Writing Life

On this day, eighty-three years ago – June 23, 1926 – the famous evangelist Aimee Semple McPherson stunned the world by wandering into an Arizona town called Agua Prieta and announcing that she had escaped from a trio of kidnappers who had been holding her hostage for over a month. On May 18th of that year, Sister Aimee, as she was known to the members of her Foursquare Gospel religious franchise, had swum out into the Pacific Ocean somewhere between Santa Monica and Venice and vanished from sight. When the news of her disappearance was made public later that night, much of the country went into mourning. According to her biographer, Daniel Mark Epstein, “Such a deep and universal expression of grief had not been seen since the assassination of Lincoln. It would not be seen again until the death of FDR.” For thirty-two days the story of Sister Aimee’s disappearance and presumed death dominated the world’s news media. Her faithful devotees kept candlelight vigils for her. Souvenir shops all over the country began selling trinkets and postcards with images of Aimee hovering above the waves that had apparently claimed her. Several of her followers, determined to follow her even into death itself, had to be restrained from casting themselves into the sea. People claimed to have spotted her in Texas, New York, Arizona, Colorado, and elsewhere. Airplanes and deep-sea divers combed the area of Aimee’s disappearance, looking for her body. On June 20th, a memorial service was held for her at Angelus Temple, the huge domed cathedral she founded in the Echo Park neighborhood of Los Angeles.

But Sister Aimee was not dead. Apparently she was merely in hiding. Three days after her memorial service, she walked out of the Arizona desert and claimed to have been the victim of a kidnapping. But the truth appears to have been less sensational and far more sordid. And it was the Sacramento Union that first published an article detailing what has come to be accepted as the most likely explanation for Aimee’s disappearance – that she had spent those thirty-two missing days holed up in a cottage (or series of different cottages) at Carmel-by-the-Sea with a man named Kenneth G. Ormiston, a married man and apparently Aimee’s lover. Ormiston was a radio engineer who built Aimee’s state-of-the-art broadcasting station Radio KFSG. They had grown close while working together on various broadcasting projects. Earlier in the year, his wife, Ruth, had visited Aimee’s mother and announced that she planned to file for a divorce, naming Kenneth’s affair with Aimee as the grounds. But Kenneth went missing in January of 1926, prompting Ruth to sail for Australia, where she and her young son moved in with her parents. Enough witnesses came forward claiming to have seen Sister Aimee and Ormiston together in their seaside cottage that a Los Angeles judge charged her with obstructing justice by lying about her alleged kidnapping. The case was never resolved in court, but it seems likely that those thirty-two lost days were spent in a California love shack with Kenneth Ormiston rather than an Arizona desert shack with three kidnappers.

Several years ago, I became fascinated by the story of Aimee Semple McPherson and read several accounts of her life. In her honor, I offer up the following sonnet, on this, the eighty-third anniversary of her mysterious reappearance outside the town of Aqua Prieta:

AIMEE

You preached in parks and, once, a boxing hall
(Your message on that day: Knock Satan Out!).
To crowds of 30,000 you would shout
And hold each of your listeners in thrall.
You battled evolution, alcohol,
And godlessness of nearly every shape,
But some sins even you could not escape.
I guess that every angel has to fall.
One day you disappeared mysteriously.
“I was kidnapped but escaped,” you later said.
In truth you spent those five long weeks in bed
In a love shack up at Carmel-by-the-Sea.
So often do we mortals lose our way
To Heaven and wind up in Monterey.