June 23, 1926, 100 years ago: Aimee Semple McPherson is found, safe and sound. Well, safe, anyway.
She was born as Aimee Elizabeth Kennedy on October 9, 1890 in Oxford, Ontario, Canada. Her mother worked with the poor in Salvation Army soup kitchens, and little Aimee preached sermons to her dolls, and then to her classmates. But she eventually deviated from this by reading novels and going to movies and dances.
In 1907, at age 17, she went to a revival meeting, where she met Robert J. Semple, a Pentecostal missionary from Ireland. She gave herself to him, body and soul, marrying him in a Salvation Army ceremony and preaching by his side.
But this marriage ended on a 1910 tour of China, when he died of dysentery, leaving her alone and pregnant, through no fault of either of them. Her daughter, Roberta Semple, was subsequently born in Hong Kong. Already well-known as "Sister Aimee," she ministered to her fellow passengers on the ship back to America.
She went back to working for her mother with the Salvation Army. In 1912, in New York, she met Harold McPherson, and married him. Their son, Rolf McPherson, was born the next year. After having her appendix taken out in 1914, she claimed to hear a voice telling her to go back to preaching. In 1915, she left Harold, took the children, went back to preaching, and, a few weeks later, sent him a note, asking him to join her.
He must have still loved her, because he sold their house, and they lived out of what they called their "Gospel Car," a series of vehicles that culminated in the most famous of these, a 1918 Oldsmobile. But, by 1918, he wanted a more stable life, and went back to Rhode Island, and sued for divorce, citing "abandonment."
Maybe he should have waited just a little longer. At this time, she settled in Los Angeles, and in 1923, opened the 5,300-seat Angelus Temple for her Foursquare Church. She got 40 million visitors within the 1st 7 years. She embraced the nascent medium of radio, and broadcast her Pentecostal sermons to the growing metropolis of Southern California. Her voice was one of those that made "The Roaring Twenties" roar.
Her politics were all over the place. She denounced Communism as "ruling without God," and denounced fascism as "wrongly stating to represent the power of God." She was among the earliest Americans to support a Jewish homeland in what was then called Palestine. In 1925, she broadcast her support of the prosecution of John T. Scopes in the Tennessee "monkey trial." But she also supported organized labor, saying, "A gangster's money is no more unclean than the dollars of the man who amasses his millions from underpaid factory workers."
On May 18, 1926, at the age of 35, and with her fame still rising, she went to Ocean Park Beach in Santa Monica. When she didn't return to her beach blanket, it was feared she had drowned. After a month of searching, including receiving fake leads, some of them ransom notes, and wild speculation from the tabloid journalism of the time, Mildred Kennedy, who had come to Los Angeles, decided that her daughter was dead, and held a memorial service at Angelus Temple on June 20.
But on June 23, Mrs. Kennedy got a phone call from Douglas, Arizona. Aimee was alive there, at a hospital. She said that, on the beach, she had been approached by a couple who wanted her to pray over their sick child. She went with them to their car, where she was knocked out by chloroform. She was taken to the Mexican desert, but escaped, walked for hours, collapsing in the border town of Agua Prieta, Sonora. She was taken across the border to Douglas, where she recuperated before returning to Los Angeles.
The newspaper barons smelled a rat, and contributed $500,000 to a grand jury investigation. It was determined that she had made the whole thing up. The story that was released was that she and a former employee, Kenneth Ormiston, had run off together, to a California resort town, and then to Mexico. He had gone along with her proposed story of a kidnapping, and dropped her off in Agua Prieta, where she walked not for 17 hours, but for one.
She stood by her story for the rest of her life, but on November 3, Aimee, her mother, Ormiston and others who assisted her were indicted for criminal conspiracy, perjury and obstruction of justice. Ormiston took a bullet for her by identifying another woman as the one who stayed with him. With the evidence against her falling apart, the charges were dismissed on January 10, 1927.
Sister Aimee's disappearance may have inspired British mystery writer Agatha Christie to try the same thing, later in the year.
She had fallen out of favor with the press, and even with her mother. So she took to a new medium: Film. As we would say today, she glammed herself up, and became an early darling of the newsreels. She married for a 3rd time in 1932, to singer David Hutton. Despite her own previous hypocrisy, she was infuriated by his billing of himself as "Aimee's man" in his cabaret act, and was often photographed with scantily clad women. She divorced him in 1934.
When World War II began, she was fully supportive of the Allied effort: "It is the Bible against Mein Kampf. It is the Cross against the Swastika. It is God against the Antichrist of Japan... This is no time for pacifism." (Another cleric in mass communication, Bishop Fulton Sheen, also compared symbols with the Nazi Swastika, taking to the radio and calling World War II "the Cross against the Double Cross.")
In 1942, she sold $150,000 worth of war bonds in a single hour, and she matched this achievement in 1944. She collected 2,800 pints of blood for the Red Cross. She organized drives for rubber and gasoline, and instead of driving her latest Gospel Car to and from the Angelus Temple, she began driving a horse and buggy, to emphasize conservation for the war effort. Choosing to forget her indiscretion of 18 years earlier, Newsweek called her "The World's Greatest Living Minister."
She wasn't living for much longer. On September 26, 1944, she died from an overdose of sleeping pills, apparently a mistake, at a hotel in Oakland, where she had planned a revival. She was only 53 years old.
Aimee's mother, Mildred Kennedy, outlived her, lasting until 1947. Her daughter, Roberta Semple, married Harry Salter, a radio producer. Together, they went on to develop early TV game shows, including the original version of Name That Tune. She lived until 2007, at age 96. Her son, Dr. Rolf McPherson, led the Foursquare Church from then until his retirement in 1988. He lived until 2009, also 96.
