Having moved from Lynn to Richmond, Jim Jones spent days attending his senior year of high school and nights working as an orderly at Reid Memorial Hospital. He quickly distinguished himself as a diligent and conscientious worker, but this may have only been outward show. Later in his life, Jones recalled his time as a teenager working at Reid Memorial and stated he had the presence of mind to apply his socialist ideology even as a sixteen-year-old orderly. On one of the many recordings held in San Diego State University’s, Jonestown and Peoples Temple: A Digital Archive, Jim Jones says:
In that hospital I did more shit than you’ll ever know. I stole rich people’s medicine and gave it to poor people. You had to charge people for the medicine back then. I worried myself to death trying to be an egalitarian in that place. People would go broke, lose their homes, and insurance was very rare. So I’d take the fucking rich people’s stuff…. I’d run three floors to get some kind of heart medicine for somebody on the first floor so I didn’t have to put it on his bill. Then catch hell from the head nurse for giving him his medicine. Because if the chart said I gave him his medicine they’d charge. I took risks. I took risks that were formidable for a kid of sixteen. Must have done enough in diligence and good work, must have done enough to let me get by with some of the shit. Of course, they didn’t have a good record keeping system, that got more intricate as time went on. I was the cause of it! They couldn’t find out what the hell was going on in Ward B. Ward B was the poor people’s ward.
There is no way of telling whether this was an accurate recollection, an exaggeration, or if Jones was simply fabricating in order to embellish his own myth. If Jones was doing these things on the job, then it went completely unnoticed by a young nursing student named Marceline Baldwin.
THE MEETING
In 1948, twenty-one-year-old Marceline Baldwin was navigating her senior year as a nursing student at Reid Memorial Hospital. One night she asked for the assistance of an orderly in preparing a corpse scheduled to be picked up by an undertaker. The orderly on call who helped her wash and dress the corpse of a young pregnant woman who had died of trichinosis was seventeen-year-old Jim Jones. Marceline was impressed by his gravity. Once finished, she found herself affected, and attracted, as she witnessed Jones take time to offer comfort to the dead woman’s family.
Jones was also attracted and began pursuing her. Despite his age, he seemed intelligent and compassionate, and he claimed to be a Christian. The latter particularly appealed to Marceline who was raised in a liberal Methodist household and used her voice to sing at church on Sundays, frequently as a soloist. She also formed a music ministry with her sister Eloise and friend Janice. They sang for patients at Reid Memorial Hospital and at old folks homes.
She was attracted enough to overlook the fact that Jim was still in high school. It helped that he looked and acted mature for his age. But the age difference was shocking to her nursing school roommate Evelyn Eadler. It was also quite concerning to Marceline’s parents.
MARCELINE BALDWIN
Marceline Mae Baldwin was born on January 8, 1927, in Uniondale, Indiana. She was the eldest of three daughters born to Walter and Charlotte Baldwin.
Walter, musically gifted, set out to be a minister but his marriage to Charlotte meant greater financial responsibility. He put away any plans for vocational ministry and took a managerial position at International Harvester. He and Charlotte became active members of Trinity Methodist Church in Richmond, Indiana. They were respected members of the community and eventually had three girls, Marceline, Eloise, and Sharon.
Walter’s good reputation led to the local Republican party seeking him to run for city council. He won election and used his position to help the local citizenry. Charlotte was known to be deeply religious and claimed to receive messages from the Lord in her dreams. They provided a loving home, but Charlotte also maintained high standards of decorum. All three girls loved and respected their parents.
Marceline was a good student and, like her father, was musically gifted. She was also very attractive. But Marceline never let attention from boys distract her from focusing on what she considered to be of greater importance, school, church, and her music outreach. She was determined to serve others.
With that mindset she decided to enter nursing school rather than go to college. She also began planning, with her cousin Avelyn, to move from Indiana to Kentucky. They thought it would be nice to experience a different state as well as a place with milder winters. Avelyn was later caught completely off-guard when Marceline told her that the plans were off. She met a boy. She was in love. It seemed sudden and out of character. When Marceline made plans she had always seen them through, and she never previously mentioned anything whatsoever to Avelyn about meeting a boy.
JIM AND MARCELINE
After their meeting over the funereal task of preparing a corpse, Jim relentlessly pursued Marceline. She was on the receiving end of his constant attention and nonstop speaking. He knew Marceline had made it her ambition to help people in need, so he mesmerized her with stories where he was always the hero standing up for others when no one else did. Of course, most of the stories were exaggerations if not outright lies. Like telling her that he was a star high school basketball player in Lynn but quit the team because the coach was racist. Not only was Jones never a basketball star but he eschewed sports altogether because he lacked athletic ability. Marceline believed his tales and thought she had found a selfless man. A man resolved to make the world a better place. A man she could spend her life with.
Jones used religious language when he felt it suited his goals. He spoke to Marceline about possibly becoming a minister. The idea of becoming a pastor’s wife was very appealing to her. She was captivated, and completely agreeable when Jim started talking about marriage within two or three months of their meeting. She took him home to meet her parents. They had concerns about the age difference but trusted their daughter’s judgment. Her straightlaced Methodist parents welcomed the unrefined teenager. Surely training for vocational ministry would soften his rough manners.
When Jim took Marceline to meet his relatives in Lynn the reaction was slightly different. They had difficulty in understanding the relationship. In his book, The Road to Jonestown, Jeff Guinn quotes the recollection of a cousin who was sixteen when the family met Marceline.
My first thought was that she was angelic, just glowing, shining, a will-of-the-wisp and obviously special … I wondered, ‘Whatever does she see in him?’
As 1949 rolled around, Jim resigned from Reid Memorial and enrolled at the University of Indiana in Bloomington. Marceline continued working at Reid. Jim took a bus back to Richmond to spend weekends with her.
On June 12, 1949, they became a married couple. Trinity Methodist Church in Richmond hosted the wedding of James Warren Jones and Marceline Mae Baldwin. It was a double wedding. Eloise Baldwin, Marceline’s sister, married Dale Klingman.
What had been the routine before the marriage continued after the marriage. Jim went back to Bloomington for his second semester. Marceline continued working at Reid while living with her parents. She was saving money to move and live with Jim in Bloomington. Jim took the bus back to Richmond and stayed with Marceline’s parents on weekends. It wasn’t long before that came to an end.
Shortly after the wedding, on a weekend in the Baldwin home, Charlotte, Marceline’s mother, made some disparaging remarks about blacks and Communists. An argument between Jim and Charlotte followed. Jones later recalled the incident this way:
‘Well, you won’t have to look at me anymore,’ I said. ‘I’ve had enough of your damn religious hypocrisy, and I’m sick of you. You won’t have to have me eat at your table. Don’t worry, I’ll never eat at your table as long as I live, and you’ll never see me again as long as I live.’
And I whipped out of that [***damn] house. Poor old Charlotte, she was so shook up. I told Marcie, ‘You’re gonna choose between me and that bitch, because I’m not gonna be around that bitch.’ We were home from school. Poor dear woman, I’d like to kill that bitch.
The awakening was more brutal than rude. Marceline married a malevolent man. The man she thought would become a pastor, and who still used religious language publicly when it suited him, was privately blaspheming God. They argued about it. I show here one such instance, but I have removed the blasphemous statements made by Jones.
We had some hell of a rows over my ideology. Hellish rows. She believed in God and I started [denouncing God]. I tore [blasphemous statement], and [blasphemous statement]. She just cried, and we’d fight, and she’d cry. We were washing dishes one time and she said ‘I love you, but you don’t say anything about the Lord anymore.’
I said, [blasphemous statement]. I don’t remember, we ended up in some [***damn] scrap and she threw a glass at me. I said, ‘You get awfully worked up over the Lord.’
Marceline sought advice from her female relatives. She was considering divorce. Her mother was strongly against divorce. Charlotte made efforts to repair her strained relationship with Jones hoping it would have a helpful effect on her daughter’s troubled marriage. It succeeded in bringing about an external cordiality.
Marceline would eventually convince Jones to start attending church with her. The Methodist Church sought to put out a formal statement dealing with social issues including racial segregation and the budding civil rights movement. They released their official church document in 1952, three years before Rosa Parks was arrested in Montgomery, Alabama. It laid out the denominational goals to assist in advancing workers’ rights, prison reform, poverty reduction, and several other social reforms, including racial equality. Marceline had to get Jim to see it. Jones recalled the story this way:
She kept ding-donging me, trying to get me religious. So I thought, ‘Oh, [***damn] it I’ll go to church with you, woman.’ She was a Methodist. We clombered into this fucking church. She pointed out this paper on the bulletin board, something about integration. She pointed to it and said, “See, he’s talking about integration, you see there on the bulletin board.” I said, “Okay, okay, we’ll go to church.”
Whether this is a truthful statement on Jones’ part or exaggeration for the sake of his own mythmaking, seeing that Methodist social creed crystallized his decision to become a minister. He set out at once to make it happen and within two months he accepted a student pastor position at Somerset Methodist Church in Indianapolis. The “ministry” aspect of Jim Jones’s story will be covered in future articles.
RONNIE BALDWIN
Two years before taking the position with Somerset Methodist Church, Jones would take responsibility for one of Marceline’s young cousins, ten-year-old Ronnie. Ronnie was without a father, he died when Ronnie was four, and his mother was unfit to care for him and his brothers. He bounced around among family members before ending up in foster care. Jim and Marceline were made aware of Ronnie experiencing severe stomach pain by one of his brothers. The Jones’s rushed to get him from the foster home and brought him to Reid Memorial Hospital. As Marceline had suspected, it was a ruptured appendix. Ronnie went into emergency surgery.
Afterward, Jim and Marceline took Ronnie into their home. He would spend the next fifteen months with them. An odd fifteen months. Remember, this is before Jones made his decision to become a minister. It was a period of time when he didn’t know what to do with his life, or what to make of it. He was floundering.
Like he did as a child, the grown Jim Jones collected animals. So many that they left their rental apartment for a bigger rental home. One of the pets was a chimpanzee that did not make it to the new home. It died of strychnine poisoning. Jones blamed the poisoning on a neighbor but knowing how Jones’s life would end, many wonder whether this was instead his first experiment with poisoning. He downsized and replaced the chimp with a monkey.
Jim and Marceline treated Ronnie as if he were their son. They wanted him to call them “Mom” and “Dad.” Ronnie declined. They disciplined him as if he were their own child as well. He received a harsh spanking from Marceline for failing to feed the animals one day. They had a hamster, a dog, a monkey, and a coatimundi.
Ronnie was never comfortable around Jones. While Jim could be caring one moment, he would be frightening the next. He trained the monkey to attack on command and would sometimes amuse himself by having it chase Ronnie. He incessantly lectured Ronnie about communism and racial equality. Jones routinely talked to Ronnie about sex. Like young Jimmy talked of sex to his peers in Lynn, the now twenty-year-old Jim Jones did the same with young Ronnie.
One thing Jones never taught Ronnie about, prior to the 1952 Methodist social creed incident, was the Bible. There was no instruction regarding Christianity. There were no prayers. There was no saying grace before meals. But after 1952, Jones would take Ronnie church hopping. Much like young Jimmy did as a child and teenager.
Jim and Marceline took steps to adopt Ronnie, a proposition he found dreadful and distressing. Jim pressed Ronnie to agree but Ronnie resisted. He held out long enough to be reunited with his mother and brothers. Jones continued to press Ronnie to become his son even after he returned to his mother, but Ronnie wouldn’t have it. He didn’t trust the Jekyll and Hyde personality of Jim Jones. Eventually Jones abandoned the idea.
In time, Jim and Marceline would go on to adopt several children of various ethnicities. They would become the first white couple to adopt a black baby in the state of Indiana. But I’m getting ahead of myself. They would have one biological child; a son they named Stephan Gahndi Jones. We will get to that part of the Jim Jones story soon enough. I only mention it here to point out the fact that Stephan saw the same thing in his father that Ronnie Baldwin did. A duplicitous or two-faced personality. In a 2018 ABC News interview, Stephan said:
My experience with my father was he was more an actor than genuine, almost always. He was always aware of eyes on him. Because all that mattered to my father was his perception of other people’s perceptions of him.
MARCELINE
After briefly considering divorce early on, Marceline now saw Jim entering vocational ministry and she was going to be a pastor’s wife. She was committed to her marriage. All the bad things she endured up to this point would pale in comparison to what was to come. But she was now certain that divorce was not an option. From now on it was Jim and Marceline. With all of the joys the future would hold, she would also suffer the increasing lies and deceptions of her husband. She would suffer his sexual infidelity with both women and men.
Her story is inseparable from the story of Jim Jones. Her son Stephan described her life with Jim Jones as a penitentiary that she made a livable place by doing as much good as she could for the people around her. It is understandable for a loving son to remember his mother this way. But the fact is she enabled Jim Jones, both passively and actively, to do what he did. At times she turned a blind eye to her husband’s wicked activity. At other times she willingly participated in his deceptions.
There is much more to tell of the Jim Jones story. And much more of Marceline. We’ll continue to see her in future articles.