Teens for Christ Brave Winds to Picket at GW
By James McNabb, Jr., Daily Pilot Staff, The Daily Pilot, California
April 21, 1968, North America
Eighteen picketing Teens for Christ battled blustery winter winds Tuesday as they picketed Golden West College in Huntington Beach and promised to return today.
Led by former professional picketer turned Teen for Christ Daniel Anderson, the band of robed young people marched for about three hours in a large oval on the heavily trafficked Edinger side of the junior college campus.
The self-styled “Christian revolutionaries” said they are protesting the Dec., 6 trespassing arrest of six of their brethren found distributing religious tracts on campus.
Spiritual adviser to the band, “Uncle” Dave 49, watched the procession from his car parked on the south side of Edinger.
He accused Miller of circulating a “partisaned bulletin prejudiced against the arrested teens.” added he was “going to pray about pressing charges against the college administrator for his alleged violation of a section of the state education code by passing out the memorandum.”
Miller admitted he refused to allow to circulate a defense of the Dec. 6 arrests. “If there is going to be any dialogue, it’s going to be in court,” he said, referring to the Jan. 9 trial date.
“My communiqué was for the staff. They broke the law. I’ve respect for the courts and plan to wait until Jan. 9,” he said.
No incidents were reported during the picketing.
The Teens for Christ, headquartered in the “Light Club” at 116 Main St. have since November been marching unexpectedly into churches and onto school grounds to spread their brand of Christianity.
They have repeatedly claimed American education has “become the stomping ground of atheism and Communism.”
They believe Americans have turned from Christ to materialism and are doomed to suffer the wrath of God.
Marian Tortorella, 18, of Brooklyn, was among those arrested and was to be arraigned today before Judge Phillip McGraw in West Orange County Municipal Court.
Five others pleaded innocent at their arraignment last Monday.
Full congregations greeted the band at both the Orange and Fountain Valley churches.
Berg in dark glasses and wearing a wooden ox yoke around his neck told wide-eyed Baptists, “We believe in the message of Jeremiah, the prophet of doom, who wore a yoke as a symbol to his own people of their coming bondage.”
The 49-year-old former high school teacher shouted to the 200-strong congregation that America has “forgotten God.”
He stated the public school system had become the sounding board of “atheism, Leninism, Communism and evolution and was anti-God, anti-Christ and anti-Bible.”
Berg’s daughter, Mrs. Faith Dietrich, speaking to a question of the group’s opposition to alleged hypocrisy in organized religion, said the Teens are “tired of seeing people in churches sitting on their haunches doing nothing.”
She added teenagers would be “thrown out of school if they believe in Christ.”