Mesa Nabbed 17 Christ Teens!
By Arthur R. Vinsel, Daily Pilot Staff, The Daily Pilot, California
February 19, 1969, North America
Hymns of courage and faith in adversity rang through the Costa Mesa City Jail Monday night, as police booked the biggest crowd since last summer’s celebrated Hessian motorcycle gang roundup.
Refusal to obey orders after being warned once led to the mass arrest of 17 members of Huntington Beach’s Teens for Christ, loudly evangelizing at two adjacent school campuses.
Crowds of children who had been listening to the self-styled Christian revolutionaries preach jeered a team of police officers commanded by Sgt. Bob Ballinger as the militants were led away.
The five girls and 12 men—four of them actually seniorteens in a sense—were booked on suspicion of all or combination of, two penal code offenses and one education code violation.
“The thing that some people just refuse to understand is that we aren’t arresting those people for preaching or picketing,” Police Chief Roger Neth said today.
Refusal to disperse, willful and malicious obstruction of a thoroughfare and willful and unlawful disturbance of a public school are the specific charges, with a $190 bail set for each person.
Virtually all of the “Teens for Christ members gave their occupations as Minister, but La Brill gave his title as Missionary of the Gospel and Gregg settled for Servant of the Lord.
High school Principal William J. Vaughn and junior high school Principal Werner J. Carlson had warned the gospel-spouting firebrands about 2 p.m. before calling for police assistance.
Warned also by investigating officers, the sign-carrying, Bible-quoting youth continued to preach to their flocks.
Police at that point began making the arrests, saying the Teens for Christ were causing the milling crowds of observers to obstruct Arlington Drive, as well as creating a disturbance.
Police filmed the incident on videotape to use as evidence in court action.
Throngs of school children who gathered to witness the roundup of the professed witnesses for the Master tended in some cases to regard the police as Philistines.