To repost a story about the Jonestown cult for our newer readers.

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On this day in 1978, Peoples Temple founder Jim Jones led hundreds of his followers in a mass murder-suicide at their Jonestown commune in Guyana. This introduced the term “…drink the Kool-Aid”, since drinking cyanide poisoned Flavor Aid caused most of the deaths.

For many years, I worked with a man who had a slight connection with the cult. But slight as it was, he was right concerned enough to violate company policy and start carrying a S&W .357 magnum afterwards. Seems he was a HAM amateur radio operator who had corresponded with the Jonestown shortwave radio station. He showed me a QSL card – postcards that acknowledge short wave listener ‘DX’ reports – mailed to him documenting that and from it, knowing his name and address, he decided he wasn’t going to take any chances.

I didn’t blame him a bit, and possibly SWB management looked the other way.

Strange thing, we speculated was some gnostic religious thing.
The QSL card didn’t have the first letter of his first & last name on the address line. It had to be purposeful, since those letters were used elsewhere in the address.