Convention Grounds Picketed. Cecil Claude McHenry, born in 1921, was one of three professing brothers from Prescott, Arizona, US. He became very upset when he learned in the early 1950s that the 2×2 Sect had assumed the name Christian Conventions, and that it had been started by a man at the turn of the 20th century. An elderly Worker confirmed to him this was true. McHenry was excommunicated in 1959 per Tharold Sylvester’s orders.
After coming by this knowledge, McHenry made a career of sharing it with 2×2 Sect members. Beginning around 1980, McHenry became infamous for picketing outside California and Arizona Conventions and Special Meetings. At times, he parked across the street and papered his van with posters about the Workers and Irvine. He also handed out tracts he had written and paraded back and forth wearing sandwich boards with messages. One poster read, “Human Sacrifice Practiced Here.”
Reportedly, McHenry was sued and taken to court a few times by sect members following the directions of Workers. After a restraining order was issued in 1986, he was prevented from coming near Meetings and Conventions, which brought his picketing to an end.
Even so, Claude McHenry lives on in the memory of many who witnessed his demonstrations. He died July 20, 2006, aged 85, in Scottsdale, Arizona. Some correspondence by the McHenry brothers follows.
Letters below are written by:
Glen McHenry – Letter to his sister-in-law, Arlene
Claude McHenry – Proposed Book Introduction
Claude McHenry – Victims, Innocents & Monsters
Read about the McHenry Brothers
Rupert McHenry died January 10, 2005
Claude McHenry died July 17, 2006
Glen McHenry died November 4, 2008
Arlene Nelson married Rupert McHenry on March 10, 1944 – died May 9, 2011
By Glen McHenry
March 10, 1962
Dear Arlene, (Rupert’s wife)
I feel it necessary to write you in detail about what has taken place since I left my field of ministry in Colorado to go to a special meeting in Albuquerque, N. Mex. Before I went to North Dakota, Wilbur Nelson and I had been preaching together in Colo. We then received word from Herbert Vitzhum to go to Albuquerque for a special meeting, as George Walker, Basilio Alvarez, and perhaps Clarence Anderson would be there. We went down and found many workers were gathered in for the meetings. While there, Wilbur and I had the funeral of a man whose wife professed.
The next day (Wed. Nov. 1) Wilbur and I went shopping and got back at about noon to find that a message had come by phone for me to get to my Brother Rupert’s place the fastest way possible because things had gotten worse and he had gotten violent. I didn’t understand why I was to go by Minneapolis, if they wanted me to get there the quickest way possible. I did it that way, however, and Jim Jardine, Clarence Arquette and Raymond Bullick met me at the airport. I didn’t sleep hardly any that night and very little the next night because of what seemed to be ahead for me.
The next A.M., Jim and I left with Clarence Flemming and went to Hunter, N.D. We got there (Carl Ricktemeier’s* place) about supper time where I met Walter Jardine for the first time. All there seemed to be very concerned about Rupert, and talked as though they were wanting to help him. That made it a little easier for me to fill out the paper that you saw which I was ready to sign. They informed me at Hunter that Rupert wasn’t locked up and I thought it a little strange that he could be in such an awful condition and still be free. At Lakota the next day, I learned that he was going about his excavating business as usual.
One thing that impressed me was the rush of it all, but I went along with that, thinking something should be done and we might just as well do it quickly. Some of us went and saw the County Judge in Lakota in the A.M. (Fri. Nov. 4) and decided to have Rupert brought before the mental board at 2:30 that afternoon, then I decided to go see you. There at the Café you told me that the part about Rupert having ever knocked me down or kicking you wasn’t true. I decided to go ahead however, because I thought a psychiatrist would be able to decide whether anything was wrong with Rupert’s mind. But when I met with the mental board that afternoon, I found that the only doctor on the board was a M.D.
Rupert hadn’t been brought in and the County Sheriff, who knew him, didn’t want to go get him, but would have done so had I signed the papers. The State Attorney told me that he knew him and didn’t think he was a mental case, though he couldn’t agree with his religious views. He suggested that I visit Rupert. I went then and saw you for a little while. Then went back to Yule’s place where Walter Jardine was and told him what had taken place. Some said that I should go ahead and sign the papers and get him brought in. I said “No,” but that I’d visit him first. Walter then said other actions would have to be taken. He told George Sanford and the others to get an injunction against Rupert to not enter their property, as you know they wanted to keep him away from church meetings. They were afraid he might say something that they didn’t want the people to hear.
I went and visited you and Rupert that evening and he was very surprised to see me. He had had no word of me being in the area. After visiting with you and him that evening, I was convinced he wasn’t an insane man, though I still felt he was wrong in the way he had gone about trying to get certain things cleared up. You know how that I went to work with him the next day and saw how well he did his excavating work. In nothing that he did or said could I find anything that suggested insanity. We were invited to have lunch with the family for whom he was working and had a little chat with them. He gave them some cookies you had made and boasted a little about your cooking. (that was Saturday.)
On Sunday I went to Hope N.DF. for the meeting in Burchill’s home. I could tell you a little about that, but I won’t now.
That afternoon I went to Hunter and saw quite a few people, but didn’t have a chance to visit Walter that day. The next morning I told him to not call on me again to witness against my brother. He then said he would take one of Rupert’s letters to the postal authorities and get him put in the pen. He also said that once they get him in Levenworth they’ll keep him about 30 years. His attitude seemed altogether different than when I first met him. He had said earlier that it was the farthest thing from his mind to get Rupert into an institution or the pen, while at (the) same time trying to get him into a mental institution When I couldn’t go along with that, he turned right around and said he would get him into the pen. When I saw how Walter changed and told me what he had denied saying before, it hurt because I had thought of him as a true servant of God and minister of righteousness. I hope even yet he will consider the steps he is taking and will turn to do that which is right. I left North Dakota feeling that both Rupert and Walter Jardine were wrong.
I then went back to Minnesota where I saw Jim Jardine and told him also to not call on me again, because I couldn’t witness against my brother, and especially not until I saw some evidence of those who had wronged him doing all they could to get right with him. During our conversation Jim told me more about the large sum of money that was willed to the ministry there. We had what I considered a good visit around the table afterward they took me to the train depot.
I also called George Walker from Minnesota and asked him where I could see him and he told me he would be in Colorado Springs, Colo. He, being over the ministry in most of the United States, I felt it necessary to see him about two things. First of all, I wanted to tell him to not call on me again to witness against my brother, and secondly to ask him about going west with Rupert, to work with him and see if I could be of any help to him. I also told him about Walter Jardine’s threat to have Rupert locked up in the pen and knew that if such should take place you and Rupert would probably lose much of your property including the place that you and Rupert bought for Mama in Prescott. George Walker seemed to be very approachable. That wasn’t the first time I had visited with him, however. I informed him also that Walter said he didn’t care what Willie Jamieson did in the west or George Walker did in the east but that he was “running things” in North Dakota.
After my visit with George Walker I wrote to Rupert and asked him to come by on his way West, as I wanted to go with him. He thought I was going as far as Prescott to visit Mama and then return to Colorado. He was quite surprised when he got there to find that I was planning to come with him to Calif. to work. If they should succeed in getting him locked up, both you and Mama would need financial help. This matter has been quite a strain for me, but he doesn’t seem to be worried about it. He is confident that the God who has led will lead and undertake in all things.
Since coming West we went together to the Sunday A.M. meeting in North Long Beach and the elder of the church there at Mrs. Hancock’s home (Eddie Schultz) met us at the door and told Rupert that he couldn’t come in. It wasn’t his home but he said he had been told by David Jennings to call the police if Rupert entered for the meeting. Rupert went in while others were entering and Eddie Schultz immediately called the police who came and talked with Rupert. Mrs. Hancock refused to tell the police that she wanted Rupert to leave. The next Sunday we went to the church meeting in the James Clark’s home in Alhambra and Rupert took part in both prayer and testimonies. The next three Sundays we went to Daisy Coulter’s home in Ribidoux (West Riverside) for the meeting (once together and twice separately;) I didn’t think Rupert would be going there those two times. He took part in each meeting and some mentioned how much they enjoyed the meetings and also his part. David Jennings had asked me (on Jan. 18) not to go to any more meetings with Rupert (as others have also requested you) or any meeting where I thought he would be. Since then I have bought a car and we have gone separately (to) the Sunday morning meetings.
On Feb. 18th Rupert went alone to Mrs. Coulter’s home and entered as usual for the meeting. He said when he entered she told him to leave and he asked why she had changed. She wouldn’t talk with him but turned and called the sheriff. When she returned to the living room he talked with her a little and also John Wisdom and then left. Now they are trying to make it look like a personal thing instead of it being a church matter. Rupert has been welcome to attend church meetings in this fellowship in all homes where he has gone since Dec. ’38 until some of the workers turned against him. It would naturally be hard for people who are not of this fellowship to understand one entering another’s home without first knocking, but that (as you know) is the custom in this fellowship meeting time. Now Rupert has been ordered to appear in Justice Court at 3855 Nakoma Avenue (Ribidoux) Riverside, next Wed. Morning.
I don’t know whether I’ll be going to his hearing or not. Mama doesn’t know about it yet, but we got a note from her yesterday evening (same time as the order to Appear I Court), saying————to see us again. So I expect she will——— we both need to be working. Whether I go or not, I’ll be praying that the Lord will overrule, in all things and that His will will be done.
I’m glad you didn’t go along with the lie that was circulated about Rupert knocking you down and kicking you and beating you. When I told Tharold about this and of how you said, Glen, that’s not true. Rupert never beat me or anything like that,” Tharold said, “She’s cowed. That’s the reason she wouldn’t admit it. She’s afraid of what Rupert might do when he gets back.” But I know you better than that. That was when, he, David Jennings, and Walter Pollock visited us a week ago last Thursday evening. During that visit when the subject of you and Rupert possibly losing your property (if he was locked up) was mentioned, Tharold answered, “Take it from me, you WILL lose your property.” Rupert then asked, Why do you say that, do you plan to have me locked up?” Tharold answered, “I’m going to leave it in the Lord’s hands.” But in the conversation, he said that he had advised others what to do. I wonder if Mrs. Coulter’s action was the result of Tharold’s advice, and is that leaving it in the Lord’s hands?
Several have been laid off from the job where Rupert works and he may be laid off soon also, especially if he loses too much time in jail or court hearings. Now I’ll not add more, except to say that even though others in the church told you you shouldn’t come west to be with Rupert, I am sure your place is beside him. He needs you and I believe you need him.
Every good wish, Your brother
(Signed) Glen McHenry
Box 6402
Long Beach, Calif.
cc: Judge D. L. Schroeder, Jerupa Judicial Dist., Box 3156, Riverside, Calif;
Tharold Sylvester, %6008 Annan Way, Los Angeles 42 Calif.;
Walter Jardine %1128 5th Ave., South Fargo, N.Dak.;
Willie Jamieson %1047 Peralta Ave., Albany 6, Calif.;
George Walker, %2380 E. Susquehanna Ave., Phila., Pa.; And others.
PS I’ve added a little to this mimeograph copy that was not written in the original letter and have made some minor changes and corrections. One thought I left out which I now believe should be included is: The actions that have been taken against Rupert (both in and out of court) have been an open disgrace to the fellowship. Some are giving no evidence that the Spirit and love of God are controlling their lives. John 13, verse 35, “By this shall all men know that ye are my disciples if ye have love one to another.” Romans 8:9 “Now if any man have not the spirit of Christ, he is none of His.”
*It was Wallace (not Carl) Richtemeier’s place where I went to at Hunter and it was he who had Rupert locked up in the county jail in Fargo (in obedience to Walter Jardine) because of him being present at the convention there last October 29th.
I am sorry that I wrote such a harsh letter to Rupert last July without looking into the matter more thoroughly.
(signed) Glen
(Gordon Glen McHenry)
Comment by V.S.: This is a common experience of many we have met. This man was in the work in Colo. This just happened last year. R. McHenry is a faithful man. They didn’t want people to believe the truth he was telling them. He was in other counties working for an Oil Co. Arlene is Glen’s wife. I have been in their home.
EDITOR’S NOTE: V.S. is probably Virgil Simpson
Claude McHenry’s Introductory Statement for a Proposed Book
Ogres grow fat on blood, the “lain down” lives of clergy people called workers who “die daily” in a worldwide but little-known underground sect! Victims of a verbally communicable believing insanity, they’re murdered – regardless of its being gradual and their being willing!
I barely escaped, only after it destroyed my young manhood and did me lasting harm! How I ached with the yearning that “God” would go back to being a meaningless three letter word! I’d seen the vision of Paul, but unlike him, had been “disobedient” to it! I’d then known the problems of Jonah – only manifold because I would not relent and go preach! I’d heard lived preaching, seen “The Word” made flesh! The daily renunciation of workers’ lives, to whatever degree or a believable pretense, sparks a believing of those preachers that’s as real as seeing Gods in flesh!
Coupled with that seeing-is-believing power is the power of workers’ sublimated sex and other family drives! It enamorates the converts in a generally non-sexual queering! How scarcely will they be able to find fault or even be shown it in those with whom they are thus in love! Being born again, then, a very real experience, is at least in part nothing less than that falling in love, and the “fear of God” but a very real terror of displeasing them! A scolding from a worker can bring one down with a stroke, heart attack, or death – just as surely as Peter scolded to death Ananias and Saphira, who loved and believed in Jesus! The first, Ananias, died so swiftly and easily that the poor dull-witted Peter thought the supposed God had to be in the scolding and proceeded to kill Saphira knowingly!
This sect has both that craze to believe in preachers and those who take advantage of it in their amassing of fabulous wealth! Some of their workers, shamming at laying down their lives, are themselves ogres! Such make a sick use of the sincere ones, their annually collected money, and especially their power of actual Gods over the helplessly entrapped believing followers! Thus, the “poor, homeless, and totally self-renouncing true two and two sent servants of God, being content with food and raiment,” are actually the owners, builders, and traders in skyscrapers and billion dollar businesses! Most supporting followers and even many younger workers are kept ignorant of their money snowballing! Workers in need of emergency money, medical, dental, travel, etc. – furthering the belief in workers’ pretended poverty–shamelessly allow wage earners to pay those bills!
In 1956, Harry DenHerder, then a worker, and now the father of one, was in Palm Springs with a younger companion. There, they visited a then professing saint man named James Johnston, whose single multimillion dollar business transactions have long since become common knowlege. After showing the two “workers together with God” through a new high-rise building and telling his plan to soon build “another just like it,” Johnston added, “I’ve been wanting to show you this so you can know what I’ve been doing with you workers’ money.” Suddenly, Harry DenHerder, knowing his companion to have been kept ignorant of such things, began scuffing his shoes, coughing, and changing the subject!
Those ogres have and are using one to whom I’ve belonged for nearly eight years! I’ve refused to abandon her just from a lack of being able to talk with her even one time for a full minute, by no means her fault! With restraining orders, supposedly meant to keep me away from her, they’ve prevented my showing of life-saving forbidden truths on posters and in circulars to thousands of their believing victims! My efforts on behalf of that sister worker were thus promptly expanded into both a crusading career of exposing that spiritual fraud and into the reaping of a rewarding in joy that instantly surpassed any monetary figure!
The sect is coppied (sic) plenty close to what is written in the New Testament. At that time, just such users and opportunists as are these would have gotten wine instead of the water Jesus suggested, told that he’d transformed water to wine, and proclaimed him a miracle worker! They’d have gone on to arrange endless miracles for the poor man. They’d have paid Lazarus to play dead, stolen the dead Jesus, pretended to be angels, hanged Judas; possibly for knowing too much, written lies as gospel, etc! They’ve rigged against me an unending series of problems and endangerments, one a brush with death from which I carry a scar!
James Johnston himself, told me, “I’ve been given the job of getting rid of you, and that’s just what I’m going to do!” He–entrusted in workers’ billions, aided by kooks, queers, crooks, the believing crazed, etc., taking advantage of that sister worker along with pitifully handicapped me, seeing judges unfailingly and illegally in chambers to show them altered “evidence,” lie to them, etc.–has been having me brought before those judges now numerous times, arrested a few times, twice sentenced to jail, stolen all my lawyers, and narrowly failed only thus far in scary and seemingly endless attempts to trick officers into shooting me and judges into committing me! He’s several times indirectly threatened to kill me, verbally assaulted me every time he’s seen me through these nearly eight years, once missed me by inches with his car, etc.!
The sect is most secretive, shows no records to non-ogres, allows no tape recording of sermons, gives only members the addresses and dates of the annual four-day conventions, day long special meetings, baptisms, etc! Even members know but few of the addresses where the regular fellowship and Bible study meetings gather. Even their funerals are secret, not listed in the obituaries! Where their homeless preachers sleep isn’t even generally known! One must know whom to ask!
I couldn’t begin to tell the agony I’ve suffered in never getting to see, nor generally, even to know for months at a time where that one might be to whom my heart has so long since and so resolutely stolen away, my miracle and star! But rarely can I find any who will tell me if she is dead or alive! When I see her being driven away from meeting places, it’s as if she’s vanishing into nothingness.
Neither could I describe the terror in the power of death with which workers tyrannically rule over their captive believers! Who can raise the ante on such who have all believing that they have once and for all, lain down their lives at Jesus’ command to “save” everybody? Since the believing is understood to be costing workers their lives, what more can be asked of them? In fact, how can they be questioned in anything? “He that receiveth you receiveth (God),” Jesus told his sent ones! So it is with these; they replace the supposed God! My being in disfavor with them has me as dead to their captive followers who usually scurry at sight of me, avoiding stores and areas I’m known to frequent!
So powerful is this idolatry that members have promptly and unquestioningly complied when workers have told them to sign into insane asylums (mental hospitals) their fellow family members who owned property the ogres could thereby acquire, who were asking the wrong questions, or who otherwise should be put away to best serve ogre ends! Judge Robert Weir, in Arcata, California, on 1-12-87, after an ogre orchestrated sham trial before a jury; and after sentencing me to “180 days,” said, “If you ever bother those people again (plural, the ogres, not the woman), I’ll see you’re committed to a hospital.” In several of these times that I’ve been brought before them, judges have said such and stronger things to indicate tamperings with justice!
“It would be better if they would just kill me, rather than to have me put into one of those places,” said a Mr. Burgess of Gardena, owner of at least one store, in talking with me. Tharold Sylvester had sent Gladys Porteous, 3812 Weston Pl., Long Beach, (213) 424-6217, to get Burgess’ wife to sign him away “for his own good.” “I always felt sorry for those who were put away in mental hospitals,” said James Young (415) 681-0204, 1218 W. Raymond Dr., Pacheco, CA 94553, a Colorado worker who quit on learning it to be started by a man.
“I couldn’t see anything wrong with him,” said Gordon Glen McHenry (213) 696-9232, PO Box 9045 Whittier CA 90608, while reporting back to superiors who’d sent him by plane to North Dakota where he was to sign our elder brother, Rupert (602) 243-3135, 6608 S. 27th Ave., Phoenix AZ 85041, into a mental hospital. Accompanied by Virginia Richmond; 1015 Carlos Pl., Chico CA 95926 (916)891-8108, and Marion MacPherson; (509) 476-3680, PO Box 580 Oroville, WA 98844; both workers, Gussy Pucket; an elder worker with present address unknown, went to my mother with a letter for her to copy into her own hand and sign in order to get me committed–with no true reason! “There must be more people going crazy in God’s Way than in all the man-made religions put together,” so agreed a young son and his mother, Evelyn Flieger (916) 622-1093, 3130 Airport Rd., Placerville, CA 95667. For possibly the fourth time, they’d heard words such as these: “Wasn’t that too bad about poor old Mr. ( )’s losing his mind and having to be put away in a mental hospital?”
“Take it from me, you will lose your property,” said Tharold Sylvester, overseeing worker for western North America, to my Brother, Rupert. Four days later, Tharold had him taken into a Rubideau court in continuing efforts to get him committed! “Every time we get about ready to sign him out of the mental hospital he goes right back to talking against The Truth (the sect).” So said a Mrs. Denio in talking to my mother about one of their menfolk during a Bakersfield convention! “No relative of mine ever said anything against The Truth!” So expostulated Melvin Denio in answering to that, and while not denying how they’d kept that one from it. (408) 842-3306; 4125 Prunedale Ave., Gilroy CA 95020!
One horror, besides many which there won’t be room to touch on in these two pages is the awesome choice forced on children! They must choose to renounce their every human expectation or miss out on the heavenly vision! So is it that they stare endlessly at my postered happiest news they could ever hear, and so it is that those making the millions are trying to kill me.
Victims, Innocents and Monsters
By Claude McHenry, May 22, 1986
I’m awed at kids who won’t “lay down their lives” as bait in this “God” fraud, whose “poor, homeless, and totally self-renouncing” preachers rob widows and their rightful heirs, incorporate investment snowballers, and build and trade in skyscrapers and multi-million dollar businesses! Gladys Porteous and her two younger companions were preaching in and around the Gardena, California, area, in or about 1950, and operating in cooperation with Tharold Sylvester in Los Angeles. “It would be more humane of them if they would just kill me rather than to have me locked away in one of those places,” said a Mr. Burgess, a successful elderly businessman in talking with me. He was the owner of at least one store, Louise’s Dress Shoppe. Gladys had gone to the professing wife, Mrs. Burgess with a letter she was to copy into her own handwriting and sign in order to get him committed to an insane asylum “for his own good.” Happily for her, Mrs. Burgess failed to obey Jesus’ commandment to receive and reverence as God his “sent ones.” Instead! she told Mr. Burgess! If she’d been as most professing people are, totally sheep-like; without a brain to do any thinking for themselves, Mr. Burgess would have gone the way of a vast number of others, “put away” to be helplessly and hopelessly forgotten with his property going to the likes of Jack Carroll who, as overseeing head worker, was known to carry suitcases full of money and to often share his batch – and bed – with a sister worker named Alma Hays. One of those two companions of Gladys was the sister of Sydney Holt, later married to Harry DenHerder, and became the mother of Richard.
“Every time we get about ready to sign him out of the (mental) hospital, he goes right back to talking against the truth,” a woman named Denio told my mother at a Bakersfield convention in the 1940s.
Gussy Puckett, accompanied by Virginia Richmond and Marion Mac Pherson, went to my mother; showed her the type of letter she would have to write and sign in order to get me put away in a mental hospital. Gussy’s “reasons” were that I’d gone crazy and accepted an invitation to visit the home of an elderly couple, to let myself in if they weren’t at home. “The key’s under the door mat,” he’d said. The real reason was that an aged widow, going blind; a Mrs. Compton, had told me that Tharold Sylvester had promised her a meeting in her home in exchange for the money from the sale of her big house and I’d written Tharold an unsealed letter critical of it – in care of John Porterfield. Gussy then went to my brother in the work, Gordon Glen, and he laughed at her. She then contacted Sprouli Denio in Korea to get him to put pressure on my professing brother, Rupert, who was working there. So Tharold had to get Raymond Hill and Allan Ashmore, then workers, to expel me from all meetings and everything – without bothering to tell a “reason”
“I felt sorry for those who were put away in mental hospitals,” said an elderly businessman who wouldn’t want me to use his name. He’d professed at 20, gone out to preach at 22, and stayed in it until he was 41 when he learned of its having been started by a man other than Jesus, the Wm. Irvine. He’s been out to stay and doesn’t want to be mixed up with it in any way.
“There must be more people going crazy in God’s way than in all the man-made religions put together!” That was the opinion of a mother and her son after hearing for about the third time of some “poor guy,” professing or somehow connected with “The Truth,” who’d had to be put in a mental hospital.
“Too bad she didn’t continue true and faithful to the end,” said Leo Stancliff regarding a woman who’d been told by workers to stop going to meetings! Before the expulsion, she and her husband had been picked on and harassed by workers for years. Further, according to my witness whom I believe; because of their being a poor family woman had sought out and worked at menial jobs – just in order to have a ‘little money to give to the workers!
I promise I won’t tell the names of any who write me. In the evening after the Lompoc Special meeting of 1980, not many weeks after I’d gotten invited by Debra Gillette back into going to meetings, I regretfully consented to being taken into a den by two monsters, Sydney Holt and Viola Fridley. In there – without saying a reason and acting like he’d like to kill me – Sydney told me I wasn’t to go to any more meetings where I could hear Debra preach nor even speak to her! Seeing I was, according to Sydney’s wishes, never to see nor speak to Debra again, I mailed her a couple of friendly notes. For that, Sydney again verbally attacked me and stopped me from going to all meeting When someone asked Sydney what in the world I’d written Debra that was bad enough to justify that, the monster lied that I’d written her something so gross that 1 wouldn’t repeat it if I was talking to hogs!
“We don’t need them.” Tharold Sylvester so dismissed some who’d learned that their precious believing and hoping are but tools, used to keep them helpless against “The Truth’s” owners. These head workers and their money investors, some of whom make no claim to believing in impossible things, amass endless millions of dollars from them, play God over them, and even tell “servants of God” what they are to preach on at the larger meetings: With that believing, they can take the lives of the young or their children if they live to have any and their homes plus other valuable property when they grow old.
“We’re here on business,” coldly and flatly stated the monsteress, Viola Fridley, but not once did she say “the Father’s” or “God’s”! At that same Calpoly meeting, in January 1980, she said, “My. companion’s only recently gone out to lay down her life.” In the flippant, off-handed, and everyday manner the words went spilling out, she could have been telling of butchering a chicken! All of us could see the girl was in the midst of a weeks-long siege of heartbreak so intense that it had rendered her unable to start the meetings, give out the hymns, do the praying, nor; much less, lead the singing!
“What we always tell people is that if they don’t like what we have to offer here is that perhaps they should go looking elsewhere.” So said Loren Smit, ex-worker and present owner of the Arizona convention grounds at La Palma, Arizona, while I talked a few minutes with him by phone right after the 1984 convention. It had been my first time to picket that convention. During the first hour or so after my arrival there with forbidden truths on posterboards, he’d tried to get me away by some scolding, bumping with his fists, the releasing of one of his big dogs with the order, “Get him,” and by his calling a deputy whom he but narrowly failed to persuade to arrest me! Supported by Sydney Holt, he’d lied to the deputy that I’d been out there yelling with “curse words and other foul language” at the conventioneers! Glaringly, he said nothing of what any supposed God might have to offer!
“James Johnston will be here tomorrow! He’ll know what to do!” So said Sydney Holt at dusk in the evening before the start of the first 1981 Gilroy convention! He’d been unable to scold me or get a deputy to take me away from my picketing vigil of protest against their claim of, and maybe to some extent practicing, the sacrificing to “God” of real human lives! At dusk the following evening, James Johnston; one of the faithful tools of the workers, a builder and trader in skyscrapers and multi-million dollar businesses for over thirty years by using their money, of course, strolled Maharaja-like onto the scene!
To again put me in violation of his restraining order, that big man; big bellied black-headed, bespectacled, with jutting front teeth, and whose single multi-million dollar business transactions are a common knowledge among “God’s people” had that sister worker who’d been chosen for the job taken out to the street and photographed by a half dozen saint men where she’d stopped a few steps from me. Johnston started by greeting me with mock salutations. After calling me “Creep” several times, he switched to “Well, Puke, how are you getting along? Is everything all right, Puke?” There was much of that, He jeer-questioned me, wouldn’t wait for any answers! Presently, he began to slander me viciously in the presence of the score or more of adult witnesses, accusing me of “doing all that filthy, rotten talking” in the presence of some twelve-year-old boy I’d never seen nor known to exist! I then turned away saying, “This man is too sick to talk to.” He then reached across to grab me by my left arm, which has a damaged elbow, and jerked me back to facing him (simple assault or battery). He next said, “I’ve been given the job of getting rid of you, and that’s just what I’m going to do!” When I’d ask him, four times, to return my emblem of mourning which he’d jerked out of my hands (strong-arm robbery), he’d answer, “If I do, it will be around your neck (death threats)!” I let him hold my injured arm behind my back and jam me along the road ahead of him for a hundred feet, or so toward the highway; it was all his idea, not mine! He let me go with a final shove toward the highway, threatening, “If you ever come back around here, I’m going to make you wish you hadn’t!”
“Poverty,” came most phonily from the lips of Sydney Holt while speaking of Frank Dennison at a funeral!
“Sydney Holt has told us not to allow you to come around here and for us not to talk to you nor ‘have anything to do with you,” said the father of that misused young worker, She’d stood crying as a deputy ha walked with me away from where I’d been picketing the 1982 Cloverdale special meeting, had quit the preaching, and gone home! The father then added, “You know, Claude, we have to do what the elder workers tell us to do.”
Claude McHenry
C/O 6608 S. 27th Ave.
Phoenix AZ 85041.
Read about the McHenry Brothers