Life at the Mesa (1956-1972)
At the ripe old age of 30, when everything in life starts to go downhill, I happened to discover that Jesus Christ had been running the universe all along--without my help! It wasn’t an accident, my coming to Jesus, of course. God had been pursuing me for a long time. The true story of my career in science is available for you techies to see.
Soon after, I was dunk-baptized at Los Altos First Baptist Church. (I was living in a grand old Adobe house at the time).
Some neat ladies from Kansas, Helen D. Baugh and Mary Clark (Stonecroft) got in touch after hearing I had been telling my story at several women's lunches in the area. They asked me to write up my story which became a small multilingual booklet “My Search.”
Mrs. Baugh and Miss Clark enlisted me to speak at their area conferences across the country. I remember well being invited to speak to a Mayor’s prayer breakfast in Ft. Lauderdale, Florida.
The Mayor presented me with the key to the city which I still have.
A long-haired hippie, Eddie Weyman, 20, came up afterwards and we arranged to meet at a coffee house that night. Somehow I convinced him to fly with me the next day back to The Mesa. (It was a kind of commune during the Jesus Movement with ten guys living with me in my one-bedroom pad).
Those were the days of the Jesus movement, which followed the hippie summer of love in San Francisco, (1967). My old adobe hacienda in Los Altos Hills was flooded with younger guys and gals seeking answers.
Eddie fit right in and slept on the straw mat on my living room with everyone else. His foxy chick shown in the photo was Linda Stedman!
Eddie Weyman phoned me recently and after losing touch for 50 years we had much to catch up on. We talked for three hours! Eddie stayed in the Bay Area for some months before returning to Florida. He now lives in Daytona Beach.
Recently Ed messaged me, “Do you remember enlisting me in the CWLF in Bezerkley in the spring of 1970, with Jack Sparks and Pat Matriciana? Yosemite Retreat, Mt Hermon, me giving my testimony to big audience. Staying in cabin with Luis Palau and family, and going to see Joan Baez occasionally at her house on Page Mill Rd., being ordained as the " Minister of Horizontal Fellowship", soo many memories.”
I asked Ed to please write up or record the true story of his life as it is amazing!
More from Ed: stuff I had forgotten! November 14, 2020. I met Linda at a Mesa bible study. Attended Foothill College. You became my legal guardian; I was under 21. I stayed till January 1971. I then went to LA to visit Hal Lindsey, (a big earthquake happened while I was there). Met Verne Bullock, Larry Norman, Don Williams, Dave Anderson, and helped start Renewal House, I did Bible school with Peter Frankovich, was roomates with Prof. Rick Webb by USC, then after a year I moved back to the Mesa, worked as monkey keeper at Syntex Labs and other odd jobs then back to NJ, to work on pipe crew, then back to Ft Laud., job at WWOG Christian Radio in Boca, then WKID TV, CHANNEL 51. StockMarketToday show with Gene Inger, Fred Hall, and Mickey Rooney. I introduced Mick to D. James Kennedy, they prayed together. I did underwater dive work for AtlanticSaveADock, became Pro dog trainer for AllBreed and FlaK-9. I'm just scratching surface, I need a secretary....
Mel Fagan, a new follower of Jesus, a “long-haired hippie freak” some called him, was perfectly straight, and he managed our house superbly. I set up bunk beds for ten in the spare bedroom, and Mel cooked and kept “The Mesa” livable and consecrated, evicting sluggards and taking in real refugees who had nowhere to crash for the night.
I tried my best to get Mel to cut his hair. I felt that his true identity was tied up, like Samson’s, in his shoulder length silky brown hair. Mel refused to “repent.”
Mel Fagan returned home one day to see if his parents would welcome their returning prodigal long-haired offspring. They did not—until Mel confronted them with the picture in their front hall. Sure enough it was a painting of Jesus, and Jesus didn’t have a crewcut.
Those of us who witnessed the Jesus Movement will never be the same! Many thousands of young people were attracted to Jesus Christ back then. (See Revisiting the Haight-Ashbury). The hippies dispersed from San Francisco in the Fall of 1967, because the free food ran out and the weather got too chilly for sleeping bags in Golden Gate Park. (See The 1967 Summer of Love: A Web Site Tour).
Economic necessities and the lure of false security in "the Establishment" swallowed up the Jesus People also.
A bit later in time, Ray Stedman flung open the doors of history to a whole generation of disenfranchised kids.
The “Jesus Movement” is another story. So also is Body Life a story waiting to be told.
Brother Lambert,
It’s been a great year for writing memoirs, hasn’t it!
Here’s the part of mine that intersects your great gift of hospitality, for which I’m forever grateful! At the point of writing last month I’d forgotten your name and just found it written somewhere yesterday.
Feel free to use my bit below and include your name, because it shows off God as the master weaver. The author is simply J.C., my first two initials.
Excerpt: Two years later, now 17, and back home in California, I went to a party one summer night at the home of a Stanford physicist. Alcohol and drugs were oddly absent- just lots of young people chatting and having a good time somehow amongst a myriad of small white candles on the steps of a Spanish style home and patio on a hillside. At midnight I called my parents to say I was on my way home. When I walked in the front door of my house at 3am, my father rightly demanded an explanation. “Well, some people asked if I wanted to stay and pray with them, so I did”, I replied truthfully. Then he barked, “We’ll talk in the morning, young lady!”
I sat on my bed, trying to make sense of what took place in that prayer meeting I somehow agreed to stay for. I had no idea what I said or who Jesus really was. But I heard that his love would be forever. FOREVER. Love was never forever. People were always leaving and letting you down. But I clung to that word, forever, and said- Jesus, if you are real, come to me. I want that kind of love that I felt there tonight.
In the morning I quietly started helping my Mom with the dishes. This wasn’t normal, and she knew something was different with me. I sat on the sofa and my father put me through the Inquisition- How do you know God is real? Can you prove this? - and other impossible questions I couldn’t answer, except to say- I don’t know Dad. I only know that what I felt was real.-
He was fearful, and who could blame him? After all, it was 1969 in the San Francisco Bay Area, the epicenter of sex, drugs, rock and roll, and the Jesus Movement.
That last year of living at home, I bought a New Testament, attended a church sometimes, and a Christian camp. I was curious and confused about Jesus. Why was he the only way to God? What about Buddha and Mohammed and Krishna, etc. and all of their followers? Was Jesus just some way of spreading America’s version of democracy to the world? I went off to college the next year, looking for my answers in all the wrong places.
(Added March 30, 2021)
November 15, 2020
March 30, 2021