a local Methodist church in Meridian and “got saved.” Gramps described that event as “a genuine religious experience” and “an unction or impulse on the heart,” referencing the verse that declares that ye have an unction from the Holy One, and ye know all things. The sermon my grandfather heard that day was the parable of the wedding feast, in which Jesus likens the kingdom of heaven to a certain king who makes a feast for the marriage of his son, and sends his servants to bid the invitees to come: But they made light of it, and went their ways, one to his farm, another to his merchandise: And the remnant took his servants, and entreated them spitefully, and slew them. But when the king heard thereof, he was wroth: and he sent forth his armies, and destroyed those murderers, and burned up their city. The parable continues, but this part was frightfully compelling to my grandfather, the fate of the men who were bidden to the feast and the pitiful excuses they gave for their refusal to come—their work. Their livelihood. He would not be one of those wretched men to spurn Heaven itself, but one of the servants who would call the world to the feast. All the dreams he and his father had shared, all the plans they’d made, all the work they’d done to get my grandfather into West Point became irrelevant in the face of God Himself calling my grandfather to become a preacher. His father was furious, but Gramps’s decision was made.
Between his high school graduation in 1946 and the summer of 1951, my grandfather never seemed to stay in one place for very long, enrolling variously at Bob Jones University, the famed evangelical school then located in Cleveland, Tennessee; at Prairie Bible Institute in Three Hills, Alberta, Canada; and at John Muir College in Pasadena, California, where he earned an associate’s degree in engineering in 1951. He left Bob Jones because of their racial discrimination in excluding black students from the university, but not before embarking on a mission assignment during summer break in 1947. He traveled to Vernal, Utah, where he worked as a seventeen-year-old missionary to the Ute Indians, and on September 8, 1947, he was baptized and ordained to the ministry by the pastor of the First Baptist Church there, both of them wading into a cold mountain stream so the pastor could fully immerse my grandfather beneath the running water—the true Baptist way.
His first taste of notoriety came when my grandfather was profiled in Time magazine in June 1951. He kept a framed print of the story on the wall of his office for as long as I can remember, and I read it often over the years, laughing at the image it painted of my twenty-one-year-old Gramps, unmistakable and utterly unchanged by the decades that had passed: stern-faced and pleading, holding an open Bible in one hand and gesticulating with the other.
Five-year-old John Muir College at Pasadena (enrollment: 2,000) has no more than the average quota of campus sin. But to Fred Phelps, 21, a tall (6 ft. 3 in.), craggy-faced engineering student from Meridian, Miss., John Muir is a weed-grown vineyard. Day after day this spring he has called upon his fellow students to repent. His method: to walk up to groups of boys and girls munching their lunchtime sandwiches in the quadrangle, ask “May I say a few words?” and launch into a talk. Fred Phelps’s talks drew crowds of up to 100. Over and over he denounced the “sins committed on campus by students and teachers … promiscuous petting … evil language … profanity … cheating … teachers’ filthy jokes in classrooms … pandering to the lusts of the flesh.” Such strictures sent Dr. Archie Turrell, principal of John Muir, and most of his faculty into a slow burn.
Every single move was classic Gramps. School officials ordered him to stop his on-campus ministry, both because they felt attacked and because he was in possible violation of California’s state education code, which forbade the teaching of religion on public school campuses. In response to their demands, he simply took it across the road, off campus, and kept at it. But Principal Turrell pursued him there, too: “He accosted me in very stern language, and told me that he would call the law. So I told him I had no fears. If the police arrested me I would preach to them in jail.” After police forced