Heart in Mouth

Fifty years ago, a gypsy boy of 17, with honeyed voice and horny hands, found God in the boom-diddy-boom of Salvation Army drums in the East London slums. General William Booth asked him to rejoice with a solo. "Keep your heart up, my boy," snickered a street lout who had not seen the light.

"It's in my mouth already. Where do you want it?" said the gypsy lad.

And, from that day, Rodney ("Gypsy") Smith has traveled the globe with his heart in his mouth, preaching salvation, singing "Where He leads me I will follow," converting thousands. In South Africa after the Boer War, Negroes and white men quivered and rose in common prayer before Gypsy Smith. In Chicago in 1889 he sought to oust the devil from the red-light district with a blaring-singing-praying midnight parade. Next day, a hundred tramps and a few daughters of joy came to his co-workers to be cleansed, Gypsy Smith having gone on to the next town. During the World War, he worked with the Y. M. C. A. at the front, went through four gas attacks, was decorated by King George V.

Gypsy Smith's evangelistic method is simple. He gets the cockles of the audiences' hearts working emotionally with a few hymns and one of his famed talks ("From Gypsy Tent to-Pulpit" or "Three Years with the Boys in France"); then he asks all who "intelligently feel the need of Jesus, and mean to give themselves to Him, body, soul and spirit," to rise in prayer. He does not make them trample moldy sawdust before the public gaze. His converts are led into the "inquiry room" where pastors and personal workers act as nurses after a surgical operation, where they are told to rejoice and to go to work winning new souls. For 50 years Gypsy Smith has opposed the snow-white pulpits and the gaudy theatrical devices of such sensationalists as Rev. William A. Sunday and Rev. Aimee Semple McPherson. "I am alone," he once said. "It is just Jesus and I. I have no singer, no press agent, no personal worker and no chorus leader. . . . Jesus Christ was the greatest gentleman the world ever knew, and He was an evangelist." Nevertheless, the press last week did not neglect to report that Gypsy Smith, "the father of all evangel ists," was on the way from Co lumbia, Ga., to Chicago, "on the last legs of a globe-girdling tour during which he has converted more than 100,000 men and wo men." He will open the three-day golden jubilee of his conversion with a mass meeting at the staid First Congregational Church in Oak Park, Ill., where the Rev. William E. Barton, father of advertising man Bruce Barton, had long been pastor. Gypsy Smith has a son, Gypsy Jr., who is also saving souls in the U.S.*

*Long ago, before Gypsy Sr. was converted, before Gypsy Jr. was born, the father of Gypsy Sr. attended an evangelistic meeting, fell to the floor unconscious, leaped to his feet a few minutes later with a shout: "I am converted."