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Happy! - Oct 9 (Aimee Semple McPherson)

09 Oct 05 - 09:38 AM (#1579327)
Subject: Happy! - Oct 9 (AS McPherson)
From: Abby Sale


Happy Birthday!

Aimee Semple McPherson

born 10/9/1890
(death by sleeping pill "overdose," 9/27/1944)

         Well, the Grand Jury started an investigation,
          Uncovered a lot of spicy information.
          Found out about a love nest down at Carmel-by-the-Sea,
          Where the liquor was expensive and the loving was free.
  
                  Hi dee hi dee hi dee hi
                  Ho dee ho dee ho dee ho.
  
                           "The Ballad of Aimee McPherson"

Aimee Semple McPherson, radio evangelist, idolized by thousands disappeared on 5/18/26. Reappearing after one month, she claimed to have been kidnapped but the proof was overwhelming that she's been shacked up with "Radio Ray," that is, her engineer, Kenneth Ormiston. Her career subsequently drifted downhill. Hypocrisy is not new in the world. Amazingly, she still has followers and her main, wildly ostentatious church still exists. Angelus Temple in Los Angeles still houses the International Church of the Foursquare Gospel with up to several million adherents. Money is still to be made.

I received an e-mail complaint from one adherent for posting the Happy! on her about 1996. The complaint was that she'd been badly maligned by the press and was really a saintly, sinless woman and had not been simply stealing from the poor with her hyped-up ministry. It was sad - this clinging to the long-since debunked - but I was glad enough to receive it. I get so few outraged complaints, I'm maybe not doing my job right.

October 5, 2005 - Received another complaint about the Aimee post - also from an Angelus Temple leader. Well, that brings the total for all "Happies" ever to three in twelve years. (Not including corrections - plenty of them.)   This time threatening me with God's wrath. Shows how off-track people can be. At my prayers this morning God told me I was doing the right thing to expose false phophets.

Copyright © 2005, Abby Sale - all rights reserved
What are Happy's all about?    See Notes and Index

09 Oct 05 - 10:43 AM (#1579369)
Subject: RE: Happy! - Oct 9 (AS McPherson)
From: Le Scaramouche

Is the Ballad of Aimee M based on Minnie the Moocher?

09 Oct 05 - 01:14 PM (#1579484)
Subject: RE: Happy! - Oct 9 (AS McPherson)
From: John MacKenzie

See same birthday same idea of fun. hee hee.
G.

09 Oct 05 - 02:06 PM (#1579517)
Subject: RE: Happy! - Oct 9 (AS McPherson)
From: Le Scaramouche

A friend reminded me of this bit in Evelyn Waugh's The Loved One:

'I took Art at College as my second subject one semester. I'd have taken it as a first subject only Dad lost his money in religion so I had to learn a trade.'
'He lost his money in religion?'
'Yes, the Four Square Gospel. That's why I'm called Aimee, after Aimee Macpherson. Dad wanted to change the name after he lost his money. I wanted to change it too but it kinda stuck. Mother always kept forgetting what we'd changed it to and then she'd find a new one. Once you start changing a name, you see, there's no reason ever to stop. One always hears one that sounds better. Besides you see poor Mother was an alcoholic. But we always came back to Aimee between fancy names and in the end it was Aimee won through.'

09 Oct 05 - 02:27 PM (#1579523)
Subject: RE: Happy! - Oct 9 (AS McPherson)
From: Bob the Postman

Ah, Sister Aimee--another Canadian gal who made it big in Hollywood. To quote Earle Birney's "Mammorial Stunzas For Aimee Simple McFarcin"

Ah but I saw her asc end up
in the ass end upping breeze
There was a cloud fall of kew pids
their glostening buttums twankling
in the gaggle-eyed and (deleted) air

09 Oct 05 - 05:53 PM (#1579640)
Subject: RE: Happy! - Oct 9 (AS McPherson)
From: Abby Sale

Scara: Sure. Here's Seeger singing at AMG: (click)
or http://tinyurl.com/93by6 and click the speaker icon at #23.

It gives John Lomax as the composer. Seems unlikely but that's what it gives.

Calloway et al wrote Minnie in 1931. Maybe he got the tune from he Aimee song? That I doubt, too.

09 Oct 05 - 09:05 PM (#1579787)
Subject: RE: Happy! - Oct 9 (AS McPherson)
From: GUEST,Joe_F

"Her great success raised up two sets of enemies, both powerful. One was made up of the regular town clergy, who resented her raids upon their customers. The other was composed of the town Babbitts who began to fear that her growing celebrity was making Los Angeles ridiculous. So it was decided to bump her off, and her ill-timed morganatic honeymoon with the bald-headed and wooden-legged Mr. Ormiston offered a good chance. But it must be manifest to any fair observer that there is very little merit in the case against her. What she is charged with, in essence, is perjury, and the chief specification is that, when asked if she had been guilty of unchastity, she said no. I submit that no self-respecting judge in the Maryland Free State, drunk or sober, would entertain such a charge against a woman, and that no Maryland grand jury would indict her. It is unheard of, indeed, in any civilized community for a woman to be tried for perjury in defense of her honor. But in California, as everyone knows, the process of justice is full of unpleasant novelties, and so poor Aimee, after a long and obscene hearing, has been held for trial.

The betting odds in the Los Angeles saloons are 50 to 1 that she will either hang the jury or get a clean acquittal. I myself, tarrying in the town, invested some money on the long end, not in avarice, but as a gesture of sympathy for a lady in distress...." -- H. L. Mencken (1926)

--- Joe Fineman    joe_f@verizon.net

||: Truth is not stranger than fiction. It is sillier. :||