I was 12 years old and living at Pacific Union College in the Napa Valley when the Jim Jones murder/suicide of over 900 people took place in Guyana. The religion had been big in the San Francisco Bay Area and suddenly we Seventh-Day Adventists were talking about cults and whether or not we were one.
There were many Moonies (members of the Unification Church) near us and I heard that Moonies were a cult. They operated a golf course in Pope Valley, Aetna Springs. During summers in high school, my friends and I used it frequently.
One Sabbath afternoon in eighth grade while I was living apart from my parents who were in Washington DC, I took a drive with the Muth family and we ran into this Moonie kid Mrs. Muth knew and I got all excited, thinking he’d have horns or be terribly deformed or something and I was stunned when Mrs. Muth talked to him like he was a normal human being.
I never had any non-Adventist friends until my dad got kicked out of the Church’s ministry in September of 1980. I never knowingly met a Jew until arriving at UCLA in the fall of 1988. I didn’t grow up relating to the world at large. It seemed like a scary place.
