A Fortuitous Encounter

In 1960, Jenkins met a widow, Maudie Bartz, at one of his tent meetings in Dallas, Texas. The two “discovered” that Maudie was Leroy’s long-lost mother, and she agreed to finance Leroy’s ministry. Later, Maudie officially adopted Jenkins, his wife, and their four children. Leroy thus became her son, and stood to inherit her estate. The reverend’s name was officially changed to Leroy Jenkins Bartz on March 14, 1961. Leroy used the new name for a while, but dropped the “Bartz” part when he and the family suddenly packed up and left Texas for California, without notifying Maudie Bartz. She philosophized to Anderson, S.C., Independent reporters:He just figured he’d milked this ol’ cow dry and was goin’ on.

Maudie Bartz was rich, widowed, and 99 years of age. She never saw Jenkins again.

Trouble in Paradise and a Touching Defense

Before long, Jenkins was screeching scripture at a huge audience from a Delaware, Ohio, church pulpit (he called it the Church of What’s Happening Now) and via a radio and television ministry. In the 1960s, he attracted to his platform a number of celebrities, including Mae West. In 1972, the Columbus Dispatch reported that Jenkins had been arrested on a drunk charge. Scores of vituperative letters followed that article, and the Dispatch published half a page of them. In order that we may more accurately assess the mentality of at least some of Jenkins’s followers, here is an (almost) complete letter from Howard F. Davis of Newport, Kentucky. We are not privileged to know what words went into the blank spaces: It’s polite to start a letter, “Dear Editor.”————to you, and or all of your writers, and the whole paper. This also goes for the dirty, rotten, worthless police you back up in your dirty town. It is a shame, a dirty shame, that all you people that accuse brother Leroy Jenkins of such a thing, are dirty————. That’s right brother, dirty————, to try to put a man of God down. You will all join the devil in hell, forever. I’ll tell you something, you and whoever they are went just a little too far this time. You can fight people, all you want to, you can fight this and that, but brother you can’t fight God. If any of you————die tonight, you will go straight to hell, (forever) and ever, and ever, you know? That’s a long time, because you don’t have a father in heaven so that makes you————. Each and everyone of you will pay for what you done to Leroy Jenkins. It’s too late to cover the damage done, but it’s not too late to save your sole [sic]. We won’t stop now, untill [sic] the lid is blown off the dirty police dept., the mayor and whoever is involved, because you have opened the hornet’s nest, and all the hornets were in church Sunday and got there [sic] stinger [sic] sharpened and filled with toxin, with the exception of five of your————seated in church. May God have mercy on your soles [sic].

The writer seems to have a fixation on the word “dirty,” and one can only hope that he does not represent the gentle, kind, and forgiving Christian that we have been led to expect.