Passionate Pilgrim A Biography of Bishop James A. Pike

Chapter I The Pious Boy from Hollywood Hollywood High's first celebrity graduate of the new decade was not a movie star, at least not in the conventional sense of the term. James A. Pike, the controversial Episcopal bishop of California who became the first American religious figure to break into national television, received his diploma from Hollywood High with the summer class of 1930. John Blumenthal, Hollywood High: The History of America's Most Famous Public School, 1988 James Albert Pike was born on February 14, 1913, in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, but for much of the twentieth century he considered himself a Californian. As an adult, Pike had slight interest in the Kentucky origins of his parents or their early attempts at homesteading in Oklahoma. A correspondent once wrote him, shortly before he became the Episcopal bishop of California, asking whether he was related to the notable nineteenth-century military adventurer and frontiersman Zebulon Pike; the future bishop wrote back candidly replying that he did not know if he was a descendant of this pioneer, and it had never occurred to him to wonder whether he was related beyond his immediate family to any earlier Pikes. The twentieth-century James Pike understood his history as beginning in Los Angeles, California, a city where he was moved by his widowed mother when he was eight years old. His mother, Pearl Agatha Pike, was a formidable woman. She had made her way across the country from Curdsville, Kentucky, becoming, successively, by age thirty-one, a farmwife, a mother, a widow, and a self-supporting single parent. She and Pike's father, also named James Albert, were third-generation Kentucky descendants of the pioneer families, surprisingly numerous, who in the late eighteenth century had carried their Roman Catholicism with them from the eastern seaboard to the Kentucky frontier. The area southwest of Louisville along the mountainous turnings of the Ohio River became known as the "Pike counties" due to the large numbers with that surname who settled there by the early 1800s. They built frontier churches named for early Roman saints, established academies to teach their children the catechism, and married into other families of the same faith, such as the Goodrums or the Wimsatts. Bishop Pike of California could have counted, had he been interested, at least one Roman Catholic priest and one nun among his ancestors before Pearl Agatha Wimsatt married James Albert Pike at St. Stephen's Church, in the diocese of Owensboro, Kentucky, in 1907. Pearl Pike soon took financial and emotional control of their marriage. The same year as their wedding, they moved to Oklahoma to take advantage of the Homestead Act's offer of title to 160 acres to any settler willing to improve unclaimed western land. James Pike Sr., who had contracted tuberculosis, plainly was not meant to be a farmer. For the first planting season, as her husband struggled to clear their land of mesquite brush, Pearl supplied them with ready cash by teaching part-time and, occasionally, playing piano in theaters as accompaniment to silent films. Her husband's health was somewhat improved by a short recuperative visit to Arizona, and Pearl Pike persuaded the Oklahoma school where she taught to hire her husband as the principalalthough in later years she was quick to add, "I told him what to do, of course." James Pike soon became too consumptive to work the farm, and the couple moved to Oklahoma City, where Pearl obtained a job as a full-time teacher. In 1912, she learned that she was pregnant. Hers was a difficult pregnancy to carry to term, and, with her husband increasingly weakened, she asked heRobertson, David M. is the author of 'Passionate Pilgrim A Biography of Bishop James A. Pike', published 2006 under ISBN 9780375726163 and ISBN 0375726160.