30 years ago today ... Jonestown

[Simon_Cowbell]

Always amazed me how, in less than 24 hours, it went from Ryan giving that "you're doing great here" speech in front of that ominous hanging sign to him and 900+ others being dead.

 

[Simon_Cowbell]

A sad postscript: one of Rep. Ryan's daughters later joined a cult in India.

Wow - that's pretty amazing.

I thought the CNN special was very well done. The audio of Jim Jones exhorting people to drink the cyanide and telling parents why their kids are better off dead is just horrifying.

Always wondered how they had audio of that.

He was taping himself?

 

[Flying Headbutt]

There were some recordings, yeah.

I read that AP story on the wire over the weekend. Just mind boggling to me how it all really went down. Can you imagine in today's media...?

I hadn't even been born at the time, and only knew the cliched knowledge of it. After that story though, phew.

 

[Steak Snabler]

Cue slow piano music and Tom Rinaldi talking about USD's Rob Jones in .... 3 .... 2 .... 1

 

[Simon_Cowbell]

There were some recordings, yeah.

As weird as all of it was.... How bizarre is THAT?

 

[Simon_Cowbell]

Introspective recollection of Jonestown by Jackie Speier:

 

[Double J]

There were some recordings, yeah.

As weird as all of it was.... How bizarre is THAT?

About as bizarre as the (apparently unfounded) rumours that suggested Charles Manson went off the deep end after unsuccessfully trying out for "The Monkees."

"I'm a Believer," indeed. :-\

 

[the fop]

I grew up in the San Francisco Bay Area and this was huge when it happened. I was 14 or so when it happened and I remember the phone just ringing off the hook as my folks and others were trying to figure out who they knew that had died. There were so many people from the area down there that many had a connection to someone. It was not a fun time.

I grew up in the Bay Area too and was of similar age (12) when it happened. The thing I remember most vividly was it was only a matter of days before the City Hall killings of mayor George Moscone and supervisor Harvey Milk. And people in SF wondered what the F was happening to their world.

 

[Armchair_QB]

I grew up in the San Francisco Bay Area and this was huge when it happened. I was 14 or so when it happened and I remember the phone just ringing off the hook as my folks and others were trying to figure out who they knew that had died. There were so many people from the area down there that many had a connection to someone. It was not a fun time.

I grew up in the Bay Area too and was of similar age (12) when it happened. The thing I remember most vividly was it was only a matter of days before the City Hall killings of mayor George Moscone and supervisor Harvey Milk. And people in SF wondered what the F was happening to their world.

I was 12 in 1978 and I didn't grow up anywhere near SF but I remember the Moscone-Milk thing. That was a huge national story at the time.

I didn't realize Jonestown occurred at roughly the same time though. For some reason I thought that happened in the spring.

 

[txsportsscribe]

i remember watching the news accounts and have sen countless news and documentary pieces in the years since and to this day don't understand the ultimate mass suicide or some of the very weird crap that came before it. i just don't understand how people can act so "normal" while believing in people like jones and ultimately falling victim to what appears to an outsider as so off the deep end.

 

[JackReacher]

Where the phrase "drinking the Kool-Aid" unfortunately originated.

I only remember it because I was staying at my grandparents for the Thanksgiving weekend that year and it was all over TV.

Here's a timeline of events leading up to the mass suicide:

http://cbs5.com/local/jonestown.tragedy.timeline.2.867258.html

Sadly, I'm a Jonestown junkie.

It was actually Flav-r-aid.

Congressman Leo Ryan's assistant on the trip, who was shot five times and lay motionless on the Port Kaituma airstrip for 19 hours, is Jackie Speier.

This year, she joined the U.S. House of Representatives.

One other interesting note/story: http://www.thedailybeast.com/blogs-and-stories/2008-11-17/they-murdered-my-friend/

Finally, it always bugged me that with all these images of bloated corpses, there has never been a released pic of Jones post-mortem.

I watched the CNN special on youtube the other night (all nine parts took about 90 minutes or so) and I'm pretty sure they showed a picture of Jones after he was shot in the head.

Phenominal job by CNN. Riveting, and sad, stuff.

 

[Double J]

It's interesting to speculate what Moscone and Milk might have thought of Jones after November 18, considering the mayor had played an important role in Jones' rise to prominence and Milk was one of Jones' staunchest defenders.