Article: Bakkers in '62: `Simple, friendly, no jewels'

FALLING WATERS, W.Va. Imagine Tammy Faye Bakker with no makeup and no jewelry. She's wearing a conservative churchgoing suit with a white churchgoing hat and white gloves, and she's playing an accordion.

Dora Johnson was there to see it.

It was 25 years ago, in the fall of 1962, that the Bakkers, poor and simple and newly wed, came to Falling Waters in the lush, rolling hills of West Virginia's eastern Panhandle with their "mobile ministry."

They were invited by the Rev. Wilbur Bell, pastor of the Assembly of God Church at Falling Waters, to preach to and entertain local parishioners.

"We were there pretty much every night," recalled Dora Johnson, who lives half a mile from the ...

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