Word: patten
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...faced C. Thomas Patten was an evangelist in fancy maroon shirts. He wore cowboy hats with brims that were wide, and cowboy boots with toes that were narrow, and his congregation couldn't refuse him a thing. When he asked for money, they gave him money-for a choir loft that went up & down like the stage at Radio City Music Hall, for an electric Escalator that lifted worshipers up to a raised altar. These wonders never appeared, but in seven years in Oakland, Calif. Tom acquired nine cars, 46 suits, 200 pairs of boots and a cabin cruiser...
Brother C. (for Cash, he likes to say) Thomas Patten had little contact with religion as a youngster in Tennessee. "My Daddy was baptized a Baptist in a mountain stream," he explains, "but a crawfish bit him on his big toe and he never went back." Tom got to be a carouser, "drank like a fish," even got himself a suspended two-year prison sentence for driving a stolen car across a state line. But he saw the light after he met Evangelist Bebe Harrison, "the only woman I ever saw that I couldn't get fresh with...
...work together. They got married in 1935, set to spreading the Gospel in 38 states, then settled down in Oakland seven years ago. Under the chilly scrutiny of the Oakland Council of Churches, they started holding revivals and set up three schools-the Academy of Christian Education, Patten College and Patten Seminary. Students joined up at the rate of 300 a year, paying $20 a month tuition, slipping on bright school sweaters with big block Ps, and learning the school yells. Sample, adopted from the old "Give 'em the ax": "Give 'em the Word, the Word, the Word...
Such displays of wealth were enough to breed doubt in some of the faithful. A few followers went to the district attorney. Last week Tom Patten, a strapping, 218-lb. six-footer with a toothy grin and a fat face, was on trial in Alameda County Courthouse charged with mulcting some of his flock of $20,000. One of the shaken believers, an unemployed food caterer named George Lewis, told the jury how he had parted with more than $10,000. "I'd go to a Patten meeting with my full pay ($125 a week) and come out with...
Perhaps the best course for Harvard to take is to completely drop football. You will at least be sure of not getting into any more embarrassing situations like the Stanford flasco. Norman L. Van Patten Herkeley, Calif...