SNL did a TFB skit once with a doll that when you squeezed it, black sh!t squirted out of it's eyes,,,
Posted on 01/22/2015 6:20:28 PM PST by Gamecock
WALDRON, KS — On the edge of Kansas’ windswept prairie, near a nondescript grave, sits the most recent token of affection.
It’s a tube of lip gloss.
Since her death on July 20, 2007, fans and friends of Tammy Faye Bakker Messner occasionally make pilgrimages to where the ashes of the Christian television celebrity were laid to rest. There, they leave the types of cosmetic items – lipstick, mascara – that helped give Tammy Faye her distinctive look.
In a Harper County cemetery, remote and unmarked, Tammy Faye’s gravestone is far away from the glamour, controversy and cameras that followed the woman who helped build three Christian television networks: the Christian Broadcasting Network with Pat Robertson; the Trinity Broadcasting Network with Paul Crouch; and Praise The Lord ministry – and ultimately the ill-fated Christian theme and water park Heritage USA in Fort Mill, S.C. – with Jim Bakker, her first husband.
“I took her down there and showed her Waldron, she thought it was a quaint little community,” said her husband, Roe Messner, a mega-church builder who for decades was based in the Wichita area and in more recent years moved to a suburb of Kansas City, Mo.
“She was glad to see where I grew up and all. She thought it was kind of neat.”
‘A personal thing’
Waldron the town is a throwback in time. Houses, storefronts and garages are in varying degrees of neglect along the dirt-covered streets that lie quiet until a passing vehicle stirs up rooster tails of dust.
It was once a thriving town with a railroad, two banks and two newspapers. Its population is now 10.
“It is a nice quiet place to live,” said Mayor Shirley Nelson. “Most people here are second and third generation, raised here or very close by.”
It is a tight-knit community where neighbors watch out for one another and are both protective and proud of their town’s most famous celebrity.
Roe Messner grew up in Waldron. He buried Tammy Faye’s ashes next to his mother, Nellie. When it is his time, Messner – who is in his eighth decade – said he will be buried next to Tammy Faye.
“That’s our family plot,” Roe Messner said Tuesday. “I buried her next to my dad and mother. My little brother is buried there.
“The press never did know Tammy. It is a shame what the press had to say. She was not anything at all about what has been written.”
Harold Waldschmidt, the cemetery sexton, said he’s seen the lipstick and mascara when he mows.
“I don’t bother it,” he said. “I feel like that is a personal thing.”
‘She was so sharp’
In the late stages of the failing Heritage USA and PTL empire, Tammy Faye was often portrayed on TV in tears, mascara running down her cheeks. She divorced Jim Bakker in 1992 while he was in prison for defrauding millions of his followers and after his widely publicized infidelity with Jessica Hahn.
In the meantime, Messner – who had been the chief builder of the Heritage USA theme park – was convicted of bankruptcy fraud and spent two years in prison.
Tammy Faye married Messner in 1993. In 2004, she appeared on the reality show “The Surreal Life” and re-emerged as a television and cult personality, this time embracing gay men infected with the AIDS virus and appearing alongside ex-porn-star Ron Jeremy.
Her faith never wavered through controversy or failing health.
“You wouldn’t believe when Tammy passed away, you know those big mail sacks?” Messner asked. “I got 12 mail sacks the week she died. It was literally thousands and thousands of sympathy cards.
“She was the most common, down-to-earth person you ever saw. The press always made her out to be some nitwit type of person. She was totally different. Her IQ was 165. She was so sharp and different than everybody thought she was.”
Even now, he said, people will sometimes write and say they have visited her graveside.
“I was down there this summer, and I could see several people there had left stuff,” he said.
The pilgrimage
Getting to Waldron, which is about 95 miles southwest of Wichita and nearly on top of the Oklahoma state line, requires back-roads determination.
Washboard roads slow SUVs to covered-wagon speeds. There are seldom any road signs, and cellphone coverage is spotty.
“You have to be kind of familiar with the area,” Nelson, the town’s mayor, acknowledged. “Some roads you can’t take all the way.”
She pointed recent visitors down the road and to the right, to the unmarked cemetery.
“I’m tickled to death,” Nelson said of people who come to visit.
“I never did meet Tammy Faye,” Nelson said, “but I always heard stories about her.”
Yeah I immediately thought of Jan Hooks too.
I remember visiting Holiday's grave near Glenwood Springs back in 1973 and he had a fairly new headstone with a pair of Colt .45s and a deck of cards engraved on it as I recall, but no mementos left behind. Then years later, right after the movie "Tombstone" came out, I visited Wyatt Earp's grave site near San Francisco and found that visitors had left shell casings and .45 Colt cartridges on his headstone.
SNL did a TFB skit once with a doll that when you squeezed it, black sh!t squirted out of it's eyes,,,
I know this sounds strange but I had Tammy and Jim Baker pegged as shysters back in the 1970s. How do you convince a mother-in-law of it when she thought they hung the moon.
I will give Jim a nudge of respect as he did not allow Larry Flint of Hustler Magazine a forum on his show after Flint’s socalled conversion to Christianity.
After Flint was shot he became a very vile creature even worse than before.
MERCY! Could you report on Jim Morrison’s grave site?
She is totally healed now. Do I think she is in heaven? Yes, I do. It upsets me that people are so danged judgmental of Christians. Some need to read their Bibles - God doesn’t gloss over all the faults of those we consider patriarchs. I think I’ll leave the judging of Tammy Faye up to Jesus, and not chime in with the crude jokes on here about her. Shame on some of you!
No. Don’t think I’ll ever make to France, but I did visit Buffalo Bill’s grave on lookout mountain in Colorado back in the ‘70s. My grandmother actually met him back around 1905 or so when she was a bank teller in Nebraska (first female bank teller ever in the state) when Bill Cody walked in one day and asked if she could change a $1,000 bill. She told me that she replied “Lordy no Sir, I’ve never even seen a thousand dollar bill in my life!”
You took the words right off my keyboard. Going on eight years ago even. I had no idea.
Goes to show IQ doesn’t always correlate to intelligence.
God bless...
She was interviewed a day or so before she died.
I’ll never forget it-—she looked dreadful but had a great attitude.
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Thank you. God bless you too.
Not good enough. Freepers have sentenced her to hell...
“Not good enough. Freepers have sentenced her to hell... “
Seems people forget—— “Judge not,that ye be not judged”.
I’m not very religious but my mother made sure we knew what that meant.
.
Thanks.
Lordy,she looks awful.
I don’t know how she managed it.
.
It does seem that the mother implants more truth in Gods ways.
I like Tammy Faye. I watched a documentary she did before she died . She seemed to be a caring and Godly women who had been very naive. She was very forgiving of others and not judgmental at all.
Jim Morrison is buried in the famous Pere Lachaise cemetery in Paris and his grave is always covered with flowers and mementos left by fans, acc. to the last account I read online.
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