ROBERT PRICE: Who was the Christlike figure in that 1952 earthquake photo? A fraud, it turns out | Robert Price

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The photographic chronicle of the Bakersfield earthquake of 70 years ago still inspires shock. The crumpled storefronts, the collapsed roofs, the fractured decades-old ornamentation continue to inspire wonder and dismay.

The pictures of that 97-degree afternoon — and there are many, in both public and private hands — capture how police, fire, ambulance, Red Cross and literally hundreds of civilian volunteers converged to help when the earthquake of Aug. 22, 1952, look at the city to its foundation. Men of all ages, some in uniform, most in street clothes, willingly waded into the chaos.

But one photo — and there seems to be only one like it — gives pause in a different, head-scratching way: It shows a group of bearded, robed volunteers chatting casually with Red Cross workers in the middle of the city’s main commercial boulevard, in front of a department store. The robed visitors appear to have stepped through a time warp, transported from biblical days into midcentury Bakersfield.

Who are they, and what are they doing there?

The central character in the photo, and in the story behind it, is a self-anointed holy man named Krishna Venta. He is looking away from the others, as if lost in thought.

For a decade, from the late ’40s until the late ’50s, Venta sent his followers wherever disaster struck in Southern California — occasionally, some in law enforcement came to notice, before the disaster had even taken place.

They were part of an organization called the WKFL Fountain of the World, a harbinger of the postwar cult movement that would grow and mutate into darker incarnations over the next three decades.

But on Aug. 24, 1952, the 11 members of WKFL (Wisdom, Knowledge, Faith, Love) who visited quake-rattled Bakersfield were regarded as benign and helpful — if a bit odd — visitors from the Santa Susana Pass of Ventura County.

The Bakersfield Californian described them as “long-robed brethren who seem to spring up from the earth wherever disaster strikes.”

The 11 of them came packed in two cars, led, the newspaper reported, “by a very tall barefooted gentleman in a yellow robe. They called him Master.”

The Master and his party went immediately to the police station and called Tom Wingate, chairman of the Bakersfield Red Cross Chapter, to offer their services.

“When it was suggested that the situation appeared to be under control,” The Californian reported, “the Master said quietly, ‘There is always work to be done.””

The Master was 41-year-old Francis Herman Pencovic, a 6-foot-2, narcissistic con man, child-support dodger and bad-check-passer who, since creating the WKFL Fountain of the World in 1949, had started calling himself Krishna Venta. He was 240,000 years old, he said.

The fact that he purportedly lacked a visible navel was noteworthy supporting evidence for some that he was, as he also claimed, the second coming of Jesus Christ.

And now he and 10 of his 60 followers were in Bakersfield, offering aid to the injured and homeless, just as they had done the previous month in Tehachapi and Arvin, following the devastating earthquake there of July 21, 1952.

They came with Red Cross field equipment, ready to do Venta’s bidding. The men were trained in “every conceivable type of field service and rescue work,” The Californian reported, and the women were trained as nurses and could do “kitchen work” and “take care of children.”

“We will go anywhere — anywhere that disaster strikes, whether it is a great fire, an earthquake, a flood or a plane crash,” Venta told The Californian.

And indeed, when a plane crashed not far from their monastery in Santa Susana’s Box Canyon some months prior, Venta’s people helped carry out the dead. A Los Angeles Times article dated March 28, 1953, called the group “a disaster aid order” whose “gowns have been flecked by burning cinders of many fires.”

But the Ventura County Fire Department regards them in a less glowing light. In 1956, a fire captain refused to let members of Venta’s group help fight fires farther than 200 yards from their compound — even though other volunteers were still routinely summoned — and not just because their long robes were fire hazards. Firefighters wondered why Venta himself would sometimes be at the scene of the brush fire, fighting it, before fire trucks could get to the scene.

By the time, not quite three years later, Krishna Venta was reenacting the crucifixion of Jesus Christ in Box Canyon — dangling from a cross atop a 150-foot rock formation for 23 minutes — his cult had 140 members.

But by 1956, his star had started to fall. He was convicted in Oakland of contempt of court for failure to turn himself in following a conviction for failure to pay child support. (He noted in court he had stopped in Tulare, en route from LA to the Bay Area, to help firefighters battle a hay blaze. The judge, aware of Venta’s several previous convictions for petty theft and check forgery, was not impressed.)

It all ended for the Master in a blaze of infamy. Venta was killed in a suicide bombing in Box Canyon just before 2 am on Dec. 10, 1958, carried out by two aggrieved former followers. They accused the leader of being a fraud who had mishandled cult funds. There was also the not-insignificant matter, they said, of Venta having slept with their wives. “You think I’m a hypocrite?” Venta was said to have shouted, or words to that effect, seconds before the explosion. He had his answer.

But did he really die? Ten people, including two children, were supposed to have perished when the killers brought 20 sticks of dynamite, hidden in a duffel bag, into the rock and concrete building where Venta slept. Pieces of charred flesh were everywhere afterward but only nine torsos were found. Ventura County Coroner Virgil Payton initially refused to close the case.

Venta, some speculated, had had ample time to escape in the 12 minutes between the explosions and the arrival of volunteer firefighters, who had been delayed by the very blast they were attempting to investigate: The explosion had blown the door of their engine room off its hinges.

Bishop Asiaiah, who took over as the cult’s leader in Venta’s absence, was convinced the Master had escaped. “He never was killed,” Asiaiah said.

Eventually, however, the FBI identified Venta’s dental plate and a piece of his jawbone, and rumors of the escape of a cult leader with a heart for earthquake victims were put to rest along with his few physical remains.

Some members of Venta’s cult remained in Box Canyon but others scattered. One of his acolytes, Dorothy Martin, moved to Chicago and became guru of the Seekers, a UFO-doomsday cult. Three others — David and Gladys Smith, a married couple, and Erma Winfrey — joined the Peoples Temple and died in the jungles of Guyana alongside 900 fellow members of Jim Jones’ suicidal cult.

Those who stayed in Box Canyon one day encountered a homeless man whom they fed and gave shelter. It was a 30-something Charles Manson, who had stopped in for spiritual sustenance and ended up staying three days. Two years later, headquartered just over a hill at the nearby Spahn Ranch, Manson would lead his own cult, the Manson Family, on a murderous rampage across Los Angeles that killed nine people in four locations, including actress Sharon Tate. Like Venta, Manson also believed he was a Christlike being and that an imminent apocalyptic race war would somehow elevate him.

Had Venta’s teachings influenced Manson? There is no way to know, but parallels between Venta’s apocalypse and Manson’s Helter Skelter are undeniable.

Their fates diverged in at least one significant way. Venta died a violent, fiery death at age 47 in the Santa Susana Pass. Manson died a quiet, unremarkable death at age 83 at Bakersfield’s Mercy Hospital.

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