Pasadena: Center of the Universe

The Crown City, Pasadena has a rich history and many sources of local pride.

Like John Muir High School, which has produced esteemed alumni such as Jackie Robinson, John Van de Kamp and a football program that keeps the ranks of the Pasadena Denver Lanes well stocked with fresh initiates. My pops - who would go on to launch and head the low-temperature physics department at JPL - attended the school for some time before being kicked out.

Some might not be aware of other famous Muir graduates.

Like Sirhan Bishara Sirhan, who murdered a second Kennedy's White House aspirations with three bullets at the Ambassador Hotel in 1968. Sirhan squared also attended Eliot in Altadena, according to the 'pedia.

Or, even more relevantly, the Muir campus served as the proving grounds for someone many would agree has earned the sobriquet as the "Most Hated Man in America."

I'm talking about Fred Phelps, head of the Westboro Baptist Church, the brilliant mind behind that whole "God Hates Fags" thing. Phelps inspired an entire nation to hate him when, along with his family and a few like-minded believers, he began protesting funerals for soldiers killed in Iraq with signs like "Thank God for Dead Soldiers" and "Thank God for IEDs"



"They turned this nation over to fags; they're coming home in body bags"

On June 11, 1951, Time Magazine published a short profile about Phelps' early years cutting his teeth on that Old Time Religion and disseminating the finer points of Christianity as a Muir student:

Fred Phelps's talks drew crowds of up to 100. Over & over he denounced the "sins committed on campus by students and teachers . . . promiscuous petting . evil language . . . profanity . . . cheating . . . teachers' filthy jokes in classrooms . . . pandering to the lusts of the flesh." Such strictures sent Dr. Archie Turrell, principal of John Muir, and most of his faculty into a slow burn. Not only was Evangelist Phelps attacking them, they decided, but conceivably he was violating California's state education code, which forbids the teaching of religion on any public school campus.

...

Students were delighted with the story that Phelps had been ordered to consult the school psychologist, a middle-aged lady, and that he had turned the tables on her by "psychoanalyzing" her. Gloated an admiring coed: "I hope he did. They had no right to suggest that he's off his stick. Just because you're religious, it doesn't mean you have to be crazy."

Sure. But the correlation is hard to argue.

As a caveat, I asked PUSD school boarder Scott Phelps - a bundle of human empathy and Bahá'í Faith adherent - if there was any relation. So sad was I to be told there was not. It's terribly annoying when facts get in the way of a good story.