CHAPTER 4

Disgusted at the falsehood of it all, Wierwille left the meeting determined to go home. He went back to his hotel and called the airport.

"But a funny thing had happened -- there was a blizzard in Tulsa. All the planes were grounded. So I couldn't get a plane. I tried the trains -- they were all snowed in. The buses -- same thing. The city was snowbound. I just couldn't get out!"

A funny thing indeed. According to Climatological Data for Oklahoma, a half-inch of snow had fallen in Tulsa on Dec. 8, three days before the rally. The next snowfall was Dec. 20, six-tenths of an inch.

A 7th Corps grad named Rev. Barrie Hill did some research on Wierwille's famous visit to Tulsa and wrote about it in a series of letters published in The Way's Heart magazine under the title "Great Day in Tulsa." She nailed down the dates, Dec. 11-13, 1951, the name and sponsors of the convention, the building where it was held, the hotel where Wierwille stayed and many other details. But she also discovered that the National Weather Service, the newspapers and the airport had no record of a blizzard at the time of the rally. She wrote in a letter to Wierwille: "There is no blizzard recorded. Does that botch up my sleuthing, or was God trying to top that 1942 sign to you?!"

Or were you lying? She couldn't ask a question like that, of course. But she did discuss the matter with Wierwille, and in a triumphant final dispatch to the editor of Heart, she announced:

Here is my third fact. It concerns the snowstorm. I talked with Dr. Wierwille about the snowstorm not being recorded at all with the weather bureau, newspapers, or the airports. He agreed with me that either the blizzard was a phenomenon, or that when he called the train station, bus station and airport to get out of Tulsa, he spoke with angels. Pretty incredible!

"Incredible" is a good word for it. Either the blizzard was a phenomenon -- an invisible phenomenon -- or he spoke with angels when he called the airport, train and bus station. And the angels told him there was a blizzard when he could look out his window and see nary a snowflake!

Angels indeed.

In the same 25th-anniversary brochure in which Wierwille told the dentist's office story without the blizzard, he also told the Tulsa story without the blizzard. Blizzards seemed to be the perfect cap to a good Wierwille story, though it took years to work them in.