Guy Young has had many jobs during his life, including as a probation officer, a furniture installer, and a pastor. It was during his time as a pastor in which he found his wife, Christine Cobb, a beautiful black woman; it was also during his time as a pastor that connected him to Peoples Temple.
Guy’s journey with Peoples Temple began when he moved to Ukiah, California, after he had completed seminary in San Francisco. Guy says that his Seminary Training was as a Presbyterian, but that the school that he went to “wouldn’t ordain” him. Unhappy with this development, Guy decided to move to Ukiah, California, a decision that seemed quite banal at the time, but one that would change his life in ways that he could not begin to fathom.
Once Guy was settled in his new home, he took up work as a probation officer. He was very concerned with “the wayward teens in the probation system,” so much so that he paid special attention to each case that he was assigned. He spent as much time as he could checking up on them and doing his best to provide them with resources within the community that would help them stay out of trouble. His job introduced him to people who had been through the justice system, and he interacted a good amount with the lawyers who worked in the courthouse. One was the District Attorney for Mendocino County named Tim Stoen. The two men became good friends as they worked together on the enforcement of conditions of probation. It was Tim who told Guy about the local church that he was attending called Peoples Temple. The more that Guy heard about the church, its congregation, and its leader, the Reverend Jim Jones, the more he was intrigued. Accepting Tim’s invitation to attend a service, Guy visited Peoples Temple, and as he said, his life was changed the moment that he stepped inside the building.
What amazed Guy the most about Peoples Temple were “the different races and many different types of people” in the church’s congregation. There were people of all ages and all backgrounds. White collar professionals sat next to blue collar workers. Those who were financially well-to-do interacted on an equal basis with those who were poor. In Guy’s view, the composition of the congregation “was simply beautiful” and allowed for people of all different walks of life to interact with each other in compassionate Christian brotherhood. Guy quickly fell in love with the group and, once he joined the congregation, felt blessed to be considered one of them.
Guy eventually moved back to San Francisco, but this time, instead of as a seminary student, he was a committed member of Peoples Temple. The church was moving its base of operations to a newly-acquired facility on Geary Boulevard in the city’s Fillmore District, a predominantly black neighborhood. The decision to follow Jones and his church gave Guy something that he had been wanting for a while, and it was while he was working at the San Francisco church that he became an ordained pastor. Although his seminary training had been as a Presbyterian, his official ordination came through the Disciples of Christ, the Christian denomination to which Peoples Temple belonged. Guy was happy to realize his aspiration to be an ordained minister, and to have made good on his seminary education.
For Guy, as it did for many others, life in Peoples Temple had the added responsibilities of being an “understudy” of sorts to Jones. There were many different roles to be filled by members of Peoples Temple in its everyday functioning. It needed its members to fill roles within the church, such as security for Jones and the church building, creating and publishing the church’s newspaper, cooking meals for Temple dinners, running the Senior Living home that took care of the elderly congregants, and a myriad of other tasks.
In 1975, when Guy began to work as a security guard for Peoples Temple, he met Christine Cobb, who worked the same shifts that he did. Christine was a divorced mother with seven children – Jim, Teresa, Ava, Sandy, Johnny, Brenda and Joel – who had moved from Indianapolis to Ukiah in 1967. Christine was a devout believer in the good that Jim Jones and Peoples Temple did for the community and the world. With the two working together and chatting about their duties and lives, it wasn’t long before Guy and Christine fell in love, and the soon married. While her two eldest children, Jim and Teresa, had left the Temple in 1973 as two of the Eight Revolutionaries who defected over disagreements with Temple leadership, Christine had remained dedicated to the church.
The newly-married couple soon adopted a little black girl named Ramona Lamothe, or Mona, as they called her. She had been rescued from an abusive home life where she suffered from physical abuse. Living with Christine and Guy as her loving adoptive parents, Mona flourished in her new environment. The girl who had once known little else but pain learned to laugh and play again. She was cherished by her parents and siblings.
Guy and Christine lived happily for the first year or so of their marriage. His life with Christine “was a wonderful experience, to say the least,” Guy said. “We were deeply in love and enjoyed life together.” Things changed, though, when New West Magazine published an article in August 1977about abuses in Peoples Temple. Jim Jones knew that the article was in the works and was able to use his influence to get his hands on an advance copy. When he realized that he couldn’t persuade the magazine to pull the story, Jim became frightened that his church might face official investigations into its activities, and directed as many people as he could to move down to its community in Jonestown, Guyana. The sudden exodus of nearly one thousand individuals from San Francisco to the South American country left a significantly smaller number of members in the United States. Since Jim Jones could no longer be in the pulpit at the Geary Boulevard church, he chose Guy to be the new “day to day” pastor in his stead.
Christine had gone to Jonestown to live with her children in 1976. Christine was a LVN Medical Nurse/ “Psych tech” by trade, and in Jonestown, she worked along with the medical staff in the infirmary. She provided counseling to other members of Peoples Temple as well while she was in Jonestown.
Except for the two elder children who had defected several years before, Christine’s children had gone to Jonestown ahead of her and were already there. Only Mona, the child whom Christine and Guy adopted, had remained in California, and when Christine left, Mona remained with Guy for the time being. The long-term plan was that Guy and Mona would one day follow Christine and the other kids down to the “Promised Land” of the settlement.
With Jim Jones in Jonestown, the new pastor leading the congregation in San Francisco found the work to be more challenging than he expected. “It was still very stressful,” Guy remembers, “because although Jim wasn’t there, we were connected to Jonestown by HAM radio, and along with my daily duties as pastor, requests and orders were constantly coming in over the HAM radio.” That meant if Jonestown needed more supplies, or if Jim Jones had a new policy regarding how he wanted Guy and others to deal with the media or the Concerned Relatives group, it would be transmitted to those who were working/living in the San Francisco church. Guy also felt more pressure while he was heading up Geary Street because he “had a close relationship with the people who were in both places,” and he found himself wanting to make certain that he met the needs of all the members, be they in San Francisco or in Jonestown.
Guy was kept very busy with his work as Associate Pastor. A few months before November 1978, Christine requested that Guy send eight-year-old Mona to Jonestown to live with her mother and the rest of the Cobb children. Christine “made it known to me that she wanted me to join the rest of the family in Jonestown as soon as possible,” Guy related, “but I told her that I was now part of the leadership [by standing in for Jones] and that I hoped to be able to visit them all in Jonestown soon.” Although he missed his wife and children greatly, he busied himself in his duties and continued to tend to his flock and give sermons.
On November 18, 1978, Guy was standing in the pulpit in the Geary Boulevard church, preaching a sermons, when one of the members of Peoples Temple who monitored and interacted with Jonestown on the HAM radio came up and told him that there was an emergency, that Guy needed to come to the radio immediately. Startled and confused, Guy whispered back that he was in the middle of a sermon, but the messenger was insistent: it was imperative that he come to the radio. Giving in and excusing himself from the parishioners, Guy rushed upstairs.
What he heard coming from the radio speakers shattered his entire life and filled him with sadness and terror. Coming over the HAM radio was the news that Jonestown was in the midst of committing what Jim Jones called “Revolutionary Suicide.” Something had gone horribly wrong during the visit of U.S. Representative Leo Ryan and some of the Concerned Relatives to Jonestown. Guy knew full well that his wife and children had to be among the dead and dying inhabitants of the settlement. He did not yet know that John Cobb – Christine’s son and his stepson – had survived the deaths just as Stephan and Jim Jones, Jr., since they were all on Jonestown’s basketball team playing in a tournament in Georgetown. Guy also didn’t know that Christine’s son Jim had visited Jonestown with Congressman Ryan. Like John, Jim survived the tragedy There was nothing that Guy could do to stop what was happening in Jonestown, other than to inform the congregation in the Temple about the limited information he had.
As happened so often for those members of Peoples Temple who survived the tragedy, the aftermath of the deaths in Jonestown was compounded for Guy. While he was mourning the loss of his wife, stepchildren and little Mona, Guy still had the responsibility as the pastor to members of Peoples Temple in the United States. In that role, Guy “travelled extensively, all through California and other states, doing my best to console” those who had lost family members, and sometimes their entire family. With most of his own family gone and the large amount of time that he spent listening to the grief of others, Guy became completely frazzled. He says that “neither the FBI or any other government agency ever interviewed me” – a small blessing, as many other survivors and family members were indeed interrogated. Even without being “put under a microscope” by some form of law enforcement, Guy was exhausted, and so worn down by dealing with his emotions and the emotions of others, that he just wanted to escape everything that he had known while living in Peoples Temple.
Although once he had cared for the needs of as many people as he could, Guy moved on from his position of pastor and left Peoples Temple behind. He was “taken in by a couple who were friends of mine, but not members of Peoples Temple.” During this time living in anonymity, Guy began to drink to forget his pain, and he did so quite heavily. He tried reaching out to his father, but found no comfort in doing so, as his own father accused him of having some part – willingly or unwillingly – in the deaths. There had been life insurance policies on some of Guy’s family members in Jonestown, and according to Guy, he “received money for the losses of life, which allowed me to cover my living expenses and drink as I wanted to do.”
That is, until one day, while in the lowest moment of his despair, Guy decided to go for a run in the area full of cliffs that he and his friends lived in. Most people see running as a form of exercise, a way to keep fit and add to the years of life that they will have on earth. Guy’s purpose, on that day, was the exact opposite. He was “hoping that I’d accidentally fall off of the edge and die.” Guy was at his wits’ end, feeling completely broken, and yet, despite the fall that he hoped he would suffer, he made it safely back. In the days that followed, Guy continued to run, and he found that his attitude had changed. Instead of hoping to fall, the running was helping him to deal with his deep sadness. As time went on, he began to run longer distances, and for longer periods of time. He drank less and less, until he had completely overcome his need for alcohol to dull his emotional pain. He threw himself into running with all the passion that he had once spent in his duties as pastor of the San Francisco church. With running as his new way to cope with what he had experienced, Guy began to enter races, and not only did he compete in and finish them, but he won quite a few as well. Running was more than a hobby or pastime for him, running saved Guy’s life.
It wasn’t long after Guy had recentered himself through running that he spoke with some survivors of Peoples Temple, including Stephan Jones, to catch up with them and their lives. They told him that they were doing as well as possible, as they made their way through their own grief, and that they had found good paying jobs installing furniture into homes and apartments. They asked Guy to join them in their work, and he agreed. Guy found that he enjoyed the labor that they were engaged in as well, and after a while, according to Guy, he and Stephan “decided to start our own furniture installation business.” It felt good for them to be working together again, while making the best out of a difficult time. Years later, Guy decided it was time to move on from delivering furniture, and he chose to move on to another type of work, one in which he felt he could truly be of help to others in a tangible way.
Today, Guy Young works for a church that is focused on Spiritual Living. This practice focuses on living one’s life in alignment with the deepest values and aspirations that one possesses. It also views all the different versions of God, amongst the many cultures and religions, as tying back to one God that has dominion over all. Along with his new line of work, Guy still speaks with John Cobb when he can, maintaining their connection; he also interacts with Stephan Jones, who has become a close and valued friend to him.
When asked about the lessons of Jonestown, Guy replied that he found it “difficult to really define something that was so complicated into a sentence or two.” Guy did say, however, that he’s “not surprised that many of the survivors have found work in professions that allow them to make a difference” in this world. After all, those who joined Peoples Temple did so because they hoped to be a part of creating a new and better way of living that focused on loving one another and seeing all of humanity as a very large extended family. Guy’s own work guiding others through Spiritual Living has brought him peace in his life. He finds the work “very comforting and reassuring” in a time where there’s so much emotional and social upheaval in the world.
Guy Young may not realize it, but he is a testament to the human spirit and the adaptability that we are all capable of, if we could only focus on those things that are truly important. He truly is “young,” in the same manner as the mythical phoenix resurrecting from the ashes of his old life. Guy keeps with him the wisdom of his past, and he uses it to teach others how to live in a better present for all.
(Bonnie Yates is a regular contributor to the jonestown report. Her previous articles may be found here. She may be reached here.)