The Los Angeles Times from Los Angeles, California • 73

prominent minister who has known Scott for 20 years but now watches horrified at Scott's constant strident attacks on his enemies, "and if I saw him in a restaurant tomorrow, I'd hug his neck. "I don't believe in what he does; but I believe in Scott. Isn't that strange?" Life and Times of an Electronic Pastor 10 Part Aug. io, 1980 Eos Atijjeles (SftmeB wrtssj- vbf3J 4-, fed YWt Gene Scott was born in Buhl, on Aug. 14, 1929.

His father, W. T. Scott, 23, was a young traveling preacher from Reed Springs, who divided his time between Idaho and Oroville, Calif. Scott's mother, Inez Leona Graves Scott, was just 18 when Gene was born. She had met W.T.

in Oroville, though they both had been born in the same Missouri county and made their separate ways westward. The baby boy traveled the camp-meeting circuit with his parents, but when Gene Scott was 6, W. T. Scott came down with rheumatic fever. "He (W.

got down to 125 pounds and he was dying in a coma," Scott recalled. "I don't know how to explain it, but I can't remove the picture of sitting in a room and suddenly Dad sits up and says, 'Mom, I'll be preaching in six Eventually, W. T. Scott recovered, but there was more to come in 1936. On May 7, Inez Scott gave birth to twins Gerald and Shirley.

Underweight and two months premature, the girl died within three hours. The boy survived until the middle of the next month. One night, with W. T. still sick, young Gene suffering from convulsions and the baby asleep, Inez Scott had a vision.

She recalls: "I saw a stairway begin to roll down from heaven and come right down to the side of my bed. Two angels walked down and they stopped in front of Gene. I said, 'Oh, no, Lord, you can't take and they just went around him and picked the baby up. My mother, she was there, and she looked at the baby and he was dead." Please Turn to Page 11, Col. 1 answer telephones, take pledges and messages during Gene Scott's "Festival of Faith." Times photo by Gry Friedman Do yourself a favor.

Continued from First Page heed Scott's admonition to "jam those phones." Within 20 seconds after Jake Hess starts singing, every telephone is in use. Money is being pledged. Homage is being paid. Prayers are said. The faithful and the curious the sinners, by Scott's and other accounts, outnumbering the Christiansare checking in.

Struggling to be heard over the music, the telephone operators scribble messages on slips of papers. The slips are collected and taken to Scott, relaxed momentarily with the TV lights turned off and the camera focused elsewhere. He sits in a redwood burl chair, voraciously reading every note. Every few moments, Scott looks up, hoping for more messages. The "Festival of Faith" is on the air.

It is, perhaps, Southern California's most unusual religious television show. Its production is not as polished as bigger, more affluent programs. Scott broadcasts from a converted hardware store in Glendale. Compared to the giant Trinity Broadcasting Network California's largest religious television operation Scott's is smalltime. But what Scott lacks in studio facilities, budget support and sophistication he makes up for in spontaneity, suspense and surprise.

No one, sometimes including Scott, is ever certain what his unusual man will do or say next. "I am the commercial for this network," Scott observed once on the air, and the money, somehow, keeps coming in $6,000, $12,000, even $50,000 a day and the Faith Broadcasting Network's three stations stay on air. They are KHOF. Channel 30, and KHOF-FM in Los Angeles; KVOF, Channel 38, in San Francisco, and WHCT, Channel 18, in Hartford, Conn. 'Just Straight Talk' Though reception is spotty in Southern California because the KHOF transmitter is in San Bernardino, cable networks spread Scott and his voice far beyond the range of the three UHF television antennas.

The "Festival of Faith" is introduced as "not a lot of whoopee, just straight talk." There is only one star and, most nights, one person does almost all of the talking: Scott. He is 50, holds a doctorate of philosophy from Stanford and pastors Faith Center Church in Glendale. Born William Eugene Scott, he has been simply Gene Scott for as long as anyone can remember. When his signature block is typed, he prefers the stylized euGene Scott." He is a puzzlingly complex, intelligent man, goal-oriented to the point of obsession, and always has been, say his parents. He demands absolute loyalty from the handful of people close to him.

He will carry a fight to its most distant extremity once he is provoked or, in his perception, betrayed. Scott is a man who simultaneously has mastered the art of ridicule, the doctrines of law, the philosophy of religion and the science of telecommunication. He has hog-tied half a dozen city, county, state and federal agencies in California, Connecticut and Washington, D.C.. when they have tried without success so far to prove their unflinching contention that Scott is possibly a crook, certainly unworthy of the broadcasting licenses his network holds or the tax-exempt status of his church. Proof Never Produced The proof never has been produced partly because Scott has effectively thwarted the investigations, but partly, too, because hard evidence has turned out to be nonexistent.

More than that. Gene Scott in the process has become a fascination in the cities where his programs are heard or seen. He has turned the "Festival of Faith" into a two-way conversation with his viewers, doing something with the medium that might have intrigued Edward R. Murrow. He preaches a mixture of fundamentalist Christianity and strict constitutionalism buttressed by the simple premise that God and Christ can get ticked off just like Gene Scott.

The audience includes thousands of the faithful, the people who tithe to Scott's ministry and respond to his constant broadcast pleas for money, such as "You don't tip God like a bellhop." But the viewership, Scott, his closest associates and his worst enemies agree, clearly includes untold thousands of "closet watchers," as Scott calls them. They are bar patrons, Hollywood celebrities, housewives, lawyers and other, publicly disapproving ministers who istinctive movements VOICES OF FAITH -From left, Lucille Johnston, Mary Smalley and Bernice Kiser wait to tune in Scott for a few moments and find themselves still riveted to the screen hours later. Scott is at once the small-town preacher's kid from Oroville, the young pastor so fascinated by the law and the Constitution that he once locked himself into the Butte County Law Library in Oroville for an entire weekend to research a case, and the unquestioned master of a complex of interlocking corporations that are manipulated before investigating agencies as though they were the pea in a shell game. The investigators never once pick the right shell. Scott has been made and has made himself so controversial that there is scarcely anyone who knows him at all who doesn't either violently oppose or totally support him.

Both enemies and friends laugh heartily when they are told that the motto next to Scott's graduation picture in the 1947 Oroville Union High School yearbook is: "Always a good-natured fellow." Staring Into the Camera He has been known to lose his temper and stomp off the set of his show if donations don't mount up as fast as he'd like. Other times, he has sat and stared into the camera, saying nothing, for as long as 15 minutes. When he's upset, he has a tendency to order the same gospel song played on the air as many as eight times in a row. Scott is deeply religious, haunted by the Resurrection. He is an embarrassment to some of his ministerial colleagues who find his unbridled, screaming attacks on civil authority at odds with the teachings of the Bible.

He can and does respond to these criticisms both with brilliantly conceived scriptural lectures and by ridiculing his detractors. Stealing a turn of phrase from an accountant who works for him, Scott calls his ministerial critics "modern-day Rev. Rufus Glitterteeths." "I alienated the church world," Scott answered in a long, introspective interview with The Times, "simply by telling the truth." "I do not question his integrity," said one nationally in time from the Cartier Santos collection. Brushed steel and 18K gold framing high precision automated movement that's water resistant. Men's square, $1450.

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