By Mark Ellis –
Joe and Nancy met for the first time at a friend’s house in Southern California, after Nancy
hitchhiked from Santa Barbara to Orange County with her sister.
“We went to visit some old friends, and Joe was living in a separate little studio in the back,” she told God Reports. “We were all in the living room smoking pot, and there were pot plants on the windowsills, and then right when we were all enjoying dinner, the police came in and busted the whole group.”
Joe went to get in the police car, but they had searched through his section of the house and didn’t find drugs.
“So when he went to get in the car, they said, ‘No, you don’t have to go.’”
Police arrested the people that owned the home and told everyone else to leave. “There was just us two left, and we had fallen in love that night, when Joe walked in the kitchen door, and we just locked eyes, and it was one of those ‘wow, aha moments.’”
One thing Joe and Nancy discovered they had in common was a desire to find meaning. They began working at Mystic Arts World in Laguna Beach, a storefront emporium that sold psychedelic art, health food, drug paraphernalia, and other elements of the hippie counterculture.
“Joe was in the book department, and I was in the clothing department. It was a real scene,” Nancy recalled. “We were searching for God. We had been meditating. We went to see the Maharishi that the Beatles were into.”
Maharishi Mahesh Yogi was the creator of Transcendental Meditation (TM) and leader of a worldwide organization that has millions of adherents today, spawning various industries said to be worth billions of dollars. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, the Maharishi achieved fame as the guru to the Beatles, the Beach Boys, and other celebrities.
After a time, they went to live on the Big Island of Hawaii. “We were meditating and praying to Meher Baba, meditating in front of a Meher Baba poster. He was supposed to say the words that were going to unlock the universe. We were just waiting with expectation.”
Meher Baba had not spoken aloud for 44 years, communicating instead with hand gestures and an alphabet board. He repeatedly told his followers that one day he would utter a “Word” or a short message of immense spiritual significance.
He said it would be an utterance that would “shake the world” and bring about a transformation of human consciousness, a catalyst for a new age of truth and love.
But in the late 1960s, his health deteriorated, even as he continued to indicate that the breaking of his silence was near. On January 31, 1969, he died without breaking his silence.
“So, he died and nothing happened,” Nancy recalled. “He didn’t say a word. We went down to a little health food store in Kona, and there were little pamphlets, and we just picked them up, and one was, “Thus saith the Christ,” and we started reading it. We were hungry. We were desperate at that point.”
The unmarried couple was also expecting their second baby. “I was thinking, if something doesn’t solidify us, we’re not going to make it. No one was staying together. It was just all free.”
While they were living on the Big Island, Mystic Arts World in Laguna Beach caught fire and burned down. Faulty wiring was officially cited as the cause, although there was speculation and controversy about the true cause, according to PBS Socal.
The couple returned to Orange County, staying with Nancy’s mother in Newport Beach. “The first night there on the TV was Billy Graham. Looking back, it was a total setup.”
Then friends, Cindy and Leroy, invited the couple to Calvary Chapel in Costa Mesa. Joe didn’t want to go, but Nancy went with them. She remembers worship that night by Love Song, and that Lonnie Frisbee, the hippie evangelist was also there.
“I kept thinking, if they don’t ask me to come up and ask Jesus into my life, I’m going to have to go up there by myself. I’m just going to get up and go up there. I was that desperate. So sure enough, they gave the invitation, and when I stood up, Cindy, sitting next to me, screamed, because I had been fighting her tooth and nail on the whole thing.”
Nancy went home and told Joe, breathlessly: “This is everything we’ve been looking for!”
Joe was unmoved. “He didn’t like me finding it first. I kept on him all the time about it for a couple weeks.”
Put off by her preaching and newfound zeal, he told her he had enough and would go stay with his brother, John Severson, the founder of Surfer Magazine.
During Joe’s absence, Nancy had a change of heart. “The Lord convicted me and said, ‘You gotta call him and tell him you’re sorry and you’re not gonna preach to him anymore.’ So I did. I called him up and I said, ‘If you come back (here I’m huge pregnant), if you come back, I’m not going to say a word.”
Joe returned home and Nancy got baptized at Pirate’s Cove in Corona Del Mar, with about 300 people in attendance. Joe came to watch out of curiosity.
After Nancy went into the water for her baptism, she lost sight of Joe on the beach. “I was standing there looking all over for him, and I look out in the water, and he’s going out in the water. He got saved and baptized!”
“I jumped in there, and I was so happy,” Joe added.
Joe and Nancy found a Baptist church in San Clemente, where they finally got married. “We’ve stayed in fellowship that whole entire time since 1970. There never was a time we didn’t have a church, and that’s what’s helped our marriage and our family,
They have been married 55 years. “It is really wonderful to be married that long. Joe is getting some dementia. I can fill in the blanks a lot of times, whereas if we weren’t as close as we are, it would be harder.”
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