The voice booms out of the telephone, coming from somewhere near Fort Worth, Texas. It is deep, full, round. A radio voice. A podium voice.
“This is Bob Harrington. They used to call me the Chaplain of Bourbon Street.”
Back in the 1960s and 1970s, even before the heyday of the televangelist, that voice was on the airwaves. From a base of operations in the heart of New Orleans’ French Quarter, Harrington launched a flamboyant personal ministry that thrived on confrontation and media savvy — and floated on that sonorous Alabama voice. Harrington debated arch-atheist Madalyn Murray O’Hair on the “Donahue” television show. He appeared in a feature interview in Larry Flynt’s Hustler magazine.
He broadcast on radio stations and played gospel music through loudspeakers on Bourbon Street. He preached outside strip joints.
Harrington cultivated a reputation as an evangelist toiling in the lowest pit of hell and ringing for more heat. In the era just before televangelists made it really big, he was big.
Then his career turned to ashes.
Harrington, he is the first to explain, immolated himself in his own success. Money begat excess. Excess begat foolish ego. Money and ego together drew women. Then came divorce, flight from New Orleans, ruin as a “motivational speaker” in Florida and now, at 76, he says, a measure of personal peace with his third wife in a double modular home on a Texas horse farm.
Except he’s coming back.
Chastened, he says. Broken and healed. In mid-December, Harrington preached at Pastor Greg Pembo’s Vieux Carre Assembly of God Church.
The trip was also a visit to his New Orleans family: Rhonda Kelley, his daughter and a faculty member at New Orleans Baptist Theological Seminary, and her husband, Chuck, the seminary’s president.
“She and Chuck brought me back to the Lord. They are my heroes. My Rhonda never gave up on her daddy. She never dropped me,” booms Harrington, with a slight catch in his voice. Harrington said he is still frequently on the road, that the invitations to preach have begun to pick up again.
“Any little storefront will do. I don’t look for much,” he said. “A lot don’t know I’m available. I’ve tried not to promote myself, but it’s hard for me not to do that.”
In conversation, he has scores of aphorisms and one-liners, little rhetorical devices that are the hand tools of a successful evangelist — or a successful insurance salesman, which he said he was before he was born again in a revival in Sweetwater (Ala.) “at 8:45 p.m. on April 15, 1958.”
Of his in-different religious life before then: “You got to be alive to be lukewarm. I was dead lost. Cold lost.”
On O’Hair: “A woman more dedicated to nothing than most people are to something.”
On his downfall: “Satan threw me a pass, and I ran with it to defeat.”
On his health: “I don’t lose weight because what people lose they generally go looking for. I’ve ‘released’ a few pounds, though.”
Harrington’s New Orleans celebrity began to crack up in the late 1970s as word spread that he left his wife of 30 years for a woman working in his ministry. Speaking engagements dried up. So did his income.
He told a New Orleans divorce court in 1979 that he and his wife were earning $1,000 a month — down from $2 million a year in gross receipts four years before, he claimed.
He also told the court he had $53 in their checking account and could not afford to pay alimony. He begged the judge, however, to let him keep his jewelry because his gold rings and bracelets were crucial to his hoped-for makeover as a motivational speaker. The judge agreed.
In Florida, Harrington hawked a personal enrichment program called Balanced Living that charged executives $1,000 to $3,000 to show them how to find success. Harrington confessed in a 1982 Times-Picayune interview he had not been fulfilled as an evangelist because he was “out of balance physically and mentally.”
“I wanted a more beautiful lifestyle for myself, and now I have it,” he said then.
What he got instead, he says now, was bankruptcy, another broken marriage and a kind of soulless alienation that had him entertaining thoughts of suicide. He said he was never arrested, never did booze or drugs. But he piled up debt and triggered lots of lawsuits.
In 1995, he returned to New Orleans. He said he was broke and alone. The Kelleys took him in for a while. In time he began to preach again, and a few years ago met Becky Birdwell, “15 or 20 years” his junior. They married and live together on the ranch where she raises miniature horses near Mansfield, Texas. Now Harrington has a new story to tell, a second redemption to accompany the first back in 1958.
The Kelleys are convinced Harrington “is on the right path in his walk with the Lord,” Rhonda Kelley said. They are happy for him, and Chuck Kelley has extended a personal endorsement of sorts: an invitation to speak at one of the seminary’s chapel services. (RNS)
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