get censored, because this gets pretty graphic and makes Peyton Place look like kindergarten:
Back in the year 1972, a young African-American brother and his wife moved to our congregation from California. He was about 23 at the time and he stayed here for several years before moving back to California around 1979, or thereabouts. This young brother was perhaps the most charismatic and fluent person that I have ever met. He was amazing. He was quite handsome. He was a regular pioneer and was soon made an elder, even at his young age, and he took the city, the circut and the district by storm. He loved the limelight and he was given ample opportunity to sparkle: Hour talks. Circut assembly parts. Major talks on the district assemblies. My God, he could perform. He would have an audience eating at of his hand. He would have them weeping. Laughing. When the hour was over, you would look at your watch in disbelief----------it had flown by. He would humbly leave the stage to thunderous applause. At one district assembly, a television news crew was filming the proceedings, as they are sometimes wont to do, and the TV station was so impressed with him that the news director offered him a contract as a news anchor to begin immediately. This was played up at assemblies for years to come because he refused to accept the offer, as it would have ended his pioneering. Also, it would have cut in on his other business: after he moved here, he began building a pyramid/multi level marketing scheme in which he recruited the brothers and sisters to sell a gasoline additive that was designed to double or even triple your car's gas mileage. It sounds far-fetched, I know, but I'm tellin' ya: this guy could sell ice to the eskimos. He sold tons of that stuff to the brothers; they, however, were not nearly as successful at re-selling it themselves. I remember being in one brother's garage and there must have been 100 cases of it stacked to the ceiling. They couldn't even get their car in there. As I recall, the brother said that he had only sold around 4 bottles. But he didn't seem overly concerned.
(Are you getting bored? This has a ways to go.)
Charismatic just doesn't even begin to describe him. But I forgot to mention one thing: besides charismatic, he was also, apparently, very heavy-hung, if you catch my drift. And he also had a thing for white sisters. Didn't care anything for the black sisters. Just white ones. And, boy, did they ever go for him. They were lined up waiting for their turn. And this went on right there in the congregation for over a year. Elders wives, pioneers, publishers------all the ladies signed up to sell his product, go to the pep rallies, and then reap the fringe benefits.
Our zealous brother was, by this time, being groomed for the circut work, and was doing his "internship" as a substitute CO when it all came crashing down. Evidently, one of the sisters got a bad case of the guilts and went to the brothers.
Have you ever heard the saying that says something about when "the shit hits the fan"? I think that this is when this saying was coined. Because the shit hit the fan, big-time. I won't go into how jealous husbands were hunting him down, and how families lost 1000's of dollars and the rest of the mess. Suffice to say that the over-zealous brother was disfellowshipped. And deserved it, obviously. The scandal encompassed about a dozen congregations, and around 20 sisters were publically reproved. Rumour had it that several more were privately reproved. Many of the sisters were young and beautiful, but by no means all----------------------quite a few were middle-aged and many were not attractive at all. Two or three wound up being disfellowshipped. I guess that they had no regrets and couldn't even bring themselves to sit in front of a committee and fake it.
As I mentioned earlier, he and his wife left town shortly after all this exploded. His wife, by the way, was a stunning beauty that would make Halle Berry look like a cheap showgirl. No action was taken against her, but the general consensus was that, even though she did not participate, she had to have been aware and at least complicit throughout it all.
So that's what happened. Next to the pedophile incidents, this is the worst thing I ever witnessed.
David
