The Faithful, Skeptics Flock to PTL Auction

Jerry Crawford, a building contractor from Salinas, Calif., had not planned to bid at all, but when the auctioneer put up Tammy Faye Bakker’s air-conditioned doghouse, inspiration struck.

“PTL saved my marriage” through one of its counseling seminars, he said later, explaining why, when the bidding hit $300, he jumped in with bids of $1,000, then $1,500, then $3,000. And, after his winning bid of $4,500 bought the doghouse, he announced to the cheers of 2,000 people in the PTL auditorium that the money was a donation “so you can auction it again.”

George T. Brown, a businessman from nearby Charlotte, N.C., had a different motive. He bid $2,900 to win a six-foot brass and copper giraffe that once had graced the office of evangelist and PTL founder Jim Bakker.

“I just want a souvenir of this whole fiasco,” he said.

Believers and skeptics, the curious and the bargain hunters--an estimated 10,000 people--flocked to PTL headquarters here Saturday as the financially strapped ministry put the lavish legacy of Jim and Tammy Bakker up for sale.

Bakker resigned from the presidency of PTL--which stands for Praise The Lord and People That Love--in March after admitting to a sexual encounter with Jessica Hahn, a church secretary.

In the weeks since, allegations have spread of additional sexual improprieties by Bakker. But of more immediate concern to PTL’s new board of directors, led by evangelist Jerry Falwell, is the television ministry’s debt--$67 million, PTL officials said at a press conference Friday--and reports of widespread financial irregularities.

PTL’s most pressing debt is $8 million owed to stations that air the PTL television show, according to spokesman Neil Eskelin. Roughly 20 of the 178 stations that once carried the show have canceled in the last 30 days, Eskelin said Saturday.

$10 Million Needed

Falwell said during Friday’s show that PTL needs to raise $10 million by the end of the month to remain solvent. Roughly $3.5 million has been raised in the last week, Eskelin said.

Saturday morning, PTL officials said they hoped that the auction would bring in as much as $500,000, but as bidding proceeded, they began lowering their sights. Falwell later said that about $200,000 had been generated.

PTL auditors said Friday they had not been able to explain what happened to $12 million of donations that the television ministry had received in the last year.

Among the payments the auditors are investigating are $640,000 in salaries and bonuses that the Bakkers received in the first three months of this year, a $100,000 check in early April to an interior decorator, who is the brother of a top Bakker aide, and hundreds of thousands in unexplained cash advances on credit cards controlled by top PTL executives.

Many of the fruits of that sort of lavish spending were on display at Saturday’s auction.

An antique car, for example, went for $27,000 to a man who plans to resell it. A 25-foot power boat went for $10,500. A lavatory sink from Jim Bakker’s office, complete with gold faucets, brought $825.

Buyers made bids on Oriental rugs, jade figurines and crystal platters. And a Kentucky man bought a black and white rug with a crocheted image of one of Tammy Bakker’s teddy bears. The rug would go well in his white Corvette, the man said.

But on display, too, was a determination of many PTL supporters to try to ensure that the ministry they believed in would survive the disgrace of its founder.

“I’m really disappointed” in the Bakkers, said Frances Dickerson, a longtime PTL supporter from Lawrence, S.C. But, she said: “When you walk on the grounds of PTL’s Heritage USA theme-park and headquarters complex, you can really feel the presence of the Lord.”

Bakker “let things get out of hand,” Jim Eberle of Dundalk, Md., said. “They helped a lot of people, they just let their priorities get out of focus.”

‘Little in Shock’

“We’ve been a little in shock,” said Hazel Hayworth of Atlanta, who along with her husband of 45 years is one of PTL’s $1,000-a-year “partners.” PTL “is getting better now,” she said, adding that she hoped to bid on one of Tammy Bakker’s hair dryers.

And Kathy Manlove of Seaford, Del., who bought Tammy Bakker’s gold-and-white desk for $625, said that she and her husband “came here the first time in November of 1985 as desperate people.”

“People will see it and say ‘hey, where’d you get that?’ ” she said of the desk. “We’ll tell them what the Lord did for us.”

As for the Bakkers, Manlove added: “If Tammy told me she thought she really needed it, I’d give it back to her.”