It began, appropriately, in Los Angeles, in the 1950s, guided by the HOLLYWOOD sign up on Mount Lee. Showtime! So, before preachers like Joel Olsteen and Pat Robertson there were Fred Schwartz and Billy James Hargis, the real-life models of my assassinated, anti-communist crusader Dr. Timothy St. John Mahoney.
I was born under that big white sign in Hollywood Presbyterian Hospital as WWII was ending. One of my earliest memories is walking a few blocks to Beverly Blvd. in the evenings with my father. We stood in front of the appliance store watching the televisions glowing against the dark. We moved to the San Fernando Valley, bought that first black and white television, and watched “The Ed Sullivan Show”.
Their script hasn’t changed much over the years. Then the bad guys were the communists and the bad Negroes like Martin Luther King. Now the bad guys are progressives, Black Lives Matter, Alvin Bragg, and, interestingly enough, still the communists. The stage directions haven’t changed either. Mock them, hug flag, thump Bible, waive arms, bright lights, patriotic songs. It is mesmerizing. It draws you in as it drew in my fictional Beth. You can hate them because they’re not us. God didn’t create the Other, they are the spawn of Satan.
When I was in high school, my girlfriend and I attended one of Fred Schwartz’s Southern California School of Anti-Communism meetings in the Los Angeles Memorial Sports Arena. It wasn’t quite as dramatic as my fictional Reverend Mahoney rising up through the stage, but close. Schwartz invented the televised anti-communist crusade. He talked the then independent, now Fox affiliate, KTLA into doing a remote. He began with “The Star-Spangled Banner” and prayers. Communists don’t pray, we do. And tithing, yes. Oh, yes. Lots of tithing. Love Jesus and pass the basket.
It is for that reason that Joel Olsteen doesn’t fly coach.
Billy James Hargis, who attended a series of rural Bible colleges, jumped onto the Schwartz bandwagon. I don’t think he was the first anti-Communists, pro-segregation televangelist to be accused of abusing the young who fell under his spell. He may have been the first to be publicly accused of doing it with both girls and, shudder to think it, boys.
The draught that hit California five years ago triggered, pun intended, the idea of the police finding a rifle in the exposed bottom of a reservoir. Was it the gun that killed Mahoney? I could, if only in a story, make a fictional Schwartz or Hargis pay for their many sins.
Write what you know, the oldest admonition to the writer. But in my case Beth, who attends the rally with my unnamed protagonist, is the antithesis of my date who attended that Southern California School of Anti-Communism meeting with me in 1961. She is my wife, the Stanford educated, New York trained lawyer. Beautiful like Beth, but not Beth.
The truest, if truth is subject to degrees, thing in “Roses for Beth” is the post-rally trip to C.C. Brown’s for a dark chocolate sundae. The Beach Boys got right almost everything about that California era, the T-Bird and surfing, the Little Deuce Coupe. But I’ll never know why they didn’t cover the C.C. Brown’s sundae. It was, as my unnamed protagonist explains, proof positive to the young Californian that there is a God. There should have been a song in that.
Trace Evidence 