The Journal News from Hamilton, Ohio • Page 25

Sunday, Julys, Journal-Xews. Hamilton. Ohio PagtD-l 'Just because we're a bunch a kids traveling together, we're not what a bunch of become We ve been together for four years-- it was a work of God that brough us togethi By DIANE RUDER Writer FAIRFIELD "You.don't have to buy any," she said tentatively, "but would you just look at the rocks?" She stood in the door of the Fair-field Journal-News Office an outsized frayed-sleeved jacket, wearing a black fell hat encircled with a silver head band a for orn-looking young woman pulling a rock-filled little red wagon behind her. This was our introduction to Pepe a member of Rick Downing Family. Pepe is just one of hundreds of young adults who have left their homes in the past few years in search of something to follow or someone who seems to give them a sense of purpose.

We interviewed Pepe and Jo (who turned up in the office a few minutes later looking much the same as Pepe minus the hat) in the hopes of trying to understand, if only a little, their reasons for abandoning traditional middle-class values for a vagabond lifestyle that seems to be leading nowhere. The Downing family was formed about four years ago when Rick and Kathy'Downing, Bob Johnson from the Cuyahoga Falls-Akron area in Lee Ann Babson (christened "Jo" by the group), left The Way, The Truth and The Life, in Miami, "to according to Jo. The four met and became friends as members of the commune where they were involved in "intensive Bible study," according to Jo, Rick and Kathy, who were to become surrogate parents to the other members of what they would later Rick Downing at the time head of 'one of the seven houses run by the communal-type fundamentalist sect located near Miami, ac- to Jo. Bob Johnson had.goined th? group and, while (here, the use'of drugs and had become converted to Christ; according'to Pepe. While it is saiifby some that leaders of the sect use a lorm of mind-manipulation or control in order to influence disciples of the sect to stay with the group 'o said only that members spent "hours and houri, intensive'Bible study." The four got together and decided "to set out on our own," said Jo.

"They allowed us to leave." The four joined a carnival group and began traveling all over the United States and Canada. Later they left the carnival and, arriving in Bob's of Akron this past winter, contacted Pepe's brother, Tony Abrusci. Bob and Tony had been friends "really messed up at die time with drugs and stuff," said Pepe. Bob, according to Pepe, had "been restless. We followed him around through letters." "That very night (that he was contacted by Rick Downing Family) my brother (Tony) was saved.

That was thelast night he ever took drugs at all," said Pepe. His conversion so impressed Pepe (or Mary Ann Abrusci as her family knows her) that she went with Tony to visit Rick and family. She came away from that meeting totally changed, she said. About a week later they both moved into a house furnished them by "a wonderful man" with Rick, Kathy, and their two-year-old son, Joshua, and the other two adult members of the Bob and Jo. Pepe and Tony were raised in a middle-class Roman Catholic family.

Mr. and Mrs. Abrusci are upset about their children's "switching religions," said Pepe. "They're very devout Catholics. They think they've failed.

"It hit Mom when we moved out the same day. Dad to let on (that it bothers him)." While living in northern Ohio, the family began selling candy apples to support themselves. They added items to their merchandise until their spiel, as they approached a potential customer; was: "Would you like to buy candy apples, candy apples with nuts, caramel apples or caramel apples with nuts, caramel corn or painted rocks?" They now sell only painted rocks. They got into the painted rock business when the girls in the family spent an afternoon gathering rocks just for the fun of it. They began decorating.the rocks with felt-tipped markers.

Their first efforts were, they say, ratne'r crude, but they have since.become proficient and their artistic talents have developed. Their rocks sell from $1 to $15 "it all said Pepe with special orders costing more. It is a cooperative venture. Jo and Pepe sell the rocks from their little red a "what could be more innocent?" asks Jo. Rick, the family's leader, is in charge of the business end handling the money paying taxes-keeping books, and is also, according to Jo and Pepe, the most proficient and talented at designing and painting the rocks.

The group has now left the Akron-Cuyahoga Falls area. The family lives together in a 1959 Chartreuse school bus, "heading West," selling their rocks "making about 50 cents an hour. trying to prove anything to anybody." Their lifestyle, while admittedly unique, is, Jo and Pepe say, a result of following Christ. Rick, as head of the family, makes the decisions for the group. His wife Kathy is responsible for taking care of their son Joshua and for cooking, cleaning the bus and the other duties involved in taking care of the family, according to Jo.

Pepe and Jo do all the selling of the rocks because" people were often leery of the men when they attempted to do so, said Jo. Tony and Bob are responsible for taking care of the family's two Irish setters and their pet "deskunked" skunk, Samantha. The men recently remodeled the bus while they were camped at Big Bone Lick State Park, Kentucky. The family uses an International Travel-all borrowed from Rick's brother-in-law, "a sort-of minister" who is presently in Germany! They also rented a car for use while they were in the Greater Cincinnati area, Jo said. The family is not made up of "Jesus freaks" said Pepe and Jo.

"Just because we're a bunch of kids traveling together, we're not what a bunch of kids traveling together can became. We've been together for four years it was a work of God that brought us together," said 22-year-old Jo. ier. "Our motives when we (originally) set out were to travel," she the lives we've touched when we've traveled (have made) people realize what we have, People never forget us when they meet us, because we are different." "We just take our lives strictly one day at a lime as Christ said We're not trying to prove anything. We're jusl Irying to live our life (he way we choose to do," said Pepe.

Before she was associated with The Way, The Truth, and The Life, she attended the University of South Florida, Tampa, for "about a year." She began smoking pot as a young teenager "everyone was doing it" but, she said, even though she occasionally experiemented with stronger drugs, she did not become addicted. She gave up drugs completely when she became associated with The Way, The Truth and The Life, she said. Although The Way, The Truth and The Life, is, according to some reports, "nothing more than an elaborate and lucrative con game pursued at the expense of young people who are easy prey to a high- pressure religious sales pitch," it is there, according to Jo, that she learned the real meaning of a Christian Even though she had accepted Christ as her Savior age 13 while attending a Baptist camp, "I didn't understand," Jo said. John Ripa, sheriff of Opa Locka, who conducted an investigation of the sect and its leaders when The Way, The Truth and The Life was located there (it has since moved to North Carolina), said in a newspaper interview: "They taught those young people to fear and hate their parents. They were told that their parents were devils or agents of the devil, and so they never went anywhere alone.

They always went in groups of two or three." Rick Downing Family were taught (heir fundamentalist Bible-based beliefs by the leaders of The Way, The Truth and The Life and although they have left the commune, they still believe in a literal interpretation of the Bible, said Jo. Their way of life is "only a rebellion if you look at it as a rebellion. God didn't come down out of the sky and say go buy a chartreuse school bus: We're doing what we really want to do. That ties in very much with being a Christian. If you walk as He wants you to walk, you are happy," said Jo.

"Children rebel because they're not satisfied. Their life isn't complete. They want something more than Me or their parents have to offer." Rick Downing Family does not attend church, "because many church members are hypocrites," said Jo. They do not study the Bible together or worship together on a formal basis. They do, however, pray and read the Bible Around Jo's neck hangs one of their painted rocks on a chain.

On it is painted the word meaning, according to Jo, "Our Lord Comes" Because they believe.that "all prophecy (Biblical) up to this (the end of the world, the second coming of. Christ, the Rapture--orliftingup of the "elect" to 'be with God') has been members of the family' "take our lives strictly one day at a time as Christ" said," Pepe said. Rick Downing Family are heading to Lexington or: LouisviHe wherever Rick decides, said Jo. Doors have been frequently slammed in their faces. They have been chased out of many towns by police or" other authorities but "it doesn't bother said Pepe.

"After a year or so, it becomes water over our backs." "The thing we're trying to do is to live by the Bible word by word. It would be difficult at home we'd be pulled back to the old ways," Pepe said with a glance at Jo as though seeking approval. "Thereare certain things I've had to deny myself -one of these is my parents I kinda miss them. "But I can't think about these things. I have to think about what I'm doing, what the real meaning of it is (that is) trying to lead a life as close to Christ as I can get.

I know I can't be perfect there isn't anyway that I can be, but He's the center point," said Pepe. "The only thing you can do for God is to allow him to: work through you the way He chooses," said Jo emphatically. "The way He chooses is not always what you would expect." "YOU ARE MY SUNSHINE an i loves the rock held by Jo, right, says. Before Pepe, left, became a member with Jo of Rick Downing Family, she said she would never have had enough nerve to wear her black felt hat. It has become, for her, a symbol "that I don't have to be afraid of what I want to be." Journal- News photo by Dick Burns.

Feature Section Are young people hypnotized or converted? By DIANE RUDER Journal-News Writer "We've given hundreds of interviews. They want us on TV and all over the country," said Ben Sebastian Sapio, founder of the fundamentalist religious sect, The Way, The Truth, and The Life, Inc. "You come down here and spend a weekend or a week as our guests and then do a story," Sapio told this reporter in an attempted telephone interview. Sapio, from all accounts, was born in New York City, Aug. 10,1929, son of Roman Catholic parents and spent several of his childhood years '-'living in a convent in New Jersey." As a youth, he hated the New York area and "left about 25 years ago when my folks moved down to in the Greensboro Daily News.

Sapio spent the next 15 years traveling around the country "trying to find out what I wanted to do." He said he "got into show business for awhile, singing in clubs, recording. "1 was on the Arthur Godfrey radio show 10 or II years ago," the story by Stan Swofford, a Greensboro, N. C. Daily News staff writer, quoted Sapio. Because Sapio was still unsatisfied, he became a hairdresser and opened a salon in Miami Beach, Swofford reports.

'I wasn't happy, really happy, until one day a friend taught me about God," Swofford reports Sapio as saying. That, Sapio told Swofford, was when The Way, The Truth and The Life, Inc. began. The sect was less than a year old when Sapio established his headquarters in Opa Locka, a small town outside Miami, in the spring of 1971, Swofford said. The group had grown steadily from a half-dozen or so young people who met nightly in the Miami apartment of Sapio and his wife Mimi "until Sapio could claim a ISO-member congregation for bis new church," one of Swofford's articles says.

The congregation, according to Swofford's story, was composed of many different types "rich, poor, middle class, dropouts, drifters, lifelong residents of the Miami area. But they all had one thing in common. They were young most of them between 17 and 22 years old. And they were alike in one other way. All of them revered Ben Sapio." During 1973, the group left Miami after selling their holdings there and moved into a mountain valley in Ashford, N.C.

Swofford reports that Sapio and his group were, at that time, anzious to leave Miami due to investigations instigated by parents who were worried about their children who had joined the fundamentalist religious sect. A local police chief "did some routine checking and discovered Sapio's arrest record. (and) a psychiatric report read at one of Sapio's trials which advised against Sapio's plans for working with young people," Swofford said. His records, according to Swofford's article, indicated that Sapio had twice been arrested on crime against nature while he was a house parent at the Kemball Children's Home in Miami." "One of those charges was dismissed," Swofford reports. "The other was reversed by an appeals court on a technicality after Sapio had been convicted by a lower court and sentenced to five years in prison.

"Dade County (Fla.) records also show Sapio was arrested twice for possession of narcotics (marijuana). The charges were dismissed," according to Swofford. While still located in Opa Locka, The Way, The Truth and The Life, Inc. jumped into national prominence when Margo Lunken, a 21-year-old University of Cincinnati student and daughter of Mrs. William luman, national president of the Girl Scouts of America at the time, attempted to turn over her $180,000 trust fund to the religious sect.

Her mother contacted the Opa Locka police chief and together, according to a newspaper story, the two were "able to break through the defenses of The Way, The Truth and The Life and reach Margo through the attraction of money." Mrs. It (man and a police-woman posing as a bank official, took Margo away from the sect's headquarters after convincing Sapio and others of the group's leaders that Margo would DC gone only a short time just long enough (o sign over her inheritance. Mrs. Ittman and the policewoman took Margo to police headquarters where she met police chief John Ripa; the Rev. Joseph Nielsen, a young Lutheran minister; Dr.

Edward Georgia, a psychiatrist; and "hypno-tberapist" named Richard Martino. Under influence of her mother and the others, the power of attorney Margo had authorized to the treasurer of The Way, The Truth and The Life was revoked and the bulk of her trust fund was kept intact, although she already had given Sapio and his group about $16,000 in securities, according to newspaper accounts. Margo moved in with the Mr. Nielson and his wife where she was "de-programmed" along with several other young people who, late in 1972 and early 1973, were, as one newspaper story says, "tricked by their parents, aided by Chief Ripa, Nielson and Martino, into leaving The Way, The Truth and The Life." In August, 1973, Sapio reportedly sent about 25 members of the sect to lake possession of the land near Ashford, N.C., that had been reportedly purchased for almost $200,000. "Convinced that 'Satan's legions' and 'devil media' in Miami were intent on destroying his congregation," Swofford reports, Sapio led the remainder of his group to the 12 acres of land that contained the old Ashford general store and post office, the Alpiner Restaurant and the 20-unit Alpiner Motel that he ultimately used as a church, a sanctuary, offices, and for dormitories and housing for members of his congregation.

The mountain valley where the group is now situated is about seven miles long and one-to-two miles wide, located between the Linville Mountain Range and wilderness area to the east, the Humpback Mountains to the north and the Honeycutt range shielding the valley on the west. "The Way, The Truth and The Life members were convinced that this was the place where God wanted them to be. This was where they would wait anxiously for and greet that Day of Judgment according to Sapio, it could come any day now, maybe tomorrow -when they, 'the climb on up to the Heavenly City," wrote Swofford. The Rev. Joseph Nielson, who had joined in the "deprogramming" of young people who had formerly been associated with The Way, The Truth, and The' Life, told Swofford in a newspaper story, he "had tried very hard" to be objective in evaluating the sect.

"And I believe I was." One of those who had joined in the "deprogramming" of young people who had formerly been associated with The Way, The Truth, and The Life in Miami, told Swofford, he reports, that the "youngpeople believed they were acting on their own, of their own free will. But they were not. They were doing exactly as Ben Sapio willed and they didn't realize it." Dr. Georgia the Florida psychiatrist who worked with Miss Lunken others lold Swofford he believes young people are attracted to The Way, The Truth and The Life because they are looking for an "authoritarian figure like Sapio. 'But once they are drawn to this group they become mesmerized," the newspaper account said.

Sapio has reportedly scoffed at Ihe suggestion that he and his assistants are making money at the expense of the young members of The Way, The Truth and the Life. He told Swofford in. an interview "that's the devil talking. This is a cooperative situation. Everything here, the building, the homes, everything, belongs to the congregation.

"And it's ridiculous to think we could be making money. Our monthly bills total between $6,700 and $7,500. The charges against Sapio in Florida, Swofford reports Sapio as saying, "were lies and perdition." Stories written about The Way, The Truth, and The Life "never does us right," Sapio told the Journal- News. "We get a bad reputation for things that ain't so. "We have a 12-foot sign (in front of the entrance) that says 'Come and Stay People driving down the highway see it and can't believe it.

They double back to visit. "You come on down here and then do a story," said Sapio..