Some Wrong Numbers She Gets Turn Out Right

Suppose you took a lot of calls at your office and didn’t want to be bothered at home. Suppose you asked the telephone company for an unlisted number. Suppose the one they gave you had just been abandoned by the police department. Suppose a substantial number of citizens were not aware of this fact and called you at all hours of the day and night to report crimes and other woes?

That’s what happened to Bessie Dinkins last summer. Her best guess is that more than 1,000 people in search of the Gardena Police Department have called her home in Carson.

Anyone else would have quickly requested a new phone number, especially after those first few weeks, when up to 100 calls a week were coming in and no one in the Dinkins home was getting any sleep.

Desperate for Help

But a curious thing started to happen. Dinkins began to stay on the phone with a handful of the callers, people who were desperate for help or advice, people who probably needed a counselor more than a cop. And darned if she didn’t find herself solving a problem here and there.

After all, what’s a minister to do?

Call it God’s will or call it a fluke, but if Pacific Bell’s computer had to assign the old Police Department number to someone, it couldn’t have picked a better person than the founder of Deeper Life Ministries, which Dinkins, an ordained Baptist minister, runs out of a small, neat office above a beauty shop on Rosecrans Avenue.

“Every time I decide I’m going to get rid of that number, somebody will call me that I’m really able to help,” said Dinkins, an affable, 52-year-old widow who grew used to middle-of-the-night interruptions by giving birth to 11 children in 13 years.

There was the guy who called her one evening just to ask a question about ordinances governing trailers.

“I told him he had the wrong number, he kept insisting, three or four times, that it was the police,” Dinkins said. “During this he broke down, weeping, saying he had all these problems, told me he was an alcoholic, so I kept him on the phone, counseled him, prayed for him. We talked on and on about his problems. He calls me on and off now.

“One guy’s mother called because her son was going to commit suicide. I asked her to let me talk to him. Another lady called saying she was going to kill somebody if the police didn’t come quickly. I couldn’t make her believe she had the wrong number. I said, ‘Lady, if you’ll just calm down and tell me what the problem is; it’s probably something real simple.’ She called me the next day and said, ‘You know something, lady, you really blessed me last night.’

“Another woman called me, hysterical, because her daughter had run away, I told her not to panic, just to call the police, and when she wouldn’t I told her that I was a minister, that all I could do was pray for her. She called me back the next day and told me everything was fine.

“Sometimes people will call the police with the craziest thing. One woman’s 17-year-old granddaughter had run away with an older man. Well, that’s not a crime. Why call the police? Wait and see, maybe she’ll come back.”

The Louisiana-born Dinkins first began preaching in the early 1970s. She worked at other jobs on and off but stopped in 1982 to pursue the ministry full-time. She was ordained by Mt. Zion Lighthouse Full Gospel Church in South-Central Los Angeles and now holds regular services in a hotel meeting room in El Segundo, as well as hosting a radio broadcast on a local station.

Picked Up Old Number

She applied for a new home phone number after she moved the ministry’s number from her home to her office. The Police Department had abandoned its old number about eight months earlier, but apparently there were enough old phone books and lists around town to generate a substantial number of calls to the old number.

It caused some headaches for the three sons and two daughters who live with Dinkins, but by now “everybody’s adjusted,” she said. “That’s amazing.”

What’s also amazing is the fact that Dinkins puts up with a ton of wrong numbers--the family still gets about 15 to 25 calls a week--for a very slim number of chances to give advice. Probably 99% of the callers simply hang up once they realize they have reached a residence. In the last year, only 15 to 20 have, for whatever reason, stayed on the phone long enough to tell their problem to Dinkins’ sympathetic ear.

That’s enough for her.

“God has given me this type of gift,” she said. “Because I’m a minister these are the kinds of problems I’m used to dealing with, people with relatives in jail, personal crises, suicides.”