Don’t ever tell me that a woman cannot be called to preach the Gospel,” she once wrote. “If any man ever went through one hundredth the part of k hell on earth that I Iived in, they would never say that again.” If hell was the hopelessness of poverty, Aimee Semple McPherson had been there. But she preached her way out of those depths, and by the time of her death had ascended into a heaven of wealth and power.

She was born Aimee Elizabeth Kennedy in 1890 on a little farm near the town of Ingersoll, Ontario, Canada. Her mother, a tambourine-thumping Salvation Army veteran, dedicated Aimee, then six weeks old, to the work of God. She remained true to that dedication until adolescence, when the doctrines of Darwin and the temptations of the secular world temporarily mired her in the quicksand of unbelief. But under the weighty ministrations of a Pentacostal preacher, Robert Semple, Aimee found herself born again. She burned her ragtime sheet music, her novels, and dancing pumps, and married Semple. A few months later, the newly weds were off to China as missionaries.

Within a year, Robert Semple was dead of dysentery, and eighteen-year-old Aimee found herself back in New York, penniless and with a baby. In desperation she married Harold McPherson, and by him she had another child. But her intractable will, buttressed by a commanding religious experience, could not long stand marital bliss, and she took to the road as a traveling evangelist.

Aimee ran her own show. She drove her own tent pegs, played her own piano, and developed her own evangelistic techniques as she traveled up and down the Atlantic coast with her children and her mother. Several years on this glory road persuaded Aimee it was time for a change, and in 1918, with $100 and a broken-down car, her little band rolled into Los Angeles.

Except for a few local revivals in upstairs mission rooms, Los Angeles was, at first, just a base from which Aimee toured the area with limited success. But her luck changed when she went to San Diego, then home of the ill and incurable, city of suicides. Thirty thousand people attended an open-air meeting sponsored by local churches. While Aimee held forth, a paralytic woman rose from her wheelchair and stumbled toward the platform. Near hysteria followed as scores of sick and crippled San Diegans surged forward. Aimee had never claimed she could heal the sick, but her fame as a healer quickly spread up and down the Pacific Coast, and riding this crest, she returned to Los Angeles determined to build a church.

Los Angeles in the 1920’s was, according to many contemporary observers, a cuckoo land with more sanctified cranks to the acre than any other town in America. It was also a city of strangers; more than a million and a quarter newcomers entered the county