Sometime in late 1968, my wife Bobbie and I with our three kids were living at 10724 Whitegate Ave. in Sunland, CA, in the northeastern part of the city of Los Angeles where I lived from 1955 to 1982. I had graduated from seminary, Golden Gate Baptist Theological Seminary in Mill Valley and was doing what one might call ‘street evangelism’ in the Haight-Ashbury. The JPM was at full strength, and I would go back and forth from San Francisco to Los Angeles every other week, sometimes on a bus, sometimes hitch-hiking, and a couple of times on my motorcycle.
Thanks to Dr. Francis DuBose, professor at the seminary in Mill Valley, I was invited to join with a new church in the city, on Balboa St. between 41st and 42nd Ave. A store front, but it had been converted into a church. Today it is a Egyptian restaurant. I was invited to stay there when in I was in S.F. At some point I asked the church to let me turn the place into a kind of motel where homeless hippies could come and stay. (No money involved.)_ Graciously I was given permission, and with the help of the Salvation Army, I managed to find sleeping space for a dozen or more people.
With everything ready, I stopped by a group known as the Haight Defense Committee, who set up a card table on Haight and Ashbury Streets and help direct hippies to those things they needed and told them of what we called “The Soul Inn” at the church on Balboa Street. The very next evening, three of us were at the church, The Soul Inn, about nine o’clock, just finished our dinner which consisted of a quart can of something or other when there was a knock at the door and 15 hippies, males and females, were invited in.
First thing was food, which we had none of except for an inch or so of the quarter can. One of the guys with us, cannot remember his name right now, but we went in the back room, which we had converted into a kitchen, and started to dish up bowls of the stuff we had almost finished off.
And here is where something incredible happened. I was dishing up and beyond belief, we feed all of the hippies and had an inch left over in the can. Somewhere in this process we knew a miracle was taking place, yet we did not announce it but only spoke of it among ourselves later on that night.