November 18, 1978 Drinking the Koolaid

Those who knew him as a child remembered a “really weird kid“, obsessed with religion and death.  He’d hold elaborate, pseudo-religious ceremonies at the house, mostly funerals for small animals.  How Jim Jones got all those dead animals, was a matter for dark speculation.

It was depression-era rural Indiana, in an age of racial segregation.  Father and son often clashed over issues of race.  The two didn’t talk to each other for years, after the time the elder Jones refused to let one of his son’s black friends, into the house.

Jim Jones was a bright boy, graduating High School with honors, in 1949.  He was a voracious reader, studying the works of Stalin, Marks, Mao, Gandhi and Hitler and carefully noting the strengths and weaknesses, of each.

Jones married Marceline Baldwin in 1949 and moved to Bloomington, Indiana, where he attended Indiana University and later Butler University night school…