Pentecostal Hike

A bad heart and a twisted foot kept husky Ernest Elmer Baker out of the War, but he got to Germany after it was over. There, according to his mother, "he fell from grace." Back in Menard, Tex., where he worked occasionally at bricklaying, Ernest Elmer Baker made up for his lapse by the zeal with which he took up Pentecostalism in 1933. Pentecostalists roll on the floor and believe that prayer will cure anything, even a sliced artery (TIME, July 23) or a rattlesnake bite (TIME, Aug. 20). Last year Ernest Elmer Baker, 38, got the idea that it would cure Russian Godlessness. The Pentecostal saints, he told his friends, had called him to carry the gospel. In February 1934, Ernest Elmer Baker's father gave him $1.40 and he set out for Russia. His wife and 14-year-old son went to live with a son of hers by a previous marriage.

Last week puzzled Russian authorities called the second secretary of the U. S. Embassy at Moscow down to Minsk, few miles from the Polish border. Since September 1934 they had been holding a strange man there. He could speak no Russian but they had finally decided that he must be an American. Sure enough, it was Ernest Elmer Baker, dressed up in an old Red Army uniform. He had worked his way to Rotterdam, jumped ship with $10 in his pocket, started to walk to Russia. He had no passport because to get one he would have had to swear an oath, which his religion forbade. Time & again German and Polish authorities had clapped him into jail, but Ernest Elmer Baker always got out and kept on walking. Soviet frontier guards had finally picked him up ragged and penniless near Minsk.

Before setting out to raise $100 to ship him home, the second secretary asked him if there was anything he would like to know about the outside world.

"Why, yes," drawled Ernest Elmer Baker. "What's happened to John Dillinger?"

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