Jynona Norwood...place 27 flowers on the grave of their relatives at Evergreen Cemetery in Oakland on Friday. Twenty-seven members of the Norwood family were among the nearly 1,000 who died in 1978 in the Jonestown, Guyana, Peoples Temple massacre orchestrated by its leader, the Rev. Jim Jones...

FOSTER CITY - From two new bocce ball courts to a refurbished boardwalk, Leo J. Ryan Memorial Park, named for the U.S. Representative who helped create Foster City and was killed in the Jonestown massacre in 1978 in Guyana, will celebrate its re-opening Sunday...

... The $7.2 million spent came from the city's general fund, community development capital improvement funds and $800,000 in state grants...

...Namesake history

Nov. 18 marks the 27th anniversary of Ryan's death, who was 53.

The making of this year's world premiere "The People's Temple" at Berkeley Rep is the subject of a documentary to be broadcast at 6 p.m. Sunday on KQED. The play itself was created in the style of "The Laramie Project," using documentary materials for dialogue. David Dower, artistic director of Z Space Studio, commissioned Leigh Fondakowksi, head writer of "The Laramie Project" and a member of Moises Kaufman's Tectonic Theater Project, to write "The People's Temple" to tell the stories of the members of the Rev. Jim Jones' congregation, 900 of whom died at Jonestown, Guyana, in 1978.

The film does a solid job of depicting the creative process behind the play...

...Jim Jones was not your average college student...

...Jones later went on to lead a religious sect called The Peoples Temple...

...In November 1978, Jones became infamous when he led 914 people -- 638 adults and 276 children -- to commit mass suicide in Jonestown, Guyana...

...Those who resisted the mass suicide were shot or injected with cyanide...

Using audiotapes, this documentary reveals that most of the 900 victims of the Jonestown mass "suicide" of 1978 were actually murdered--injected with cyanide against their will...

Play examines the Jonestown Massacre

The play explores the social, cultural and racially inclusive dynamics of The Peoples Temple (the cult name carries no apostrophe)�

...On Nov. 18, 1978, 913 died in a mass suicide after drinking Kool-Aid spiked with cyanide...

...Fondakowski and her co-writers in the Tectonic Theatre Project have spent four years researching and writing the play. They drew from the California Historical Society's Peoples Temple Collection archive and interviewed dozens of survivors. Convincing former members of the congregation to talk to them was a gradual process...

...Congress voted to give California Rep. Leo Ryan, a Democrat, a Congressional Gold Medal after he was killed near the Jonestown commune in Guyana in 1978. Ryan had gone to Guyana to investigate whether cult leader Jones was holding people against their will.

Some cult members chose to leave with Ryan but the party was ambushed; Ryan and four others were killed.

Jones ordered a mass suicide, and more than 900 members of the People's Temple cult committed mass suicide by drinking cyanide-laced punch while others were shot by guards loyal to Jones...

...Congress voted to give California Rep. Leo Ryan, a Democrat, a Congressional Gold Medal after he was killed near the Jonestown commune in Guyana in 1978. Ryan had gone down to Guyana to investigate whether cult leader Jones was holding people against their will.

Some cult members chose to leave with Ryan but the party was ambushed; Ryan and four others were killed.

Jones ordered a mass suicide, and more than 900 members of the People's Temple cult committed mass suicide by drinking cyanide-laced punch while others were shot by guards loyal to Jones...

"The People's Temple," a new play based on the Jonestown massacre, reconsiders the group's origins in the social justice and civil rights movements.

On November 18, 1978, over 900 members of the Peoples Temple religious movement, together with their leader Reverend Jim Jones, died in Jonestown, Guyana, South America. That same day, Bay Area Congressman Leo J. Ryan and three journalists were also killed as they were leaving Jonestown. Leigh Fondakowski's "The People's Temple" at the Berkeley Repertory Theatre is a production about this tragedy. Spark follows the project from its original conception to the opening night of the play....

The real faces of Jonestown

...as I came to know the survivors, none of these assembly-line notions worked. In the play, and in real life, the story is more intriguing.

It's filled with faces and stories. People joined the temple for lots of reasons. Some bought into the church for its lefty politics. Others craved its mix of black and white members. Still more liked the comfort and security of an enclosed world. One woman even said she never believed any of it and only joined to be with her husband and small child...

The People's Temple: Docudrama...

...The words are based on documents and interviews with survivors and relatives of those who died in the mass suicide-massacre at Jonestown in 1978. The voices fill the theater with hope, regret, faith, skepticism, joy, anger, suspicion, panic and immeasurable sorrow. As created by director Leigh Fondakowski and her remarkable crew, "Temple" is gripping drama and a forcefully honest re-examination of our own history that turns the theater into a temple of community healing...

Although grateful that his father, Les, received what Tom Kinsolving says is a long overdue apology from Tim Stoen, he said he still questions Stoen's motive for the apology...

...In mid-February, Humboldt County Assistant District Attorney Stoen sent a letter to former San Francisco Examiner Religion Editor Les Kinsolving, apologizing for events that happened more than 30 years ago...

...Les, along with Carolyn Pickering of the Indianapolis Star, are credited with breaking the first stories about Jim Jones and the Peoples Temple in the early 1970s, Tom said.

• March 23, 2005 Thank you for article on Tim Stoen, Letter to the Editor, Kathleen Kinsolving, The Eureka Reporter, California

  ...Being a graduate of NYU film school, I found the � story of People�s Temple compelling enough to make it into a feature screenplay. Let's hope the film gets made some day, so that people will know...

The Bancroft Library Pictorial Collection is fortunate to hold the visual archive of two of the foremost practitioners of the art of the courtroom, Rosalie Ritz and Walt Stewart, whose work covers over 30 years of many of the most famous and historically significant trials held in California and elsewhere from the latter half of the 20th century.

This exhibition of 50 drawings and related memorabilia represents just a small fraction of the more than 4000 drawings by Ritz and Stewart in Bancroft's collections. The seven trials featured in Two Artists of the Courtroom, Charles Manson [Tate-LaBianca murders] (1970), Soledad Brothers (1971-1972), Angela Davis (1971-1972), Ruchell Magee (1971-1973), Patricia Hearst [Symbionese Liberation Army] (1975-1976), Eldridge Cleaver (1976), Larry Layton [People's Temple] (1981), had significant legal, cultural, social, and political impact on California

...Tim Stoen, Jones' former chief legal adviser and now a Humboldt County deputy district attorney, sought redemption in the form of a handwritten apology to the first reporter who publicly exposed bizarre behavior at the Peoples Temple's Mendocino County headquarters in the early 1970s...

...Stoen concluded his Feb. 11 letter by asking former San Francisco Examiner religion reporter Les Kinsolving to "forgive me."...

...Kinsolving faults the national media for ignoring his early reports about the Peoples Temple and failing to scrutinize the cult before the 1978 mass suicide. Kinsolving said before Jonestown was even settled, he personally contacted "40 of the leading dailies in the U.S., through my fellow religion editors, begging them to send a report to Ukiah."...

"None of them would," he recalled...

February 11, 2005

...About three dozen sketches and related items belonging to Stewart and Ritz are on display through March 31 at the Bernice Layne Brown Gallery in the Doe Library at the University of California, Berkeley...

Dear Editor: Quickly, anyone: What date--before Sept. 11th--marked the greatest single loss of American civilian life in a non-natural disaster?...

...If the answer takes some digging, don't worry about it. After all, when last November 18th came and went, the local and national media apparently suffered a great collective amnesia about that day's historic significance. The massive news blackout on any mention of the 26th anniversary of the Jonestown Massacre was simply mind-boggling...

...Our journalistic community's neglect of even the slightest remembrance of Jim Jones's slaughter of 912 Americans (276 of them children, including 40 babies who had cyanide squirted into their mouths)...

...Jones could have been obliterated as the fraud he was years before that, because he was exposed by the Indianapolis Star's Carolyn Pickering and the San Francisco Examiner's Les Kinsolving (my father) in 1972. In one of the exposes, current Humboldt County Asst. D.A. Tim Stoen, then one of the most formidable Temple enforcers, is on record making claims about "Father" Jones bringing 40 people back from the dead. (Ref: http://www.cultsoncampus.com/jimjones8.html)

Tom