Photo by the Virginian-Pilo
Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker
Portrait of two notorious televangelists as a sweet young couple: Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker were on air five days a week in 1967 at the start of their TV careers.
These days, the sidewalks of North Central University reverberate with the sounds of construction workers ripping up a road, shouts from a nearby skate park, and cars fighting rush hour traffic. This campus, which is in Elliot Park on the southeastern end of downtown Minneapolis, likely had a much softer buzz when Tammy Faye LaValley first stepped onto it in the fall of 1960.
Tammy Faye left a tiny, tumultuous home and seven younger siblings in International Falls to study at what was then North Central Bible College. The millions who would watch Tammy Faye on television decades later—dolled up in bold lipstick and multilayered eye makeup, which would often streak down her cheeks—probably wouldn’t recognize the barefaced 18-year-old who hopped off that Greyhound bus.
In fact, in his book PTL: The Rise and Fall of Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker’s Evangelical Empire, historian John Wigger points out that, after being raised to believe that it was a one-way ticket to hell, Tammy Faye didn’t even wear lipstick yet. But she didn’t need bright lips to catch the eye of her future ex-husband Jim Bakker at school.
Like Tammy Faye, Jim was raised in a fundamentalist Assemblies of God church, the largest denomination of Pentecostal Christianity today. And he also wasted no time leaving home (the small paper-mill town of Muskegon, Michigan) for Minneapolis fresh out of high school in 1959.
Jim grew smitten with Tammy Faye during long shifts as the night monitor at her dorm. The red-bricked Miller Hall still stands five stories tall, dominating the city block on Elliot Avenue, shaded by mature maples and elms. It was the first building purchased by North Central in 1937 and must have felt palatial compared to Tammy Faye’s humble childhood home and its outhouse. In her eyes, Miller Hall, and North Central more broadly, was a stately ivy-draped heaven, and she adored the view of Elliot Park from her dorm window.
In her autobiography, Tammy Faye recounts returning to the dorm late after an evening out bowling with some Bible school boys and receiving a lecture from Jim out of left field.
“A girl’s reputation is her most valuable asset,” he allegedly told her.
Soon after, Jim fessed up to his feelings for her and asked Tammy Faye out. On a wintry Wednesday evening, they talked and walked down the road to the Minneapolis Evangelistic Auditorium (MEA)—the modern-day Music Box Theatre of Triple Espresso fame—an Assemblies of God ministry on Nicollet Avenue where Jim was a youth leader.
They went on a second date the night after the first, and by the end of their third date the following night, they were engaged.
Along with their shared faith, both had a knack for putting on a show. Tammy Faye starred in her high school production of Oklahoma! and was elected queen of her Bible camp—twice. Meanwhile, Jim sparked a lifelong habit for flashy fundraising with a 15-act vaudeville-style benefit show for his school paper. (Decades later, he would receive backlash for frantic mega-telethons that funded a lavish lifestyle, but he’s still at it these days, selling bulk apocalypse food and asking for donations on The Jim Bakker Show.)
“They were both interested in performing and North Central allowed them to connect that to their religious upbringing, to bring those two things together,” Wigger explained in the book.
The 1960 North Central yearbook shows Tammy Faye standing in the school choir, and on another page, a focused Jim surrounded by his staff as co-editor of Northern Light, North Central’s newspaper. But by the spring of 1961, their academic performance began to flag, and the college didn’t allow students to wed during the school term. So, Tammy Faye and Jim made their exit on March 30th and were married two days later—April Fools’ Day. Neither family could attend the ceremony.
After a brief stint working as youth ministers at Minneapolis Evangelistic Auditorium, the newlyweds left Minneapolis to work as traveling preachers. Jim preached while Tammy Faye sang and played accordion or piano. They struggled in those first few years, making next to no money, even getting paid with a chicken once (which Tammy Faye decided to keep as a pet). But with persistence, puppet shows, and the help of powerful people who saw their potential, the Bakkers went on to make it.
So, while most know Tammy Faye and Jim from their gilded conquests (acquiring the first private satellite network for their televangelist programs; building Heritage USA, the third most popular theme park in the country in the 1980s) and storied scandals (Jim’s federal prison stint on mail and wire fraud chief among them), a very different couple once walked the sidewalks of Elliot Park.
