Guyana Massacre<\/i><\/a>, by Washington Post<\/i> reporter Charles Krause, was the date of publication. It was December 3, 1978, about two weeks after the incident. Incredible. I picked it up more for what I thought would be the novelty factor of owning a long out-of-print, exploitative \u201cquickie.\u201d I had no idea that this book would, over the next few months, kick off an obsession.<\/p>\nYou could make an argument that publishing the book so quickly was an opportunistic money-grab, but the content itself is anything but exploitative. It rekindled my interest in Jonestown, and when I looked for what else I could find online, I of course found the Jonestown Institute website. From that point on, I was a goner.<\/p>\n
A few months earlier, a colleague had briefly mentioned Larry Schacht, a native Houstonian, in a story about some of the darker days of the city’s past. And when I checked out Julia Scheeres’ A Thousand Lives<\/i>, I saw that she devoted a few pages to the \u201cJonestown doctor.\u201d But I thought there had to be more. I caught my editor on a good day, and she agreed to let me write a story about Schacht.<\/p>\n
Ultimately, I don’t know how successful I was. After all, I think I was on a fool’s errand of trying to explain the unexplainable. Moreover, Schacht’s brother and two of his old Houston buddies \u2013 three people who would be able to shine a light on his pre-Peoples Temple life \u2013 didn’t want to talk. As a reporter, I found this frustrating; as a human being, I found it selfish. I can understand the desire to not want to talk to an absolute stranger about your friend or sibling who conspired in mass murder, but as far as I could gather, these people hadn’t shared anything with anyone. <\/i>Yet, incredibly, people who had survived Jonestown \u2013 people who were there <\/i>\u2013 were opening up to me about the most tragic events of their life, trusting me (as they had trusted other reporters) with unbelievably sensitive material. If these people could talk, why couldn’t these three, so far removed from the events of November 1978, share what they knew about Schacht, in the event that it might be of import to survivors? I believed then, as I do now, that they owe that much to history.<\/p>\n
Ultimately, I don’t think my story uncovered anything that former Peoples Temple members didn’t already know about Schacht. But I hope that, on some level, it connected with readers who were either too young to have even heard of Jonestown, or with those who could only equate the tragedy with a punchline.<\/p>\n
I’m fairly certain that, even if I hadn’t found Krause’s book in an airport bookstore, something else would have reawakened my interest in Jonestown \u2013 but probably not with the same immediacy, and not to the same degree. That little book \u2013 published when there was still so much to learn \u2013 was the right thing at the right time for me to begin a quest to truly educate myself on a singular event in American history that has largely, and curiously, faded from our collective memory. It gives me the hope that my little story can be the right thing at the right time for someone else<\/i> to wade into these waters and find something new and profound, something that serves to honor the memory of all those who were taken away.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
(Craig Malisow’s story, \u201cJonestown’s Medicine Man\u201d, is reprinted with permission of The Houston Press.) My story begins \u2013 as many do \u2013 in a used bookstore in the Milwaukee airport. I was heading back to Houston after visiting family, in November 2012, and had time to kill before my flight. As is my M.O., I […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":6,"featured_media":0,"parent":40185,"menu_order":20,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"class_list":["post-40207","page","type-page","status-publish","hentry"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/jonestown.sdsu.edu\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages\/40207","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/jonestown.sdsu.edu\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/jonestown.sdsu.edu\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jonestown.sdsu.edu\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/6"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jonestown.sdsu.edu\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=40207"}],"version-history":[{"count":14,"href":"https:\/\/jonestown.sdsu.edu\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages\/40207\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":112966,"href":"https:\/\/jonestown.sdsu.edu\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages\/40207\/revisions\/112966"}],"up":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jonestown.sdsu.edu\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages\/40185"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/jonestown.sdsu.edu\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=40207"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
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