Happy Doomsday
(Page 2 of 4)
Failure and ridicule: that was Hawkins’ winning formula. In seventeen years his church had grown out of a trailer home in Abilene to become an entity whose three annual feasts (Passover, Pentecost, and Tabernacle) were attended by literally thousands, from as far away as Trinidad and Australia. The House of Yahweh published numerous texts and had its own Web site (www.yahweh.com). Millions of dollars in tithes poured in annually to its office on Abilene’s T&P Lane (the T and P standing for Texas and Pacific, but nowadays referred to by the congregation as Truth and Prophecy). Yisrayl Hawkins had reared a giant. The world was cluttered with religions far more illustrious, but his enemies would make his House the chosen one: So said the Scriptures, and where they failed to say so, they would then be “retranslated” until they cooperated.
What could be a more perfect scam than to turn to a man’s advantage the deck stacked against him? On August 28, 1934, a dirt poor sharecropper named Otis Hawkins and his wife, Maggie, gave birth to their sixth of eight children near Purcell, Oklahoma, where they lived in a three-room house without indoor plumbing. Apparently having run out of names, the parents asked one of their children, Vernon, if he had any in mind for his infant brother. “Buffalo Bill,” proclaimed the boy.
A recently published book by Yisrayl Hawkins states that he “is a Jew whose family was severely persecuted and forced to flee from Europe to the United States. He was raised without synagogue, but was strictly taught by his Jewish parents, both of whom trace their lineage to the tribe of Levi.” When this passage was read to one of Hawkins’ brothers, he sighed before saying, “Bill’s my brother, but he ain’t got both oars in the water, if you know what I mean. Our daddy was a Dutchman, our mother was three-quarters Cherokee, and we don’t have a drop of Jewish blood in us.” Maggie Hawkins did, however, read her Bible and pray on her knees three times daily. Otis Hawkins was not religious at all, but one of Bill’s brothers-in-law, Major Followwill, remembered, “Mister Hawkins would give you the shirt off his back. There weren’t finer people in the world than Bill’s parents. And there isn’t a bigger liar in the world than Bill Hawkins.”
While the other children helped their father farm his crops and break horses, Buffalo Bill prowled about Purcell on a pony, a floppy brown hat stuck atop his head and a fat hand-rolled cigarette between his teeth. He regularly played hooky from school until the fifth grade, when he dropped out altogether. No one can recall the boy harboring any ambitions. Early on, though, he displayed a talent for making money, though not necessarily through honorable means. Before his teenage years Bill was skinning cats and taking the meat to the black side of town, where he would sell it off as rabbit.
In 1952 eighteen-year-old Bill Hawkins and a woman named Rosa Bell Boulding married in Muskogee and soon relocated to Enid. A year later Rosa Bell moved out. Hawkins would later say that his wife had cheated on him, but relatives remember that it was he who had gone outside the marriage. The new woman, a Native American named Darlene, moved in and in short order bore him four children. Hawkins introduced Darlene to others as his wife and told his offspring that their parents had eloped. Many years later—after one of his children caught him in bed with another woman and Darlene moved out with the four in tow—the mother confessed to them that she and Hawkins had married in Mexico. Regardless of which account is true, Bill Hawkins had not yet divorced his first wife, Rosa Bell, and would not file against her until 1976, four years after his second wife left him. When I pointed this out to Hawkins, he insisted, “[Rosa Bell] had actually divorced me long before this, in California. That’s what she told my dad in a phone call.” None of Hawkins’ relatives remembered hearing of such a conversation, and in any case, his own attorney could find no record of Rosa Bell’s filing for divorce in any courthouse in either California or Oklahoma. By filing for divorce himself, Hawkins was legally acknowledging that he had been married to Rosa Bell throughout his marriage to Darlene.
Odd that a taste for religion would materialize on such a tongue. But Hawkins’ eldest brother, J.G.—who had long been intrigued by both Judaism and the literalist teachings of Herbert W. Armstrong’s Worldwide Church of God—took Bill under his wing. Bill followed him to Midwestern Bible College in Stanberry, Missouri, but lasted only two semesters. “Oh, he was religious, all right,” scoffed Major Followwill, himself a former Baptist minister. “He was religious about making money.”
Hawkins took to peddling Bibles door-to-door with J.G. after following him to the North Texas town of Graham in the early fifties. While J.G. knew his Scriptures better, Bill was “definitely the better salesman,” remembered a relative, “because he could look you right in the eye and lie through his teeth. He could charm a rattler.” On the side Bill sold icemakers. The machines didn’t work, but the folks he approached wouldn’t have known that, since Bill loaded the contraptions with ice he had previously frozen in his home icemaker. He also sang in his brothers’ rockabilly band, Buffalo Bill and His Whippoorwills. Because he booked the band’s engagements, he collected the gate receipts—and, as one of his band mates noted ruefully, “he always kept the biggest part of the money for himself.”
In the early sixties J. G. Hawkins relocated to Romney, where he founded a church and became its preacher. Bill Hawkins moved nearby, to Cross Plains, but his calling was not yet set in stone. He raised coonhounds and operated a welding shop set behind his house. Then he persuaded Darlene to give him a several thousand dollar tribal land settlement belonging to her and her children, which he then invested in the purchase of two washaterias in the area. He continued to flail about until 1967, when an acquaintance through the hound-breeding business informed him that the Abilene Police Department had an opening. That year Hawkins packed up his family and moved them 43 miles northwest to the town of his destiny.
For the next nine years Buffalo Bill Hawkins led a steady if undistinguished career as an Abilene cop, and spiritually he was at a low ebb. Though he still took his family to church on Saturday mornings, Hawkins worked on religious holidays and spent his off-hours raising coonhounds, operating a mobile home park—which his wife was not even aware that he owned—and making homemade wine. When Darlene was due to have their last daughter, Officer Hawkins simply dropped her off at the hospital on the way to the station and told her to call when the baby was born. Often irritable, he frequently beat Darlene in the presence of his kinfolk. One of his daughters remembered how he reacted when she and her sister burned the potatoes one evening: “He threw them against the wall and made us go to our rooms. Then he came in with a wire hanger and whipped our legs till they bled. And then he pulled off his belt and whipped us some more.”
After Darlene learned in 1972 that Hawkins had slept with another woman, it occurred to her that she had given her life and her money to a remorseless cad, so she and their children moved back to Oklahoma. Less than a year later Hawkins took up with a woman named Kay who lived in his trailer park, and together they had a child out of wedlock. In 1974 he learned that his father was dying. He hastened to Otis Hawkins’ residence in Graham, where he loaded up his father’s pigs into his father’s truck, and proceeded to sell them both. “Well,” sighed the sharecropper, “I guess Bill needs the money.”
IN 1975 J. G. HAWKINS RETURNED TO TEXAS from a seven-year stint in Israel. While there, Buffalo Bill’s eldest brother had begun calling himself Jacob and had learned of an excavation in which a Hebrew inscription had been found that read “House of Yahweh.” “It was like a current of electricity went through my body,” Jacob would later write. He set out to found a church by that name in Texas. Bill showed Jacob a vacant field he owned in Abilene and suggested that they establish the House of Yahweh there. Instead, Jacob moved to Odessa, where he acquired a small church and began to gather worshipers.
Much as his brother would later, Jacob Hawkins exhorted his congregation to use only the holiest of the Creator’s names (Yahweh), to maintain the true Sabbath (Saturday) as a day of pure worship, to wear holy headpieces and for the men to grow beards, to eschew unclean foods like pork and shrimp, to feast together as a congregation three times a year, to in all other ways follow the 613 Rabbinic Laws of Yahweh, and finally, to prepare for the imminent arrival of the Messiah. Buffalo Bill Hawkins watched his brother’s church grow, and his envy grew correspondingly. In 1977 he resigned from the Abilene Police Department. A year later he persuaded Jacob to ordain him as a minister, and about the same time, he resolved to overcome his long-standing insecurities about his humble beginnings and feeble education. He plunked down $500 and enrolled in a Dale Carnegie public-speaking course. All Bill Hawkins lacked was a church.
In 1980 Hawkins opened up his own House of Yahweh in his Abilene mobile home. The first congregation members were Kay, whom he married in 1977, their two children, and a few folks who lived in his trailer park. To Jacob’s annoyance, Hawkins began to lobby some of the Odessa members to join the place of worship in Abilene. Two years later Hawkins built a small sanctuary on the vacant field he had once shown Jacob, abutting T&P Lane. A family friend, Ruby Maynard, began attending services regularly despite knowing Bill primarily as “the kind of guy who would always try to make money if he could.” Her wariness was confirmed when she noticed that some folding chairs and living room furniture Hawkins had loaned the sanctuary turned up missing. Maynard learned that Hawkins had reclaimed and moved them into the trailers he was renting as “furnished.”
One day in 1982 the minister strolled into the Taylor County courthouse in Abilene and petitioned that his first name be changed. He strolled out as Yisrayl Hawkins. Kay Hawkins remembered his breathless excitement a few days later when he approached her with Bible in hand, his finger pointing to Isaiah 43: But now thus saith the Lord that created thee, O Jacob, and he that formed thee, O Israel, Fear not: for I have redeemed thee, I have called thee by thy name; thou art mine . . . Ye are my witnesses. Surely the Hawkins brothers were none other than the prophesied two witnesses, Jacob and Yisrayl, called upon by Yahweh to rebuild His temple in the world’s waning days!
