The Hippie Scene Degenerates The hippie thing was done by the summer of 1968, and by 1969the Haight-Ashbury had utterly changed. Long gone was the1967 Summer of Love, but despite the radical change, theunabated influx of kids from all over the country continued, likely
because the hippie thing had moved eastward over the previous year.
They were easy to spot with their sleeping bags and suitcases and
were the kids I approached and shared the message of Jesus with.
They were often runaways, and what they found in the “liberating
mecca of love” disillusioned and discouraged them. Now they were
scared, broke, and desperate. The girls had often been molested in
one way or another, and the guys often turned to drug dealing and
prostitution.
The Switchboard was a hippie organization set up to assist America’s
youth looking for a new way of living and provided “trip masters”
for those wishing to expand their minds by taking LSD. Owsley
was the favorite brand then, and several trip masters turned out to be
little more than rapists. One day, angered by tales I had been hearing
from both young men and women,1 I walked into the old Victorian on
Fell Street, where the Switchboard was housed, and standing in the
large front office I began calling them out, challenging them all to a
fight, right then and there. I cut loose with, “You raping, robbing jerks,
you need to go to prison, and I’m going to see to it, if you continue,
you %$#*&+$s.” Not too Christian, perhaps, which is debatable, but
1 On Haight Street I was known as someone to turn to, and it was not unusual
for emergency cases to find their way to me. I found that the local police and medical
people were extremely helpful and competent in those days.
Chapter 14
Early Leaders in
Marin County
46 Chapter 14
considering my size and physical condition in those days, few would
have wanted to accept the challenge.
The predators had descended into the district by the middle of
1968. Even the motorcycle gangs were there in large numbers. People’s
minds had indeed been expanded by marijuana, LSD, peyote,
magic mushrooms, and mescaline, so that heroin and meth were
becoming the new drugs of choice. No one wore flowers in their hair
anymore. Drug dealers were everywhere, as were the pimps and the
porn makers. Good-looking young flesh, mostly white, was up for
grabs. This is not racist in any sense, just true.
The kids kept coming, and once in a while we were able to rescue
some. We sent many young people home on buses, trains, and planes.
Sometimes parents traveled long distances by car to claim their children.
I must relate a story, since I have included her biography in this
book. We called her Mary K., and she had sunk to real lows by the
summer of 1968. She had been a high class business professional but
heroin did her in. There she was, standing on Haight Street, flagging
down cars. I called out to her, she stopped and listened, and as I presented
the forgiveness we have in Jesus, she was immediately converted
right in front of me. I took her to Zion’s Inn, and she lived with
us for about a year, until she married a young man who attended the
Tuesday night Bible Study. Mary K. was one of the original members
of Joyful Noise, and through her testimony at our concerts in high
schools and churches around the state, I would estimate that several
hundred kids’ lives where changed. She is someone special, and so is
her husband Chuck Mancebo.
Sometime in 1970, I turned my attention exclusively to Marin
County where I was living, since the work there was in full bloom.
Leaders Emerge
In 1969, I had met Mike Riley and Roger Hoffman, both students
at Golden Gate Seminary. Like Paul Bryant and Oliver Heath, they
were attracted to a different kind of Christian ministry and were also
interested in the charismatic part of the Jesus Movement. They soon
saw that we were in desperate need for some theologically trained
people, so Mike and Roger led the opening of a new Christian house
Early Leaders in Marin County 47
in Mill Valley on Ethel Avenue. At one point they asked me to come
to the school they attended, my old alma mater, to meet a friend of
theirs who had expressed interest in working with us. His name was
Bob Hymers.
Bob, whose full name is Robert Leslie Hymers, Jr., would play a
very large role in the ministry we were developing in Marin. He was
one of the best preachers I had ever heard; yet he was quite different
in many ways. A Southern Baptist, not the slightest charismatic, but a
real fighting fundamentalist, he loved evangelism and was tireless in
this area. A brilliant man of the highest IQ I had ever met (during his
high school years in Los Angeles he would be the lead in several plays
at once and could memorize all the lines without confusing them), he
and I became close friends.
Bob, Moishe Rosen, and I
became fairly well suited to different
kinds of ministry: demonstrations,
protests, infiltrating
anti-war demonstrations, book
burning events, picketing the Russian
Consulate in San Francisco,
and other forms of street evangelism,
including street preaching
and the use of tracts, known as
broadsides. It was Moishe who,
being older than Bob and I and
with experience and inventiveness
we could not match, spurred
us onto these new approaches.
Led by Moishe, we quickly organized
many demonstrations. We
regularly managed to get leaflet
materials composed and prepared
for printing, placards made by the dozen, and the call put out to be at
a certain place at a certain time. Hundreds of Jesus freaks would show
up, marching and handing out flyers. It was a wild and exciting time.
Moishe taught me how to get media coverage from radio, newspapers,
and television stations at whatever event we were up to; it
48 Chapter 14
worked wonderfully well. The attention we received served to inspire
other Jesus freaks all over the country to try the same things; thus it
served as a kind of cross-pollinization process, and the same sort of
strategies began to spread across the nation.
Bob was an exciting preacher, and we brought together many of
our Bible study groups and material to new Sunday evening gatherings.
We met in San Rafael at both the Lucas Valley Community
Church, pastored by Dale Nystrom, and The Christian Church, pastored
by Chuck Boman. We also rented out the Episcopal Church in
San Rafael’s suburb of Lucas Valley.
I was attracted to the Presbyterian form of government as
opposed to either the congregational style I had learned as a Baptist,
or an episcopal, hierarchical style, like the Catholic or Episcopal
churches. As a result, we developed an eldership structure within our
Christian House Ministries. By the time Mike, Roger, and Bob came
along, our eldership consisted of Mark, Kenny, and me. Some other
key leaders, who later became elders, were Bob Gaulden, Bob Burns,
and Cliff Silliman. Paul Bryant and Oliver Heath had already moved on
to other things, so Mike, Roger, and Bob joined Mark, Kenny, and me
to form a group of elders; I served as the senior elder, but this was all
informal and not recorded in any way. This came about in 1971, but I
am getting ahead of my story.
