45 years later — Peoples Temple and the Peninsula

The former student director of the Cal Marching Band at the University of California, Berkeley, Bob Houston had joined the Peoples Temple after getting a degree in education at Berkeley and a teaching credential at San Francisco State University. He began a job teaching in Mendocino County, where the Peoples Temple first operated in California before moving to San Francisco. Bob Houston questioned cult leader Jim Jones about details of socialist theory. Jones decided Houston was an “insensitive intellectual” and “class enemy.”

Officials ruled as accidental the death of Bob Houston — who worked several jobs, including night maintenance worker at the railroad train yard, after moving from Mendocino County to San Francisco.

His father Sam Houston knew U.S. Rep. Leo Ryan, the congressman representing northern San Mateo County. Before his political career, Ryan had taught Bob Houston at Capuchino High School in San Bruno.

Ryan’s inquiry into Houston’s death and the Peoples Temple would lead to the congressman’s 1978 trip to the South American jungle settlement where 918 people died.

The deaths, 45 years ago on Nov.18, 1978, was a San Francisco story that shifted to South America when the cult moved there from the city. But the deadly saga had many ties to the Peninsula.

Journalistic interest

More than a year before the mass deaths, New West magazine editor and Belmont resident Rosalie Wright was interested in a temple story that the San Francisco Chronicle wouldn’t print. Chronicle city editor Steve Gavin was later described as Jones’ most ardent supporter in the press.

Rosalie Wright had worked at ‘Philadelphia’ magazine on big stories. The planned New West story about the Peoples Temple produced phone calls at 2 a.m. to Wright’s home warning her: “Don’t do it.”

Because of the temple threats, the magazine editor sent her two sons to stay in San Diego with her ex-husband, moved into the Stanford Court Hotel and bought a Beretta .380 semi-automatic pistol. The 35-year-old editor took firearm instruction at Coyote Point in San Mateo.

In the story New West published in 1977, San Francisco Chronicle reporter Marshall Kilduff and writer Phil Tracy said public officials from Gov. Jerry Brown on down left the impression that they used Jones to deliver votes at election time — and never asked any questions about the temple. Not about Jones’ bodyguards. And the church’s locked doors. Or why Jones’ followers so obsessively protected him.

“Although Jones’ name is well-known,” New West said, “especially among the politicians and the powerful, he remains surrounded by mystery. For example, his Peoples Temple has two sets of locked doors, guards patrolling the aisles during services and a policy of barring passersby from dropping by unannounced on Sunday morn­ings. His bimonthly newspaper, Peoples Forum, regularly exalts socialism, praises Huey Newton and Angela Davis and forecasts a government takeover by American Nazis.”

In South America

The New West story helped send Jones and his followers to South America. There, the temple leader told followers gathered at the pavilion in Jonestown days before the jungle settlement’s end that if Ryan entered the site the congressman’s stay had better be brief.

“I didn’t come this far to be pushed about by someone from Burlingame or San Mateo, and now we found the CIA, we found our link, he’s the catalyst,” Jones said of Ryan. “We found out just exactly that. He is the catalyst.”

Jones’s drug-fueled paranoia had spurred his speculations about the intelligence agency’s interest in the jungle settlement. 

The temple leader complained Ryan wanted to see if we’re all psychologically oriented.

“I said, ‘Who in the hell are you? Are you a psychiatrist with the right to speak of our, our psychological  balance or not?’ And then he said he didn’t see any pictures of Jesus anywhere,” Jones complained.

He’s questioning our Internal Revenue Service exemption, Jones said.

“So you can’t win with a motherf—r like that if you try. You can’t win. There’s no way to win with some son of a bitch like that, so as far as I’m concerned, he can take his ass back to San Mateo.”

The temple leader continued to rant to followers about Ryan.

“He’s not your counselor. He’s not your goddamned priest. He thinks he’s sent down here from the Holy Father of Rome, and the Constitution and the Monroe Doctrine gives him the privilege to go ever — wherever he wants to. It also gives me the right to shoot him in the ass.”

“I didn’t vote for him,” Jones said of Ryan. “And I don’t know where Burlingame is. A few of you may have been there. I didn’t come from Burlingame. I don’t want nothing from Burlingame. I left it all there, god damn it, I have left it all there, and I don’t want to see his ass. It’s my opinion they start this shoving our ass around, and there won’t be no end to it. We’ll have President Carter and about 18 more that’ll be here on Christmas Day to see us.”

Jones said he was listening to the temple attorneys. Ryan’s group was trying to set us up, the temple leader told followers. Jones said visiting relatives, who joined Ryan on the trip and hoped to see family members in the temple, were brainwashed. “They accuse us of being brainwashed. They’re the robots, and you’ve got to be extremely careful, extremely careful.” 

“We do not want to see all of our children sacrificed over a jackass from San Mateo,” Jones said.

Ryan standing in the open air, tin-roofed pavilion that was the center of the settlement — spoke to temple members Friday night before the mass deaths that followed the next day.

“I’m very — very glad to be here,” he said. “I already have met a former student of mine. I’ve already met a former classmate of one of my daughters at Mills High School.”

“This is a congressional inquiry. I think that all of you know that I’m here to find out more about questions that’ve been raised about your operation here,” Ryan said. “But I can tell you right now that, from the few conversations I’ve had with some of the folks here already this evening, that whatever the comments are, there are some people here who believe this is the best thing that ever happened to them in their whole life.”

Sustained cheers followed from temple members.

“I feel terrible that you can’t all register to vote in San Mateo County,” Ryan said, laughing.

“By proxy,” a man in the audience said.

Ryan laughed again.

“By proxy. OK. We’ll do that if we can.”

Shooting at the airstrip

The Red Brigade, the temple security force, shot Ryan and four others the next day at an airstrip outside Jonestown. On a rainy Wednesday in South San Francisco where Leo Ryan had served on the City Council and been mayor — the funeral for the congressman was held Nov. 22 at All Souls Catholic Church.

Jim Wright, the Texas Democrat and House Majority leader described Ryan “as sometimes introspective, never fully predictable” and “a brave and compassionate man.”

Three police helicopters flew overhead during the burial service at Golden Gate National Cemetery in San Bruno where Father Thomas Parenti of Our Lady of Mercy Church in Daly City read a Catholic burial rite, seven Navy riflemen fired a 21-gun salute and a bugler played “Taps.” 

Jackie Speier, 28-year-old legal counsel to Ryan, who had traveled with him to Jonestown, was wounded in the airstrip shootings.

“I was lying on the ground by one of the plane’s wheels, pretending to be dead,” said Speier, a graduate of Mercy High School in Burlingame.

She almost was. A medical technician who treated Speier said she was three minutes from death. Speier would spend two months in a hospital and undergo 10 surgeries.

She later won election to Congress to represent the Peninsula.

Cyanide, victims

Steven Katsaris was pastor of a Greek Orthodox Church in Belmont where his daughter Maria attended Carlmont High School before the family moved to Ukiah in Mendocino County.

Mariah lived on a ranch and rode horses, cooked Greek meals and built fences after graduating from high school. The 5-foot-9-inch girl, described as a “shy, pig-tailed string bean” found a friend in a teacher’s aide who was also the Peoples Temple makeup artist — helping to transform young people into the old and ailing for faith healing by Jones. Invited to a temple meeting, Maria joined and rose in the hierarchy to become a key aide to Jones. 

Her father tried tirelessly to reach Maria in Jonestown but Jones’ control of Maria proved too powerful. Her brother Anthony Katsaris joined Ryan’s trip to the jungle settlement and said goodbye to his 25-year-old sister Maria.

Anthony pressed into Maria’s hand a sterling silver cross that had belonged to their Greek grandfather. As Anthony turned to board the dump truck taking visitors to the airstrip, Maria Katsaris called out. She threw the cross to the ground and spoke about their father.

“Tell Steve I don’t believe in God,” Maria said.

Anthony picked up the cross and left.

Maria Katsaris and others directed people to take the purple liquid dispensed from a metal vat at the center of the pavilion, ringed by temple security. A mix of cyanide, Valium and Flavor Aid was in the 55-gallon drum. 

Maria Katsaris’ corpse, her death believed due to cyanide poisoning, was found in Jones’ bed.

She was buried in an old county cemetery with soaring pine trees near Redwood Valley in Mendocino County, 15 miles from where she first heard Jim Jones speak at the county fairgrounds in Ukiah.

Her father Steven Katsaris, 50, carved Maria’s grave marker with words in Greek that read, “Beloved Daughter, I Understand.”

Clare Bouquet, a Burlingame school teacher, recalled when her son Brian — who would join the temple and, at age 25, be among the dead in Guyana at Jonestown — asked if she knew how blues singer Bessie Smith died in 1937. Smith was seriously injured in a car accident and one account — since found false — said Smith bled to death after a whites-only hospital refused to care for her. Brian told that story of Smith’s death.

Brian Bouquet, his mother said, “was always for the underdog.”

Clare Bouquet said of temple members that “some segments of our society have dismissed them as a bunch of crazy fanatics, or a grotesque spectacle.”

“But someone loved each one of them,” Bouquet told a congressional panel. “They went to Guyana looking for some sort of promised land, and found themselves prisoners in hell.”