Pete Geiger on covering Rex Humbard

Peter Geiger, former Beacon Journal religion writer who covered Rex Humbard, writes his recollectios of the televangelist who died Friday at a hospital near his home in Lantana, Fla. Humbard was 88.

The Rex Hbumbard Ministry site calls him “one of the 25 principle architects of the Amterican Century and Elvis Presly’s pastor."

See the Ministry site

Collette M. Jenkins filed the first story for the Beacon Journal on Ohio.com which showed six photos of Humbard over the years .By 10 last night there were 34 comments mostly laudatory but a couple nasty.

See Jenkins’ first story

Today’s Beacon Journal carried an update by Jenkins with a timeline

See also the New York Times story by Michael Pollak

Here’s Pete’s story:

By PETER GEIGER
I"m here in Mongolia, cramped with an intestinal virus and struggling to pack up 13 years of life here and return to the U.S. My wife, Sandy, awaits me there. She had quintuple bypass open-heart surgery on July 7 and we are going to retire.

Thanks for letting me know about Rex's passing. I'm sorry I didn't respond with more alacrity to your earlier request for Rex recollections. But here goes:

His name was actually Alpha Rex Emanuel Humbard, named partly for his dad, the Rev. Alpha Emanuel (A.E.) Humbard. The Humbards were a traveling salvation show family, known well in the Ozark region. They began to travel further after World War II, bringing their tent into the Midwest. When Rex landed in Akron, he became entranced. The city was well populated with Bible Belt expatriates, a ready-made audience for the Humbard style of Christianity. And, because of the population concentration here, making Akron his home would obviate all the put-up and take-down of the evangelism tent. He campaigned with A.E. to put down roots, but the elder Humbard declined. Rex and Maude Aimee stayed on alone.

The other seminal feature of his ministry, Rex used to say, was the day he saw one of the first television sets running in the South Main St. window of the former O'Neil's department store. He had a vision: put "old time gospel" in living rooms across America via this new medium. The man was a visionary and opportunist, and Akron became a nexus of televangelism.

The Cathedral of Tomorrow was not the first originating point for the show. He ran from the movie theater on Copley Road that later became WAKR-TV studios and from the theater on State Road in the Falls that became Hilarities comedy club. Many folks remember that Rex build his Cathedral with a mortgage from the Teamsters Mid-States Pension Fund. There seemed to be no other connection with Big Bill Presser, however;
just a Teamsters investment.

Covering Rex and his family was like a regular encounter with untreated bi-polar disorder. The man needed ink, but (like politicians and business mavens everywhere) wanted only his own spin on the coverage. He would sit me down in his office or one his four-engine Lockheed Electra plane and explain patiently to me that I was missing
the real story of his ministry.

"Lives are being changed!" he would exult. "Marriages are being saved, drunkards are being reformed and all you want to write about is the money."

This at a time when the Cathedral of Tomorrow was raking in $25 million a year. (And back in the '70s and '80s, that was real lucre.)

You bet I wanted to cover the money. But I also wrote some stories about eager converts who wanted to tell me about how their lives had got straightened out from watching the Humbards' weekly, hour-long TV shows broadcast from Cuyahoga Falls or from road shows around the U.S. and Canada. On occasion I would accompany the family troupe and walk the lines of fans waiting to get into the theaters where they held their services, interviewing people about their reasons for coming.

Rex and Maude Aimee (named by her mother for Aimee Semple McPherson,
a female traveling evangelist in the '40s and '50s who was the inspiration for the film, "Elmer Gantry") had four children, not three as the newly-sloppy BJ ascribes to them. Rex, Jr., was the oldest and seemed to understand well my responsibility to cover the whole Humbard story. Donald was next in line, a very angry young man who more than
once threatened to punch me out if I didn't stop writing about the Humbards' finances. Elizabeth Darling (she married an Atlanta guy named Darling, really) was in her late teens and early 20s when I was covering her family. She seemed unsettled about the show-biz atmosphere of the family ministry and more than once came to me with questions about the authenticity and usefulness of the whole thing. I advised her to do as I had done and get out from backstage and talk to the audience members. She did so. Charlie was the youngest and the one not mentioned in the hip-shot BJ obit. He was a laid-back teenager who liked to play folk and gospel guitar and jammed with me on occasion when I was in my guitar-strumming days.

Maude Aimee was the least understood member of the family, I felt. Sycophants in the Humbard retinue treated her as a goddess, but I enjoyed her down-home Texas style (she was a Dallas native.) One winter day on Mackinac Island, Mich., I rolled up a snowball and tossed it into Maude Aimee's back. The staff gasped: a great heresy had been committed. Maude Aimee simply bend down, made her own snowball and threw it at me.

Once when our adopted son ran away from home, Maude Aimee called from Florida to say she was praying for him and for our family. Some staffer had heard it on the radio and mentioned it to her in a phone conversation. That was Maude Aimee, not Rex.

It is amazing to me that she is still alive. She's had congestive heart failure for years. In the end, the same malady took Rex before it claimed her. Perhaps hers is the bigger heart.