Get Ready!

Just before dawn one morning in September 1938, an aging Pasadena cultleader named Charles Long woke up with a start and saw a vision. Like most supernatural phenomena manifested in Southern California, it had English subtitles and Disney animation--a luminous hand scrawled "Daniel, Chapter 12" on a spectral blackboard floating near the foot of Long's bed. Before fading away, the hand wrote three dates, the last and most significant, 1945. To a man of Long's perception the meaning' was clear--in seven years the world was going to blow up like a bottle of home brew in a hot room.

Long, a white-haired, bespectacled man, also decided that the Lord had slyly been training him as an oracle. Born in Turkey, he had been a missionary in Syria, Egypt and Palestine, had come to Pasadena in 1932 to found a minuscule cult called Remnant of the Church of God. But despite these qualifications and the vision, sinners paid no particular attention to his prophecy--at least, until last May.

The Word. Then, from a small voice, he got more definite information: the world would end at exactly 5:33 p.m., Sept. 21. Hastily Long wrote a 70,000-word tract giving the details, sent copies to Stalin, the Pope, Churchill, Harry Truman and governors of the 48 states. (None of them passed the word.) Long decided that the end would come about through atomic dissolution, tried to get on the radio. He wanted to let folks know that ten angels had been assigned the gargantuan task of shooting sinners off to Hell right after the explosion. Station managers refused to let him on the air.

Long's son, Richard, quit his job in a grocery to preach: "Repent ye and be baptized for the appointed day is near at hand." This got only 25 converts. Determined to save what fragment he could, Long got the 50 members of his church together for fasting, singing and praying, finally announced, "We are ready!"

In the News. Then Los Angeles newspapers got curious, interviewed the 72-year-old prophet and gleefully printed the news. But when sinners began calling at Long's house he had to tell them they were too late. "I'm afraid I can't help you," he said, "the Day of Atonement has passed." He suggested repentance on a cross, after the fashion of St. Dysmas, the good thief. "It might work," he added doubtfully, "but I can't guarantee it."

At first the prophet was gratified at the stir he was causing. Twice the London Times telephoned him to ask if dissolution was still certain. From New Brunswick, Canada, one Ernest W. Cannon called up to protest over 4,000 miles of wire that his wife had read Long's prophecy and had refused to go on pickling cauliflower. "The Lord," said Long coldly, "cannot wait until worldly tasks like pickling are finished." When Cannon's wife got on the phone, the prophet said: "Pray at noon, 2 and 8 p.m., and ready yourself for the end."

In Manhattan, weeping housewives called the Hayden Planetarium to ask if two planets were about to collide. Flib-bertygibbets in other U.S. cities got ready for the final bang.

Whimper. But the prophecy also stirred jeers from unbelievers. A Los Angeles yogi named Paramhansa Yogananda announced that Long was unscientific, soothingly said that the atomic age was going to last 100 years and would be followed by the "mental age," good for 3,500 more. House hunters kept trying to buy Long's stucco bungalow, since he obviously wouldn't need it.

Reporters asked an embarrassing question: had the small voice meant 5:33 Pacific War Time? Long decided that the Lord would probably go by Jerusalem time, firmly announced that the big blow-off would destroy Pasadena at 7:33 a.m.

Early on the appointed day last week, newsmen gathered outside Long's house, and smelled frying bacon; the prophet's family were using up their red points while they could. But 7:33 came and nothing happened. Long's son opened the door, told grinning newsmen the world was full of lust, filth and hatred and that he hoped it would soon blow up.

But nothing happened at 5:33 p.m., either. Prophet Long, apparently engaged in furious arithmetic, sent out word that he had miscalculated but that dissolution was still imminent. His best bet: Sept. 29 or any day thereafter for a year.

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