CAST OF CHARACTERS
W.N. OTWELL: Fundamentalist minister of community Buptist Church, lawbreaker, a man who liked to say that he wore no luce on his underwear.
ROCKY OTWELL: Otwell’s son, the all-american boy, great gospel music singer, leader of the church while his dad was in hiding.
JIM MATTOX: Attorney general of Texas who once wanted to be a Baptist preacher, now considered by many to be the evil enemy of the chureh.
SUE BERKEL: Mattox’s assistant who led the charge to license Otwell’s church home for boys.
DOZEMS OF BUREAUCRATS
THOUSANDS OF FUNDAMhNTALLST CHRISTIANS A DEAD CAT
A RUBBER CHICKEN
GOD: Well-known deity. creator of the world, said to have spoken to several of those in this play.
PROLOGUE
SEVERAL HOUKS BEFORE THE MIR, the Rev. W.N. Otwell-on the day when accounts. even by the report of the police officer, should have died a violent death-the preacher rose early as is his custom. and prayed to God for the defeat of his enemies.
It was late October in Southern California. The fugitive pastor on the run from the Texas law had been in Los Angeles for a week. Here, in the city of sunshine and money and tame, where movie stars and television preachers are nearly indistinguishable fiomeach other, Otwell his hair cut short and his pants held up by clip-on suspenders, was staging a last stand to save his little church on the outskirts of Fort Worth. It was amazing that he had ever gotten here. California isn’t really the place anymore for stern, old-fashioned southern preachers whose eyes gleam with in-dignation and whose hard-edged voices seem more suited to talk about the terrors of hell than the glories of heaven. Otwell, unable to find much support, was ready to go to the airport and fly to Oklahoma, familiar country, where, he was sure, somebody would receive him with open arms. The linebacker-sized preacher shook my hand sternly and headed for the rental car.
Traffic was backed up on the freeway, but Otwell gunned the car in between two diesel trucks. I leaned a little farther back in my seat as Otwell weaved to the right, saw an opening to the left, and zipped back. Preachers never think they’re going to die in some ordinary way, like a highway smashup.
Moreover, when a man is on a mission, silly things like traffic don’t get in the way. Otwell stepped on the accelerator. Once, as a young man, he got so fed up with a car that kept breaking down on him that he pulled over to the side of a highway, poured gasoline on the engine, and burned up the entire car. Now. the forty-nine-year-old Otwell was traveling the country, spreading the story of his little church and his boys’ home being sacrificed to the state of Texas. He fully believed he was fleeing the same kind of persecution that had sent Joseph and Mary into Egypt.
Otwell’s story illustrates the classic conflict between the individual’s right to practice religion and the states vested interest in the education of children.
Here was a fundamentalist country pastor of the Community Baptist Church, unpolished, sometimes overzealous but unerringly faithful to his litlle congregation of 200 people on the edge of Fort Worth-who had been told by a Texas judge that he would be jailed, his church fined $500 a day. and half of the church buildings padlocked because he would not apply for the mandatory license the state requires of anyone who runs a home for children.
In the end. his refusal led to a bizarre, theatrical battle between church and state-complete with devout prayers for death, 100-mile marches, predawn police raids, mysterious tires in the state attorney general’s office, hymn singing in the courthouse, and vicious allegations.
Most of all. the story highlighted the perplexing, belligerent, all-too-human W.N. Otwell. A simple, salvation-hustling preacher, a former oil field roughneck whose ministry had existed entirely in those little frame churches you see on the edge of town, Otwell suddenly found that he was a national celebrity and embarked on a campaign that took him face-lo-face with the governor of Texas and onto thousands of television screens where viewers who didn’t know him would watch. baffled, as he ranted for justice.
And then, just as his crusade was sputtering to its inevitable conclusion, something eerie and sickening would happen to him, something so freakish that he would later call it a miracle of God and claim it as the turning point in his fight for righteousness.
ACT ONE: The Conversion
W.N. CTTWELL DOESN’T HAVE ONE OF THOSE GREAT “I-WAS-SAVED” stories. A part of him doesn’t trust the big, dramatic salvation. “Hey, that lovey-dovey emotion only stays with you a little while,” he says in his straight-shooting way that tends to offend as many evangelicals as it does non-churchgoers. “Acting emotional ain’t going to change you forever. All that stuff you see where people are suddenly knocked to their knees and they convert-well, let me tell you something, man, there better be more to it than that.”
Otwell grew up in a small town in Arkansas. He joined the Navy after high school, got a tattoo, and was kicked out on a bad conduct charge after three and a half years. He couldn’t take the discipline. A big, swaggering fellow who knew how to use his fists. Otwell liked to lead more than he cared to follow. When he came home, he started working on the Arkansas oil rigs, and within three years had been promoted to boss of a drilling crew.
It was not a sheltered life. He drank a lot, and he loved the honky-tonks. He played poker, and he drove fast through town in his car. He had been married for a year, but his wife never went along on his evening adventures.
“Then, one Saturday night at eight o’clock,” Otwell recalls matter-of-factly, “I came into my family’s house, sat down in the living room, and felt like I was going to die. I sat there in the chair and realized it all had to stop. 1 knew it was the Lord speaking to me, and no one can convince me any different.”
He was converted the next morning at the East Side Missionary Baptist Church. He says he stopped drinking and cursing. A few months later, he was preaching. Just like that. In the little fundamentalist churches, there are few preachers with seminary backgrounds. A preacher doesn’t even need college. He doesn’t need to understand psychology or counseling or the history of the Reformation. His duty is to emphasize one message over and over-that if you don’t believe in the Bible, which contains no errors of science or history, and if you don’t believe in the essence of the Biblical message, which is that Jesus Christ died for your sins, then you’d better get ready for the fire of hell, because it’s coming fast. There’s no gray area. God isn’t some mysterious essence or remote figure as the liberal churches make Him out to be. He is in control, and He will strike with a vengeance if you go astray. You can’t drink, you can’t smoke, you can’t listen to rock ’n’ roll music, you can’t gel too many pleasures out of this life. Your real duty is to get ready for heaven, because this world is headed to hell.
For the mostly lowermiddle-class audiences who make up these congregations, people whose lives are often flat and uninspiring, bound by the slow repetition of days, this message is like a security blanket. And the message takes on an especially satisfying tone if the man giving it is some looming, tenacious figure like W.N. Otwell, flinging high one arm with a Bible sagging from his hand, his other hand slicing the air like a karate chop.
Combining a strict Victorian morality with a typically blue-collar notion that your butt should be kicked if you do something wrong, Otwell spared no one. He ripped into sinners. And he loved to go after the big Protestant denominations and the fancy television evangelists who spent more time raising money and building big churches than doing the Lord’s work. If another minister wouldn’t fight as fiercely as he did against loose morals, Ot-well would usually mock him in a sermon as a man “who wears lace on his underwear.”
As a young preacher, Otwell enrolled at a Bible seminary in Little Rock, but he quit after a few months because he thought the students and professors weren’t serious enough. What he did best was go into small towns, gather some people around him, and create a new church. There were never more than 200 members.
In Fifteen years he created five new churches in small towns in Texas, Louisiana, and Arkansas. Most of the time he was not paid for his efforts. He would work carpentry or an oil field job during the day. and at night he’d visit people out in the country, asking them to join his church. And there, from the pulpits of these little churches, Brother Otwell would launch into his ceaseless tirades.
After forming a church near Texarkana. he became known as the “letter-writing preacher,” firing off dozens of letters to the editor of the newspaper complaining about public immorality. When he started a church in Magnolia, Arkansas, he used his weekly gospel radio broadcast to call the local sheriff a drunkard and womanizer. He would stand outside liquor stores and pass out Bible tracts to the people going inside. He would protest local rock ’n’ roll concerts, not by picketing the auditorium with signs like “Rock ’n’ Roll is the Devil’s Agent,” but by marching right up to the police officers there and trying to talk them into locking the building.
In November 1981. he moved to Community Baptist Church on the southern edge of Fort Worth. The independent church was nearly twenty-seven years old, and it was losing members. Otwell would have the chance to work full time at the church.
For the country preacher, it was just one more stop, another tiny church that few people outside the congregation would ever realize existed. In one of those utterly unpredictable twists, however. Community Baptist would make the Bible-toting pastor one of the most controversial national religious figures in years.
ACT TWO: The Calli
ON APRIL 17, 1983. THE REV. OTWELL WENT TO THE PULPIT AND told the congregation of Community Baptist Church that God wanted him to add a home on the church grounds for troubled teenage boys who need to be taught the principles of discipline and Christian morality.
The congregation trusted its preacher. Otwell had brought in many new members-around 400 people were now on the church rolls- and he was already planning for a new sanctuary that could seat 1,000 people. They also didn’t debate his desire for a boys’ home. Right there, in a voice vote, they all said, “amen.”
Three days later, the Community Baptist Church boys’ home had its first resident. Within a week, there were four more boys. The church already had a bunkhouse on the property for camp meetings, and Otwell put the boys there. For Otwell. the boys’ home was an integral part of the church’s ministry, ordered and sanctioned by God.
It sat, along with the sanctuary, church offices, and the church school, on a six-acre lot. Most of the lot was a pasture where Otwell kept horses and cows for the boys. Otwell himself lived in a little apartment with his wife above the church offices. His son, Rocky, as easygoing and playful as his father was austere, served as the superintendent of the school and sang solos during the Sunday services. Deeply loyal to his father. Rocky still loved to tease him about the ways of the church. When the Rev. Otwell asked his congregation to wear sackcloth vests to symbolize mourning. Rocky joked that it was all right to wear them, because they had been made by Jordache. When he’d sing a hymn on Sundays, he would modestly ask those in attendance to help him out if he forgot the words. Then he’d perform with such power that the congregation, which normally shouted “amen.” would sit in hushed silence.
The word of Otwell’s home spread quickly through other churches and local detention centers. Almost all of the boys came from broken homes, where the single parent could no longer prevent them from skipping school or running with a bad crowd. Otwell wouldn’t accept a youth who had been convicted of a violent felony or who had serious mental problems.
Besides following a highly regimented schedule-up by 6:30, beds made before breakfast, a couple of hours of free time before dinner, lights out by 10 p.m.-the boys also attended the one-room Christian school that was on the church property. Unlicensed by the state, using a curriculum devised by a Christian evangelical group, the school had been formed more than a decade ago for church members who wanted their children to be educated from a fundamentalist Christian perspective. The parents were charged only what they felt comfortable paying. Otwell says no one paid more than $300 a month, and most of them paid nothing at all.
As the demands poured in. the church quickly built a new dormitory. Within a couple of months Otwell had nearly forty kids; at one point, sixty-seven boys ranging in age from nine to eighteen stayed there. But in June 1983, a representative from the state’s Department of Human Services arrived to say that Otwell. if he wanted to operate a boys’ home, would have to apply for a state license that would certify that his institution met certain minimum requirements, including financial solvency, a certain staff-child ratio, nutritional standards, and medical care. Otwell was told that by law, the state could not interfere in his religious instruction, or even prevent him from paddling a child-its yearly inspections would simply try to make sure a kid was not being abused.
Otwell didn’t believe a word of it. He saw only a bunch of state bureaucrats getting ready to stick their un-Christian noses into things that weren’t any of their business. “A marriage license doesn’t stop wife beating,” he would say in his sermons. “A driver’s license doesn’t stop drunken drivers. The state just wants to license me so they can have control. But we aren’t going to let the state control a home ordained by God.”
It did seem preposterous to argue that one licensing requirement was sending the country on the road to religious tyranny. Of all the church-state issues that have aroused considerable emotion over the last couple of years-school prayer. Nativity scenes on city hall property, what children should read in textbooks, the rights of churches to provide sanctuary to refugees from Guatemala and El Salvador-licensing of homes has not been one of them.
The state’s standards for a children’s home aren’t very difficult to meet. The only qualification for a regular staff member, for example, is that he or she be eighteen years of age, able to read and write, and not have any behavior or health problems that could endanger a child. Otwell’s most specific objection was that the law required him to show his budget for the year and exactly where the money would come from. The state wanted to make sure that the home wouldn’t go broke and leave the kids stranded. Otwell argued that a church like his survived on faith; if money was needed, they would find it.
Says Cris Ros-Dukler, who directs the licensing program for the state’s Department of Human Services: “Texas standards for twenty-four-hour youth homes are considered abysmally low compared to the rest of the country. There is little Otwell has to do. You know, it’s hard for me to talk about this without sounding incredulous about it.”
Still, despite the far-from-rigorous stand-ards, this kind of fight was not new to Texas government officials. A highly publicized, decade-long struggle through the state agencies and the courts finally came to an end a year ago when the South Texas children’s homes founded by the late evangelist Lester Roloff were closed because their operators had not applied for licenses.
When the U.S. Supreme Court refused to review a Texas Supreme Court decision that licensing does not infringe on religious freedom, the game was up.
The state attorney general’s office wanted to make sure there were no more Roloffs. “We are going after the next homes that are not licensed,” said Sue Berkel. a young assistant attorney general who was put in charge of prosecuting the licensing violators.
And she found one: W.N. Otwell and the Community Baptist Church.
The attorney general’s staff didn’t know much about Otwell, except that he was a bull headed pastor who had said all along he would not license his home. But Otwell had one thing going for him. His home worked. The state was unable to come up with any evidence that would suggest the boys at Otwell’s home were being mistreated or neglected.
In an environment devoid of any popular music, where stereos were banned and the only television shows allowed were sports and old westerns, Otwell reared his boys the old-fashioned way. Hair had to be cut above the ear, all men and women were addressed as “sir” or “ma’am,” and all incoming mail was read first by a supervisor to see if anything evil had been written to one of the boys. The boys went to church three times a week. At the daily church school, they could not speak unless a teacher spoke to them first. And if anyone kept misbehaving, he would be sent to Otwell’s office, where the pastor would pull out a paddle and swat the boy on the bottom.
“One lick was enough to give them the message,” said Otwell. “Sometimes I gave a second one. But it didn’t take anyone very long to understand what lite was like here. I a tell them that this was the real world, that it wasn’t going to be easy, and we wouldn’t put up with any nonsense.”
Last fall. I spoke to a half dozen of the kids. We talked one-on-one, with no supervisor around to guide their answers. Each one told me versions of the same story: they were drinking a lot as young teenagers, getting into drugs, staying out all night and rebelling against their parents. They had been caught by the police for offenses varying from busting out the windows of a car to possession of narcotics. They were caught in that gray area of juvenile law-not really criminals, but maybe headed that way. And Otwell said he’d take them in.
New York native Scott Wetmore. seventeen, left the Otwell home last May after graduating from the church’s school. Today, he is a soft-spoken, thoughtful teenager, working at a Radio Shack and preparing to attend junior college. He had come to Ot-well’s home three years ago after he was caught vandalizing his old school. His mother said she couldn’t handle him anymore.
“It was true,” he said. “I rebelled against everything. 1 didn’t understand it back then, but it was just a lack of self-discipline. That’s what they teach you here. They don’t try to browbeat you or force you to do anything. You might get a lick or two. but so what? The people here are like counselors at summer camp. It’s not hard to change after that.”
The state’s point was clear: the only way to possibly prevent a bad home is through a mandatory licensing procedure for all. But it was not difficult to understand the conflicting argument: that a church program, one that is genuinely helping people, shouldn’t be shut down simply because the church leaders refuse to license a ministry the Bible tells them they must carry out.
Of course, there was also the argument that if Otwell and his church members really cared about their troubled boys, they would stop their obsession with a minor church-state issue, comply with some minimal regulations, and get on with their meaningful work.
The state, however, would not back down. Otwell would either have to license his church home or close it. It was time for the wrathful preacher to give the performance of his lifetime-because, as he saw it, the agents of hell were literally on his doorstep. As it turned out. a lot of reporters and minicams were there, too.
AC1 THREE: The Crusade
SUE BERKEL OF THE ATTORNEY GENERAL’S office began to get an idea of what she was in for in early January of last year, when she asked Otwell to come to the attorney general’s offices in Fort Worth to give a deposition. Otwell showed up with l00 of his supporters. While they stood outside the building chanting slogans-some children even held posters that read, “Daddy, Don’t Let the STATE Get Me”-Otwell said to an astounded Berkel, “People are afraid of the state, you know. It’s like the Gestapo or the KGB. They run in on you. and they jerk files out and kick things around.”
And he had only just begun. A few weeks later. Otwell got a casket, solemnly marched it around downtown Fort Worth with his church members walking with him, and then buried it in front of his church. The burly Otwell wept, calling the moment the “death of religious freedom.”
Until this point, no one in the attorney general’s office was sure how the preacher would respond to the state’s pressure. They learned quickly that he would not go quietly. After one court hearing, Otwell. with the television cameras rolling, yelled out, “If the state cares so much about kids, why don’t they go and get these homosexuals and these dope addicts?”
In May. with 100 followers in tow, Otwell led a week-long. 100-mile march down Interstate 35 to Waco. The protesters then drove to Austin and circled the Travis County courthouse seven times in a reenactment of the Biblical story in which the walls of Jericho were blown down. They held a mock trial of Gov. Mark White and Attorney General Jim Mattox, convicting them of the murder of religious freedom. When he introduced other supporting ministers in the crowd, he paid them the ultimate Otwell compliment. “They are men,” he announced. “They don’t wear lace on their underwear.” To a great cheer, Otwell said he would send pink panties to the Austin ministers who failed to support the struggle.
But it was Mattox who got sent a pair of pink panties, placed around the body of a rubber chicken. It was Otwell’s way of calling Mattox a sissy and a coward.
Those expecting a more intelligent style of debate were disappointed. But there was Ot-weil, announcing that if the state authorities tried to harm the church’s children and women, there would be “blood in the street.” Then, when Mattox returned home from work one day, he found some Otwell supporters picketing his house. On the porch was a dead mother cat, already decomposing, and three crying kittens. He got a call from someone who asked how would it feel if boys were dumped on his doorstep like that.
Otwell said he had nothing to do with the incident, but that was about as much as Mattox could stand. What a lot of people didn’t know about the attorney general, already infamous in Texas for his hardball politics and fierce rivalries, was that he had planned to become a Baptist minister when he was in college. Mattox can still pick up a Bible in his office and quickly flip to the verse he wants. And he apparently made a decision early on in his battle that Otwell was not the kind of man who gave Christianity a good name-and it was up to Mattox to do something about it.
“These kind of people.” Mattox said, “are beyond your Southern Baptists. They are beyond your independent Baptists. They are the kind of people that are just nearly a cult. They could very well end up being the same kind of people who, rather than being apprehended by the state, would end up drinking poison Kool-Aid, like Jim Jones in Guyana.”
But Mattox underestimated the preacher’s popularity. In June, state District Judge Paul R. Davis granted Berkel and Mattox’s request to put the church up for sale to cover the cost of the more than $14,000 in fines that had been levied against Otwell since March for refusing to license his home. Otwell, seizing the advantage, proclaimed, “There’s never been a church sold in the history of America because its believers simply practiced their faith.”
That did it. The battle cry had been sounded. It was one thing to fight over a licensing regulation, another thing to put a church on the auction block. So much support began coming in for Otwell from around the country that a rally was planned in Fort Worth on the day the church would be sold. More than 10,000 conservative Christians from around the country were expected to come.
Quickly, the attorney general’s office postponed the sale until later in the summer, saying church members would not allow a survey of the property. But the damage was done. Although Otwell’s rally was postponed, two nationally powerful nondenom-inational Christian groups, the Coalition for Religious Freedom and the Religious Roundtable, asked the U.S. Justice Department to intervene in the sale. Texas Republican chairman George Strake even got in a shot, accusing Mattox of selective enforcement against certain Christians. A minister of a huge fundamentalist church in Indiana put Mattox on a prayer “hit list” and asked God to remove the attorney general from office, even if it meant killing him.
There was no question that W.N. Otwell possessed a kind of coarse, elemental power, evoking lurid images of sinners in the hands of an angry God. His sermons would whip-crack over his audience, sending a shiver down the spines of his believers and disgusting those who didn’t like him.
When Mattox, for example, called Otwell an “outlaw,” the preacher shot back with pure venom: “The streets are filled with homosexuals,’” Otwell said, “and Mattox defends their right to practice their lifestyle. Jim Mattox doesn’t care about little boys and girls. Jim Mattox is not even married. He runs with bad companions. There are some things that need to be said about Jim Mattox’s character that I won’t say publicly.”
Such comments inflamed Mattox, especially coming from a man who was openly flaunting a judge’s orders. Mattox had always held out the offer to Otwell that if he would just give up the boys’ home, all fines and civil charges would be dropped. But now Mattox was steaming. In early October, he and Berkel again went to court, this time to ask that Otwell be arrested for refusing to shut down the boys’ home.
Yet, amazingly, Otwell was one step ahead of the attorney general. He sneaked out of the state on October 6, the day the judge issued a warrant, and when the sheriffs deputies showed up to find him. there sat Otwell’s son. Rocky, wearing a silly-looking cowboy hat. “Howdy,” said Rocky with a wry smile.
The attorney general’s office wasn’t through. Sue Berkel, in one of her court filings, made the dubious claim that threats from Otwell and his supporters indicated they were “capable of violence” and asked that the children be removed from the home. Yet when Mattox ordered a secret, pre-dawn raid on the Community Baptist Church to find the boys, Otwell again got in a rabbit punch. More than fifty law enforcement officers drove up to the church at 5 a.m.-and there sat a smiling Rocky in his hat. waiting for everyone. One of the officers, sympathetic to the Otwell cause, had alerted the church about the raid, and the boys were moved to an undisclosed location.
Meanwhile, W.N. Otwell had taken his act on the road to tell the whole nation about his mission from God. Without cracking a smile, he called himself a “Paul Revere warning people about men like Jim Mattox.” He was written up in USA Today, and Fat Robertson’s “700 Club” ran a taped feature about his struggle. At the annual meeting of the American Coalition of Unregistered Churches, a group of small independent churches like Community Baptist, Otwell spoke seven times, and on each appearance received a standing ovation.
Improbably, out of one minor skirmish, Otwell had joined, if only briefly, the ranks of the nation’s best-known preachers. But as October came to a close, he knew that his new role was already in danger of collapsing. When Mattox and Berkel went before the judge again in late October, this time asking that all the buildings on the church site be padlocked except for the church sanctuary, its offices, and Otwell’s private residence, only about twenty-five Otwell supporters showed up to picket the courthouse.
So Otwell came to California to give it one last shot. Jim Mattox claimed that Otwell headed out there “only so he can pretend to be some great evangelical leader.” A furious Otwell said Mattox was bound for hell.
ACI FOUR: The ConcLusion
“THEY’RE JUST ENTERTAINMENT,” OTWELL was saying, nearly spitting out his words. “They’re showboating, Hollywood, rock ’n’ roll, jungle rock, feel-good preachers.” Otwell was lecturing me on the kinds of slick, television preachers who come out of California, and he was so exasperated by their well-rehearsed style that he was turning red in the face.
“Feel good! Feel good! That’s all they can talk about. Lord, did you take a look at their suits? Did you ever see the Apostle Paul in one of those suits? Feel good! Well, I guess if you want to ignore abortion, sodomy, crime, and everything else, then you can feel good.”
It would be possible, in a place like Los Angeles, for even his detractors to feel a bit of genuine affection for Otwell. With his straight barber-shop haircut and puritanical intolerance, he was completely out of place in this city, which didn’t bother him in the least. A man from one of the churches, giving him a tour of the city, drove Otwell past the mansions of Beverly Hills, but Otwell stared straight ahead and said. “This ain’t no big deal to me. This indulgence is downright un-Christian.”
But I wanted to know what Otwell was really thinking at the conclusion of the two services he led at the Fundamentalist Baptist Tabernacle Church in Los Angeles, one of the country’s most famous fundamental churches. More than 500 people crowded in for each service. It was more people than Otwell had ever spoken to at one time, and he gave it all he had.
There was a sense of awe in his voice when he said to me, “They gave me twenty to twenty-five clapping, standing ovations.” he said. No matter how pious a preacher might be, he remains as susceptible as anyone else to the roar of the crowd-perhaps more so. He spends Sunday after Sunday painstakingly laying out the old. old story, trying to make it all sound reasonable. And when it clicks, the applause can be overwhelming. For Otwell. those moments in that church could have been the highlight of his preaching career.
It seemed that things might pick up. Otwell was asked to appear for a thirty-minute interview on the nationwide, evangelical Trinity Broadcasting Network. He was in fine fettle. He stared hard at the camera, his eyes icy, and called Mark White and Jim Mattox “enemies of the church.”
He made some calls to a couple of other religious television stations. He tried to line up some radio interviews. And then, after sitting for two days in his hotel room, he realized his journey had come to an end. The revelation didn’t hit him all at once; he had known, in the back of his mind, that his days in the headlines were over, that soon he would disappear into another little church. But perhaps worse than losing, for Otwell. was that people had stopped paying attention.
“You’ve got all these big-time evangelists.” he said to me. “with their private planes and big fancy television shows. You’ve got these Rex Humbards and Jimmy Swaggarts. And what did they do for us? Did they lift one hand for a little church in need?”
On Friday morning, he decided to catch a plane back to Oklahoma City, where part of his family would be waiting for him. It was difficult for me to tell whether he was disappointed; he can hide emotions so easily behind his religious fervor.
But he did say. almost in an embarrassed way, that he wanted to travel back from California before the November 4 election day the next week. Otwell’s old friend Lester Roloff-the preacher whose unlicensed children’s homes in South Texas led to such a controversy in the Seventies-was killed in a plane crash on election day in 1982. (Ironically, Attorney General Mattox and Gov. Mark White were elected to office that day.) Otwell had been warned by fellow fundamentalist ministers about the same thing happening to him. They told him one never could tell how the Devil might act.
“I just want to be careful,” he said. “Not that I’m afraid of death or anything.” At the time, I found that a very strange thing to say; it would later sound most prophetic.
After a while, I asked him what would happen next. An odd thing happened. For the first time since I had met him. he lowered his voice. “You know something?” he said. “They can laugh at me all they want. Those people, all the Sunday churchgoers, can say that I’m a little too much on the fringe, a little too religious. And all those state bureaucrats can say I’m raising hell for something that don’t mean that much. But tell me, what are all those people doing for society? What are they doing to help someone down on their luck?
“Listen, I was ready to build a home on our property for unwed mothers, and another one for old people. I wanted to build a gymnasium for those boys in the home. We didn’t have much, but at least we tried to do our part. I knew it was coming. I knew we’d have to move. Goodness, I hate to lose the church, but what else is there to do? You have to wave goodbye, and may God have mercy on those who took it.”
The man who vowed to fight religious tyranny to the bitter end hooked one finger through his clip-on suspenders and stared at the floor. Then, his face lifted and he left me with a very unlikely, passive benediction.
“I tried to do what the Lord wants.” Otwell said in a resigned voice. “That’s what it’s all about, isn’t it, brother?”
The big man walked off. He seemed to barrel his way through the crowd, utterly detached from those near him.
AC1 FIVE: The Miracle
OTWELL’S PLANE ARRIVED IN OKLAHOMA City around midnight. There to meet him were his wife Charlotte, whom he hadn’t seen in two weeks, his younger son Randall, twenty-six, a welder in Fort Worth, and his five-year-old grandson. They were headed south on Interstate 35-the same highway Otwell had hiked down nearly six months before in his religious freedom march to Austin-when they saw the accident.
By 12:45 a.m., they were just about a half-mile north of the Main Street exit in Norman when another southbound car in front of them inexplicably crossed the median and struck two northbound cars. Randall Otwell. who was driving, wasn’t sure what to do. But cars began to spin everywhere. One of the cars crumpled in entirely. The Otwells quickly pulled over onto a shoulder, and Otwell and his son ran across the highway to the most damaged car. where three women were trapped.
It was pitch black, Otwell peered through one of the windows. All three women-ranging in age from eighteen to forty-three-looked to be dead. Another man. twenty-one-year-old Terry Wayne Corbett of Ardmore. Oklahoma, driving with his wife and infant child, also stopped his car on the southbound side of the highway and ran over to help. No one could see very well, so Corbett began directing traffic away from the women’s car that lay in the lane nearest the median. Otwell and his son tried to open the doors to get the women out in case the car caught on fire. Randall went around to one side of the car. Otwell was within four feet of Corbett, directing traffic.
Then, in another instant, there was another terrible screech of brakes, and, according to eyewitness accounts recorded by the Oklahoma Highway Patrol. Corbett shouted, “Look out! There’s a car coming.” Otwell remembered looking up to see a pair of headlights. An oncoming car ricocheted off the women’s already disabled car, knocking Otwell’s son into a ditch. Then the car slammed head on into the preacher and Corbett.
Corbett was killed instantly. Otwell was thrown backwards. The seat of his pants was torn out and acid from the car spilled onto his legs. But all he suffered was a concussion and some bruises. Otwell got up and walked over to his own car. Otwell’s son also received only a few bruises. The state trooper who investigated the accident, Scott Woodward, said it didn’t make sense that Corbett would be killed and Otweli live. “It was one of those freak things,” he said.
Otwell, of course, saw it as something different-a miracle. Said Otwell: “A highway trooper came into my hospital room [where he had been taken overnight for observation] and stood there shaking his head that I was alive.”
There was no way around it. In one horrible, violent moment, Otwell had survived an incident that, by any stretch of the imagination, he should not have. The congregation of the Community Baptist Church left the next day in a caravan of cars to meet Otwell. They brought plates full of food. They baked pies and cakes. There were nearly 100 people from the church, and they all gathered in a Holiday Inn banquet room in Ardmore.
When Otwell walked in, one side of his face heavily bruised, several church members burst into tears. Otwell said later that even he almost began to cry.
“Not you,” I said, thinking of his fiery demeanor. “Not the Rev. Otwell.”
“Well, almost,” he said.
The “miracle” had allowed him to live another day, and to someday wage another war. Otwell casually tossed out the statement that he was ready to talk to Jim Mattox about a compromise where the church would not be sold if Otwell gave up the boys’ home. “You know,” Otwell said. “God has other plans in store for us.”
“How do you know?” I asked.
“Well, when you come so close to death,” said Otwell, “and the Lord lets you live, then you better examine your life real close. I wondered if God’s judgment was on me because of my battle with the state, that maybe I was doing it too much for me instead of the Lord’s glory. Maybe you don’t believe it, but I went through all those thoughts.”
“And?” I asked.
The old Otwell fire was slowly returning. “I learned that night on the highway that God is watching over us,” he said, “that we’re anointed, and that our fight will never end. We haven’t been treated right, but maybe it isn’t right either to give up our church that so many people loved and needed just because the bureaucrats of the state said to.
“But you better listen to this,” said Otwell, his voice back at full volume. “We might not be able to beat the judge this time. But we’ve got a higher judge on our side. And that judgment day is coming. Do you think I’m not telling the truth? Then ask yourself this; why am I alive? It’s because the power of the Lord doesn’t go away so easy. You haven’t, by far, seen the last of me.”
W.N. Otwell sounded, once again, like his same old self. A few days later, he did come back to Texas, after five weeks on the road, to surrender to authorities; he had made a preliminary deal with the attorney general’s office that all charges against him would be dropped in return for the church’s permanently shutting down its boys’ home.
But before he went to Austin to appear before Judge Davis, he made a triumphant return to Community Baptist Church, where, in a typical Otwellian move, he decided to forgo a welcome-back party in order to give a sermon.
With the local press looking on. Otwell got behind the pulpit and displayed his usual lack of subtlety, at one point spitting into the microphone to show his distaste for lawyers. He announced that the country was going to hell, that television evangelists were going to hell, that people who gave a bunch of money to big churches without meaning it were going to hell, and that once again, just in case anyone missed it the first time, the country was going to hell.
At the court hearing, where Judge Davis dismissed the $97,000 in court fines and the order to padlock the church doors, Otwell was able to lay eyes for the first time on his nemesis, Jim Maltox. The two had never before met.
Mattox couldn’t help himself. While Otwell and his supporters in the courtroom silently fumed, unable to say anything for fear of jeopardizing their case before the judge, Mattox, the old Bible student, stood up and pointedly said, “In my religion there is a parable about forgiveness. It’s called the prodigal son, your honor, and I suggest it applies to the prodigal reverend. We hope that you will give him forgiveness.”
The country preacher said after the hearing that he needed no forgiveness. He vowedthat he would make his return, wrathful andimpassioned as ever, his Bible held high andhis eyes blazing.
