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place to stay and a free meal,” he said. Ken Smith said he noticed it at his ministry in Hawaii, too. Kids were becoming less transparent, less innocent. “They’re more sophisticated now,” he said. “They’re harder to figure out.” After Jim Durkin Sr. died, the ranch fell into disuse. In 2005, Gospel Outreach sold the 5.9 acres it still owned to the state for $1.5 million and used the money to build a new church off of Harris Street in Eureka. The state donated the land to the federal Bureau of Land Management to preserve as public open space. In 2010, the BLM purchased a remaining 2.6 acres on the site owned by Fortuna businessman Patrick
O’Dell for a while. The lighthouse ranch land is surrounded by public preserves — an ecological preserve across the road where a rare lily grows, the South Spit, the Humboldt Bay National Wildlife Refuge. The lighthouse property completes the picture, says Lynda Roush, manager of the BLM’s Arcata field office. The BLM initially intended to preserve all the old structures and create a visitor center there. But Roush said the buildings were too abused by neglect and vandalism — and riddled with asbestos — and in the end the agency decided to raze everything after
consulting with the state historic preservation office. Most of the oldest structures already were gone. The lighthouse tower, which ceased operating in 1975 after new lights were put in at the harbor entrance, had been hauled away in 1987 to Woodley Island. The state dismantled the 57-foot redwood water tower and sent it to the Piedras Blancas Lighthouse museum in San Simeon, where it will be rebuilt. Eventually, the light poles that cross the property — the original road went through there — will be moved back to the edge of the current road, Roush said. And if there’s ever money, maybe a visitor center will go in. ❖
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Todoroff — who is our young man standing on the bluff in June of 1972 — told a story recently while wandering on the bluff, reminiscing: A Lighthouse member who’d gone to Los Angeles for the summer faked his death so nobody would try to coerce him to come back. His ruse was discovered when Todoroff and others from the ministry drove to L.A. to try to go to his funeral. There wasn’t one. They called around to morgues, called the guy’s friends — and one had just seen him, alive and well. “There was tremendous pressure to stay with the program,” Todoroff admitted. What kept it from becoming a cult, he said, was that Jim Durkin “always pointed to Jesus Christ.” But the Lighthouse Ranch began to change, as the Jesus People moved on, some slipping into conventional church-going society. In the 1980s, Todoroff said, the ranch became more of a formal training center, a reform school, he said, where parents were known to drop off troubled kids to get straightened out. Durkin said the county court system even sentenced some troublemakers to rehab at the ranch. Durkin said young people who came to the ranch on their own no longer seemed to be seeking a truth. “They were seeking a
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