Word: humbard
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...Before televangelism got so complicated--before Jim Bakker had sex with a church clerk and Jerry Falwell entered politics--there was Rex Humbard, a wide-eyed guitar-playing, TV-loving revival preacher from Little Rock, Ark. In the early '50s, the self-described "electronic evangelist," who helped eulogize fan Elvis Presley, began to develop a following with TV broadcasts that for a time reached more parts of the globe than any other religious show and claimed 20 million viewers. Among the hallmarks of his 5,400-seat, marble-and-glass Cathedral of Tomorrow, a onetime movie theater near Akron, Ohio...
...several minority groups, and was recently fired by a Native American tribe that claimed his work as its lawyer was inept. Evangelist Bailey Smith, while president of the Southern Baptist Convention, gained brief notoriety by declaring, "God Almighty does not hear the prayer of a Jew." Retired Televangelist Rex Humbard was once rebuked by the Securities and Exchange Commission for selling unregistered securities, and was taken to task in the press for spending too much of his ministry's money on his family...
...stem the damage from the newspaper's latest revelations, Falwell pledged an open-books policy at PTL. He then reconstituted the board, adding such newcomers as pioneer Televangelist Rex Humbard and former Interior Secretary James Watt. Falwell also called an emergency meeting of the board for this week. His administrative assistant, Mark DeMoss, indicated that Falwell is not empire building and that his organization in Lynchburg, Va., and PTL will have "separate boards, separate management, separate everything." In the shake-up, Richard Dortch, formerly Bakker's top executive, becomes PTL president...
Then there was the unmistakable dynamism of the preachers themselves. Graham caused such a sensation that his 1950 advent on ABC radio was foreordained. He made his TV debut the following year. Weekly shows, the basic unit of TV programming, did not begin until traveling Revivalist Rex Humbard happened by a crowd gazing into an Akron department-store window. Fashion < show? Puppets? No, a TV set. By 1953 Humbard was telecasting services weekly and in 1958 opened the splashy, 5,000-seat Cathedral of Tomorrow, the first church designed to be a TV studio. In 1955, at Humbard's urging...
Sons of evangelists often follow in paternal footsteps. Timothy B. Robertson, 28, has just been made a vice president of Pat (700 Club) Robertson's Christian Broadcasting Network. Another TV preacher, Rex Humbard, has four children in his operation. Billy Graham's son Franklin, 30, is also a preacher, but he chose his own course and now heads Samaritan's Purse, a humanitarian agency working overseas. His father, though, sometimes muses that Franklin might prove useful some day in the Billy Graham organization...