Word: humbard
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...swaddled behind the piano while his parents led revival services in the tabernacles and tents of the Bible Belt. Once, after he had learned to walk, his father collared him as he ran across the stage and spanked him soundly to demonstrate proper child training. Young Rex Humbard reformed, but real conversion had to wait until he was a shy 13, listening to a visiting evangelist call for converts. He went forward, he recalls, "to open my heart to Jesus," and it happened. "Light flooded my soul and I became a new person. In that moment God took...
...Lord, Humbard would probably admit, did a thorough job of it. Now 51, he heads a religious-business empire that deals in millions of dollars as well as souls; he reaches his outposts by private airliner. But the seat of empire is a weekly television show. Each Sunday he is seen conducting a nondenominational service on 335 television stations across the U.S. and Canada, and the number is still growing. Even in New York City, not normally fruitful territory for evangelists, Humbard this month was able to switch his show from 7 a.m. to a choice 11 a.m. slot right...
Technicolor Cross. Humbard's sumptuous Cathedral of Tomorrow in Akron was in fact built for television, though it also serves a local congregation of 2,800 families. Opened in 1958 at a cost of $3,500,000, the vast circular structure is lavishly appointed: glass and marble walls, a huge wooden dome, tiers of theater-type seats around a stage that can be raised or lowered hydraulically. The auditorium atmosphere is hardly dispelled by the cathedral's single mark of religious character: a 100-ft.-long cross, hung horizontally, embellished with 4,700 light bulbs that...
...Technicolor cross sets the tone neatly for the television service, a bland but professional blend of folksy, pep-talk piety and bubbly, inspirational hillbilly music-a Norman Vincent Apeale to a Lawrence Welk constituency. The music is no mere come-on; in the hour-long show, Humbard's sermon usually takes little more than 15 minutes. The Cathedral Singers-including Rex's wife Maude Aimee, a pert, peppery, brunette soprano who becomes properly demure for the Gospel numbers-are the stars. Smoothly pancaked, eyelashed, and carefully coiffed in styles of the '60s, the girls come...
That kind of joyful, superconfident soul balm is probably the reason many listeners tune in. But as more than 20,000 letters a week attest, many others are troubled people seeking help. For them, an important part of the standard Humbard service begins when Rex walks over to a prayer table piled high with letters and-a scrupulous touch -microfilm copies of all those that could not fit on it. "Every name," he assures listeners, "is on the table." After the prayer there are down-home introductions of visiting notables, more music, Humbard's sermon and the final "altar...