Jonestown Survivor Shares Information about Book by Judy Bebelaar and Ron Cabral

Judy Bebelaar and Ron Cabral were teachers at Opportunity High School in San Francisco. They got to know many of our Peoples Temple youth. Now, they've written a book about them — And then, they were gone.

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Teachers recall students they lost in Jonestown in ‘And Then They Were Gone’

Each November the names of the dead come to Judy Bebelaar as if she’s back in class for roll call.

Rory Bargeman, Wesley Breidenbach, Marilee Bogue, Joyce Brown, Dorothy Buckley, Cindy Cordell, Cleveland Garcia, Amondo Griffith, Lisa Lewis, Teddy McMurray, Kimberly Fye, Mark Sly, Ollie Smith, Willie Thomas, Cornelius Truss …

These teenage victims of the Jonestown massacre had all been students at a San Francisco continuation school called Opportunity II High School, where Bebelaar either taught them or counseled them. She considered many of them her friends, before the Rev. Jim Jones transferred them to his own school in the jungle of Guyana, leaving Bebelaar with nothing but a stack of attendance cards signed by her students, held together by a rubber band.

These cards and stapled-together class poetry anthologies later became primary resources for her new book, “And Then They Were Gone: Teenagers of Peoples Temple From High School to Jonestown.” Bebelaar is scheduled to read excerpts from the book Thursday, Nov. 15, at East Bay Booksellers in Oakland, in time to commemorate the tragedy’s 40th anniversary.

“This is the only book about the Peoples Temple teenagers,” says the 78-year-old Bebelaar, a retired English and creative writing teacher, who lives in the Elmwood neighborhood of Berkeley. “The only one that approaches it through their eyes.”

“And Then They Were Gone,” co-written with Ron Cabral, who was Opportunity II’s journalism teacher and baseball coach, re-creates an obscure chapter in the Peoples Temple story.

In the fall of 1976, the renegade preacher Jones, who had brought his flock down from the Redwood Valley, was able to circumvent the school’s protocol and enroll about 80 of his disciples into Opportunity II, increasing the student body by one-third. Jones used Opportunity II as a holding station, pulling children out of class at will to populate rallies and other Peoples Temple events. But he gave his word that when they were at school, his disciples would not cause a problem.

“The Temple kids had this energy, and they wanted to be good students and do interesting things,” recalls Bebelaar, who taught creative writing and ran the school’s literary journal. “They were informed. They were articulate. They had opinions about things.”

Though they stuck together and were sometimes guarded about their Peoples Temple connection, the students participated in the school poetry journal, In Small Dreams, hosted the radio show “Natural High Express” on KALW-FM, and helped form the school’s first sports team, in baseball.

But Opportunity II never put out a yearbook, and the San Francisco Unified School District could not find any record of the institution. Bebelaar, who retired after 37 years with the district, contacted her former employer to get the attendance list for Opportunity II’s classes of 1975 and ’76. She couldn’t obtain it “due to legal reasons,” she was told.

“Even today, Peoples Temple and Jonestown is a sensitive topic,” says Bebelaar. “I think the school district may not want to be associated with it.”

Bebelaar knows that Opportunity II, a branch of another alternative high school, existed, because she helped create it. The concept was to help children struggling with their grades, or who had truancy or pregnancy issues, graduate by giving them more attention and a different curriculum. The teachers would also serve as counselors, and grades would be mixed together with no class exceeding 15 students.

Fundamental to the whole concept was an interview before a panel of teachers and students to make sure each applicant was right for Opportunity II.

Bebelaar was on the faculty when Opportunity II opened at 739 Bryant St. in 1972, and stayed with the school when it moved to a two-story corner building at 160 S. Van Ness Ave., at Plum Street, in the fall of 1975.

It was Opportunity II that Jones selected for the Temple’s high school students, many of whom lived in communal homes in the vicinity of the Peoples Temple on Geary Boulevard. Most of them had attended George Washington High School, the big public campus in the Outer Richmond. None of them was submitted to the personal interviews required of all other candidates for Opportunity II.

“They just came,” says Bebelaar. “The principal told us that Jim Jones was her No. 1 and made arrangements to comply with his request that all the Peoples Temple kids come to Opportunity.”

Bebelaar recalls that the students arrived over several weeks, so as not to swamp the system. In the first batch came Stephan Jones, the only biological child of Jim and Marceline Jones, and his adoptive brothers Jim and Tim Jones.

They were followed soon by their father, who came to the school’s open house and returned to speak to the students. Bebelaar recalls that one child, not a Peoples Temple member, asked Jones why he never took off his sunglasses. That earned the student the ire of the school principal, Yvonne Golden, but Jones ignored the question and kept his shades on.

“He was impressive,” Bebelaar says. “He talked a good line.”

The two-story school had no gym or athletic facilities. But Cabral, who had been a catcher at Poly High School, had been determined to form a baseball team (he even got The Chronicle to write about the team in 1974).