anybody see the new JW-commercial? (page 4)

Pureheart

Can anyone tell me when Dateline will air the JW story?

Pureheart

ballistic

What about televised Judicial Commitees?

And now it's time for......Jehovah's Judiciary with Judge Judy!

*

Pureheart, I don't think anyone knows yet when the Dateline special will air. With everything that has been happening since 9/11, anything other than the WTC tragedy and its aftermath has taken a back seat. Silentlambs, however, has been in touch with the Dateline people, and he has promised to notify us of the time as soon as he hears anything.

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< http://groups.yahoo.com/group/witness-wave/message/370

From: witness-wave@b...
Date: Thu Jun 10, 1999 12:05 pm
Subject: Experience: 1947 Reader's Digest

Submitted to WW by: Audra Tyler <audrazark@y...>
Hello All
I tore out a wall in an old house and I came across this very old Reader's
Digest from 1947 it is the January issue. But that is not the neat thing. It
has an article about Jehovah's Witnesses in it. So I just thought I would send
the article to everyone. So here it is.
----------------------------------
Jehovah's Traveling Salesmen

Last August, in Cleveland Ohio, some 83,000 members of the doorbell-ringing,
tract-selling religious organization known as Jehovah's Witnesses assembled for
their first international convention since before the war. Like most cities,
Cleveland suffered from housing and food shortage. Yet the Jehovah's Witnesses
found shelter and meals for a population totaling more than that of Cleveland's
largest suburb. Before the convention opened, an advance gaurd swept through
the town, block by block, until more than 60,000 rooms had been obtained. Then
they took over an old trailer camp in the outskirts and constructed their own
tent and trailer city. They set up an incredibly efficient cafeteria, in which
50,000 Witnesses were served two meals a day. When food ran short in Cleveland
they brought in their own - from out of town - by the carload. They had their
own carpenters, plumbers, policemen, doctors, nurses, auto mechanics, barbers -
all working for nothing. On the last day they set up an assembly line
arrangement at Lake Erie, and mass-baptized 2602 new converts.

But the most amazing thing about convention - probably the largest religious
conclave in the history of the United States - is that it was held at all. The
Witnesses' record of persecution for religious beliefs was unequaled during the
war. Because they refused to perform any of the normal duties of citizenship,
such as voting and jury duty, or to salute any flag, they were accused of being
pro-Axis in the Allied countries and pro-Allied in the Axis countries. In
Germany they were among the first to be thrown into Hitler's concentration
camps. In Canada the organization was outlawed completely. In England some of
its leaders were thrown into jail. In the U.S., shamefully enough, it was no
better. Hundreds of Witnesses attempting to preach their Gospel were dosed
liberally with castor oil, Mussolini-fashioned, beaten, shot, tarred and
feathered. Their literature and meeting places were burned; their children
expelled from public schools. Approximately 4000 of them were sent to prison
for claiming that they were ministers of the Gospel and not subject to
selective service. Instead of being wiped out, the Witnesses thrived on this
persecution. The 1940 American membership was estimated at 44,000 and the world
membership at well under a million. Today the figures are something like
500,000 in the US and nearly three million all over the world. The name of the
Society comes from the 43rd Chapter of Isaiah which says "Ye are my witnesses,
saith Jehovah, and my servants whom I have chosen." Their doctrines are simple
being basically a down-to-earth fundamentalism that follows only what is
written in the Bible. For this reason they are against all organized religion,
since they can find no justification for a church or a hierarchy of any kind in
the Bible. The Witnesses prophesy that on some day before 1984 Gabriel's
trumpet will blow and Christ's voice will announce that the end is at hand.
God's hosts will descend form the heavens to fight the Battle of Armageddon and
the "Great Theocracy" will be established on earth. The only human's left will
be Jehovah's Witnesses. They believe, therefore, that their mission is to bring
as many as possible into the fold, and they devote endless hours every week,
following Christ's method of personal invitation. They do it by ringing
doorbells, playing their phonograph records, and handing out tracts both to
householder and on the street corners. The Witnesses do not believe in
purgatory or paradise. When you are dead, they say, you're dead. But on the Day
of Judgement all of the faithful from Abel on down will be resurrected to enjoy
the fruits of the Kingdom of God. And those of the faithful who are alive will
just go on living on this earth-made-heaven. Hence their famous slogan
"Millions now living will never die."

In order to advance their doctrine the Jehovah's Witnesses own and run radio
station WBBR in Brooklyn, and turns out more than 1,500,000 books, 11,000,000
pamphlets, and 12,000,000 magazines every year in 88 languages. From 1919 to
1946 the Witnesses claim they sold the incredible total of 468,000,000 books
and pamphlets. Most of this is done in a modern eight-story factory in
Brooklyn, staffed by every conceivable type of technician and executive. These
"headquarters servants" live in a seven-story apartment building owned by the
society and work for $10 a month "expense money." All their other needs are
filled by other Witnesses. They have their own chambermaids, dining room,
laundry and tailor shop. Their food is produced by Jehovah's Witnesses working
on farms owned by the society. Jehovah's Witnesses have no churches. Their
local societies are called "company organizations" and their meeting places,
whether an elaborate ex-hospital as in Little Rock, Ark., or a grass hut in the
Mysore jungle, are called "Kingdom Halls." On Sunday nights they gather to
discuss a Bible lesson, handed down to them by the Brooklyn headquarters. In
the daytime the "publishers," as they are called, go from house to house
"witnessing" or "exchanging for a contribution" the pamphlets and books which
they bought from the society. The ideal work week for a "publisher" according
to the society is "five days devoted to God, and one day to secular work."

Department of justice figures indicate that less than one percent of the group
have had a college education while 15 percent have less than grammar schooling.
Most of them are poor, yet at the convention there dozens of well dressed
Witnesses in Cleveland's finest hotel suites, 100 doctors, 250 nurses, a Mrs.
Dodd who flew from London by Clipper, and the senior engineer at a leading
Midwest radio station. Once a year these conglomerate Witnesses, provided they
have contributed at least $10, are allowed to vote for the board of directors,
who in turn select the society's officers. No one is ever elected to the board
but the previous directors or new-comers the board might designate. The
directors live at the Brooklyn headquarters and hand down instructions and
interpretations of the Bible; they are responsible for running the radio
station, the printing of the publications, the 57 branch offices in the US and
foreign countries, the society's farms and the Watchtower Bible School of
Gilead (at South Lansing, N.Y.) where Witnesses are schooled for positions of
command in the organization.

Because of the obviously huge income from the publications, the directors have
been accused of using Jehovah's Witnesses as a personal racket. There is no
evidence to support these charges. The leaders live in lower middle-class
simplicity, and the first president of the society, Charles Taze Russell, left
exactly $200 in his will when he died. Jehovah's Witnesses got under way in
1872, when Russell, a Presbyterian, organized a Bible class in Allegheny, Pa.,
to "begin a through study of the Scriptures." From this obscure beginning
developed Zion's Watchtower Tract Society, the corporation name of Jehovah's
Witnesses. Russell's personal interpretations of the Bible now have become
Jehovah's Witness dogma. He organized the system of "witnessing" from
door-to-door, the local kingdom hall and company organization setup, the
Brooklyn headquarters and the foreign branches. When he died in 1916 the mantle
dropped onto the shoulders of "Judge" Joseph Franklin Rutherford, a Missouri
lawyer who had become attorney for the organization. Tall, portly,
senatorial-looking Rutherford gave the movement the personality it needed. Soon
everything was done in the name of Judge Rutherford. The tracts were his
personal messages, the Watchtower became filled with his personal opinions. As
early as1927 Rutherford had a coast-to-coast network of 53 stations, which grew
to an astonishing number of 403 in 1933. When protests from the clergy forced
most of the stations to drop Rutherford's lectures, he made portable
phonograph's and recordings of his lectures in the Brooklyn factory and sold
them to the servants, to assist them in witnessing.

Rutherford first instituted the name Jehovah's Witnesses in 1931. He also set
the Witnesses' pattern of refusing to serve in the army of any government but
God's, when he was sentenced to the Atlanta penitentiary for counseling draft
evasion in World War I. After Rutherford's death in 1942 Nathan Homer Knorr was
elected to fill his place. But the Great Personality is a recent convert,
Hayden C. Covington, formerly a lawyer in San Antonio and now the society's
legal counsel. Covington - drawling, handsome, wisecracking - has been
described as one of the country's most resourceful attorneys. From 1941 to 1946
he personally handled 4200 Jehovah's Witness cases in the state and federal
courts, 35 of them before the U.S. Supreme Court itself. Covington argues all
the Supreme Court cases personally and has won notable victories. In 1942, for
instance, three West Virginians were threatened with prosecution if they did
not force their children to salute the flag in school. The Supreme Court upheld
Covington, and it is now illegal for any school board to force children to do
anything against their religious principles. Another Supreme Court decision,
fought through by Covington, established the ruling that distributing tracts is
as much a part of the freedom of religion as going to church.

These momentous decisions probably will be remembered long after Jehovah's
Witnesses become extinct. (Yeah, right!!! If they could see us now!!!) As
Roger Baldwin, head of the American Civil Liberties Union, put it, "by
contesting in the courts every restriction on them, these Jehovah's Witnesses
have won for you and me a degree of freedom we've never had before. In serving
what they conceive to be the cause of God, they have served the cause of their
fellow men."
===================================
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"AM Broadcasting History-Various Articles":

< http://members.aol.com/jeff1070/am4.html

WBBR New York:

WBBR New York
This article appeared in Popular Communications in May 1994. It is reproduced here with permission. Thanks to Jim Douglass for providing the back issue of the magazine.
By ALICE BRANNIGAN

In the January issue, we discussed station WBBR, the old Watchtower Bible and Tract Society station on 1330 kHz that had its transmitter on Staten Island, New York City, and studios in Brooklyn. Religious station WBBR first went on in 1924. We noted that it went off the air on April 15th, 1957, after it was sold to a new owner, who called it WPOW.

It turns out that the man who purchased WBBR and turned it into a commercial station happens to be one of our regular readers, and he wrote to provide information about WPOW. His name is H. Scott Killgore, who now owns KMPG/1520, of Hollister, Calif.

Under the name Tele-Broadcasters, Mr. Killgore also owned KUDL, Kansas City, Mo.; KALI, Pasadena, Calif.; WARE, Ware, Mass.; WKXL, Concord, N. H.; WKXV, Knoxville, Tenn.; and WPOP, Hartford, Conn. He recalls that he paid $133,000 for WBBR, which included the mint condition 5 kW RCA transmitter that had been used only 30 hours per week.

The transmitter site was an 18-acre farm, complete with a 24-room house, a swimming pool, a cannery, a barn, two greenhouses, and 20 chicken houses. After the station was purchased, Mr. Killgore found out that there was no power on the property except for a huge generator plant that was sufficient to serve a town of 30,000. The catch was that nobody could run the generator except for the man who had built it. He was 70 years old and said he was retired. That meant the power company had to bring in a power line from three miles away.

Another interesting self-sufficient feature was that the farm had a storage tank for millions of gallons of water. Mr. Killgore needed to pump in water once a year in order to meet the daily needs of the facility.

The 18-acres Mr. Killgore purchased were part of a 30-acre farm operated by the Jehovah's Witnesses, from whom he had bought WBBR. The farm sent food to the Witness facilities in Brooklyn, where they fed 1,000 at each meal. Mr. Killgore had no immediate plans for the farming potentials of his parcel of land, but he recalls that it was always in the back of his mind that no matter how bad business might be at WPOW, he could still live off the land if necessary.

WPOW claimed it was the first new broadcast station in New York City in 14 years. The studio was located at 41 East 42nd Street. This was one room measuring only four by six feet. Mr. Killgore says that it took only three people to run WPOW, and the station made money with its Top-40 music format.

In time, WPOW was sold. It no longer exists. Now the 1330 kHz slot in New York City is occupied by 5 kW station WNYM. We are therefore particularly pleased to have had the opportunity to get an inside look at this station, as described by its founder. Doubly special because we are proud to number Mr. Killgore as "one of our own."

anybody see the new JW-commercial?

Pureheart

ballistic

RedhorseWoman

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