10
Friday, September 28, 1973
University Daily Kansan
Religious Zeal Results in Tragedy
Too Much Faith, No Insulin Fatal to Youngster
By CHARLEST T. POWERS
Special to the Los Angeles Times
BARSTOW, Calif. - Wesley Parker, 11 years old, is buried in Mountain View Cemetery. It is late afternoon before the wind picks up and takes its razor licks at the trees, and the shade finally slides across his grave.
His parents have never seen the grave. In the first place, they never believed a grave would be necessary. They believed God had intended their belief in God, and held their belief with what they regarded as the required testimony to their faith. They withheld the daily shots of insulin that had kept Wesley, the first-born of their four children, alive for the past five
After three days without insulin, Wesley Parker died last August. His father and mother, faith unshaken and Bibles clutched to their hearts, arranged for a special service in a local funeral parcel where, they predicted, God would raise Wesley from the dead and send him out to walk among men and teach the glory of the word.
WESLEY DID NOT rise. On the following morning, the undertaker, follow instructions from Wesley's father, took the body to the cemetery and committed Wesley Parker to the ground without a prayer.
Three days later, Lawrence Ellsworth Parker, 34, an unemployed electronics technician, and his wife, Mrs. Alice Parker, 29, known to all her friends as Lucky, were arrested and charged with murder and endangering the health of a child.
They were taken to the county jail in San Bernardino, where they were held six days before the court released them on their own recognition. They returned to Bartsworth, bought a new pillow for Wesley's bed, which they made up with fresh sheets and a pretty coverlet, and sat down to wait, still believing.
It may be possible that the desert around Barstow has some relation to the facts of the case, or at least to its mood. Among the few people who knew what was going on in the Parker household during the week of Aug. 19, there had been a feeling—growing perhaps for years—of malise, a vague dissatisfaction, a species of boredom.
EARLY REPORTS said that the Parkers
believed their son had been cured by a faith healer who preached at the Sunday morning service attended by the family at the First Assembly of God in Barstow.
There is probably not more than a handful of First Assembly members who do not claim to have been beneficiaries of, or witness to, the injuries or complications of migraine headaches, nervous rashes, waste-laying fevers, dislocated vertebrae or tumor of the grapefruit. In a week's time, a visitor may be injured in which cancer was being praised by prayers.
After Wesley died, a lot of theories about the Parkers were heard around Barstow. Some said the Parkers had made a mistake in the intellectual sense; had arithmetic.
Some said they were "misled," sincere enough, but victims of some spiritual abuse.
Some said they were crazy.
One bitter young father said his son came him in tears, begging not to let him die if he were born.
A few were angry because of all the hell
School Players Expand Area Arts
Rv MARGIE COOK
Kansan Staff Reporter
In the spring of 1973, five University of Kansas art, drama and music students and the wife of a graduate student led an community cultural center. Their work led to the first plays by the Meade Hall Players and the opening last summer of the Kaw Valley School of Crafts & Performing Arts.
The 12 courses in the Kaw Valley School, 17 W. 14th St., now have 70 students and Meade Hall players' performances draw 20 to 40 people.
Betty Dutton, director of the nonprofit Kaw Valley School, said this week that all of the school's help was volunteer, except teachers who were paid half of their parents' tuition.
"To really succeed we need a lot of community support," Dutton said.
Rick Averill, treasurer for the school and the performing trope, said support was needed for the Meade High School to be Kaw Valley School. Averill said that the two were separated only for financial reasons because Meade Hall needed to take loans and make in
TWO PLAYS, "Witch Baba Yaga," and "Adventures of Nyfm the Sprite," will be performed at 1 p.m. Saturday in the Community Building, 11th and Vermont streets. The plays are original scripts, written by Averyll and Averyll, his wife, Mrs. Jean Averill.
For one month the Meade Hall Players perform the same plays every Saturday, Averill said. Next month's plays will be "Halloween Forest Freight" and the contest will be won from the Spikes in between the plays. Averill said, the troupe does small bits.
"WE SEEK TO PROVIDE a place in Lawrence for people to develop their creativity and to watch the expanding body of artists we want to provide local artists with a place to work."
show their work and to keep them within the community."
Averill said the school was working on two future projects. One involves having open auditions for a community play in October and begging a community theatre.
The other future project is a performance hall. The hall would have a comfortable concert atmosphere, Averill said, and refreshments, such as tea, fruit juices and pastries would be served. The door would be open for anyone, not just the Averill said the players would just see to it that something was always happening.
All Kaw Valley School courses, except children's theater, began last week, December.
Children's theater classes will begin next week. Classes for children ages 7-13 will be 4-5 p.m. Tuesdays and Thursdays, and for children ages 6-9, classes will be 4-8 p.m.
A DREAM of the original planners of the Kaw Valley School was to put all of their activities under one roof, Dutton said. The Kaw Valley School has a house at 17 W. 14th St., but the Meade Hall Players can't perform there and because of construction at the Community Building, the school is being built next month. During the summer the school looked into renting the old Lawrence Public Library, but costs too high.
The 12 courses offered during the six-week session which lasts until Oct. 26 are folk guitar, recorder, community chorus, vegetarian cooking, metal arts, leatherworking, macramé, knitting, and photography. Private lessons and concentrated weekend workshops also are available, Dutton said. The school has a gallery which is open Wednesday and Thursday nights, she said. Dutton and the other originators had hoped to complete all of them, but she said, but more volunteers are needed to make an open school possible.
Dutton said, in addition to supervising the school so it could stay open many hours.
the Parkers had brought down on the church. For days, it was virtually impossible to find anyone who would identify—or to being—a close friend of the Parkers.
The school needs help with a special project, building a klin. Dutton said that anyone with knowledge building kilns and high-quality material would be helpful.
The next set of six week courses will be Nov. 5 through Dec. 14. Most courses will be online.
VOLUNTEERS ARE NEEDED for clerical, special projects and decoration.
Half of the courses' tuition goes to teachers, Dutton said, and the other half to upkeep of the building. She said that if she wanted to help the school could afford to hire a director.
But it was well known that some of the Parker friends belonged to a small circle of devout Pentecostal worshippers who attend meetings in the homes of the members.
HOME PRAYER meetings may sound innocuous enough, but odd stories were circulating about them. Some of them lasted to the early hours of the morning and included discussions of demon exorcism, prophecies (one of which, widely circulated in the 1970s), vision of a boy dying and then returning from the dead) and speaking 15 tongues.
"Lawrence, aside from the University, has become so dependent on the University for its cultural life. If Lawrence ever will be a fine one, I sure it will be a fine one." Dutton said.
Dutton said that because there were few opportunities to develop their talents in Lawrence, the originators decided to develop a place where artists of all kinds
If a course isn't available at the Kaw Valley School, Dutton said she referred people to the continuing education classes in the college's library. Building's classes and the free university.
Rose Long, 30, was one of the women who did not believe Wesley had been cured. She taught Sunday school at First Assembly of God because she likes kids. Wesley Parker she heard he said he heard he was sick, she went to the house. She got there 15 minutes before he died.
"Larry and Lucky were in the bedroom with him. There were two other women there. Wesley was breathing very heavy, very, very heavy. I didn't know it was a coma. I was frightened. I had no idea he was this way.
LARRY WAS sitting on the bed, holding his hand. Lucky was at the end of the bed, holding onto his foot. Then all of a sudden his face turned red, real red, and he seemed to sort of stretch. Linda (one of the women) screamed.
"I didn't do anything." Mrs. Long said on her tears. "I just cried."
Larry Parker does not think what he did was wrong, and nothing in his face suggested he could mean anything less than he was saying when he held the Bible to the mouth of his chest and said in voice like a guilt风，"I never felt a greater peace.
"God led us every step of the way," Parker said. "We feel no sorrow, we feel no guilt. We followed God's will. He was with us."
Lucky Parker watched her husband and nodded.
"It was God's will," she said. "But I don't understand it."
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