Religion: Pentecostal Hike (Cont’d)

Two years ago in Menard, Tex., a six-foot bricklayer named Ernest Elmer Baker got the notion that his religion, Pentecostalism, would cure Russian Godlessness. He would, he told his father, who gave him $1.40 to start on the trip, “preach the Gospel to the Bolshevik! under the Kremlin wall.” After tramping without visas over Germany and Poland into Russia, Ernest Elmer Baker ended up in a detention camp at Minsk, where he was identified last summer by the second secretary of the U. S. Embassy at Moscow (TIME, July 1). Last week, with $100 raised by his family to repatriate him, the Embassy had Pentecostalist Baker brought to Moscow, thence to be shipped to the U. S. Wearing fur cap, fur-lined jacket and high boots, he joyously scrutinized the Kremlin, bemoaned the loss of his Bible. Said he: “I wasn’t much more than a skeleton when the Russians picked me up. … I couldn’t make them understand what I was after, but they treated me all right. I didn’t have to do a lick of work [Accepting a cigaret] I must have even backslid a little. . . . I’m so happy about going home that I feel like a coon in a watermelon patch.”