his growing audience to disperse and “invited” him into a police car to drive him away from the scene, the school suspended him—but he was back preaching from the lawn of a friendly neighbor the next week, now with “something of the attraction of a martyr.” And then this little gem: “Students were delighted with the story that Phelps had been ordered to consult the school psychologist, a middle-aged lady, and that he had turned the tables on her by ‘psychoanalyzing’ her.”
Each time I read the profile, I couldn’t help but laugh in fond recognition of the whole picture, familiar though it had happened long before even my mother existed. He wasn’t focused on the gay community in those days—LGBT rights hadn’t yet become a cultural touchstone—but this was unmistakably my grandfather: defiant, tenacious, and ultimately triumphant, calling out sin wherever he found it, fighting the powers that be to do what he believed was right, no matter what forces they brought to bear on him. Something of a martyr. Something of a hero.
Oh, how perfectly it seemed to capture my Gramps.
* * *
Five months after the profile was published, my grandfather was preaching in the chapel of the Arizona Bible Institute in Phoenix. He was introduced as “the young man from the Time magazine article,” and a considerable crowd had gathered to hear him speak—among them my grandmother, a twenty-six-year-old postgraduate music student who was working for the professor who’d invited him, Mr. Woods. She watched from the back of the room as he paced back and forth on the platform, guessing he must be thirty years old to be behaving so seriously. “It was the way he always got when he had to preach,” she told me later. “He’d get so sober it was scary. That’s the way he was.” I didn’t need to ask what she meant, because it was something that had never wavered. It was impossible to hear him speak from the pulpit without being overtaken by an almost paralyzing sense of gravity; these were matters of eternal import, and it was your never-dying soul that hung precariously in the balance. “He laid it on us for about ten or fifteen minutes. I mean, he didn’t hardly breathe … It was just shocking, it got everybody’s attention.” Mrs. Woods slipped in the back during my grandfather’s presentation and told her, “I want you to pay attention to that young man, and be nice to him.” Mrs. Woods was an Italian lady, and she was matchmaking, Gran chuckled later. But at the time, her only thought was, What young man? It didn’t occur to her that Mrs. Woods was referring to the man onstage.
They both remembered that she had an apple in her hand when he first saw her, shortly after they’d left the chapel. Biting into the apple, she practically ran right into him coming around a corner. “Are you Margie, ma’am?” he asked in his Southern drawl, and launched into another talk about how Mrs. Woods had told him all about her, how highly she thought of her. Gran was a transplant from rural Missouri, and the praise embarrassed her Midwestern sensibilities.
They saw each other several more times in the next few weeks. First at one of the school’s street meetings in downtown Phoenix, when Gran was on her way to sing at a wedding. Then Gramps gave her a ride to get her driver’s license. After that there was the New Year’s Eve party, where he said he first really noticed her, sitting at the piano with her back to the keys, singing along with all the others in an aqua-colored dress, looking radiant. When it came time for my grandfather to preach every night for two weeks at a church in nearby Glendale, she’d catch the bus to see him, and he’d drive her home afterward, taking circuitous routes so they could talk a bit more—about the Bible, mostly. “He didn’t go very long without talking about some verse … He just had Bible verses rolling out of him.” This part of the story took me aback when I first heard it; such behavior would certainly be characterized as the appearance of evil in the strict operation Gramps was running at Westboro. A boy and a girl in a car together alone, without a chaperone? For shame. When my grandmother would get home, she’d dissect the whole evening with Mrs. Woods, who told her, “Well, he’s gonna ask you to marry him