Bosch History
Ioas Grove
There is a magnificent grove of trees near the main buildings in the woods. It is a place where one feels history; a deeply special place. The grove is named for Hand of the Cause of God, Leroy Ioas, a brilliant and gifted teacher who dedicated his life to the promulgation of the Baha'i Faith and the painstaking creation of its institutions.
Our Purpose
“Regard man as a mine rich in gems of inestimable value. Education alone can cause it to reveal its treasures.” —Bahá’u’lláh, Prophet-Founder
Students who attend this school come with the purpose of increasing their knowledge of various aspects of the Bahá’í Faith, including its history, core teachings and spiritual principles. This life-long education process is fundamental because without a priesthood or clergy, every Bahá’í is asked to take an active part in the affairs of the community.
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Sister Schools
Bosch is one of three major centers of Bahá’í learning in the United States, all permanent schools of the National Spiritual Assembly of the Bahá’ís of the United States. The other two are Louhelen Bahá’í School in Michigan and Green Acre Bahá’í School in Maine.
Their founding dates back to the early 20th century and their central mission is to foster personal transformation and more effective service to the Bahá'í ideal of a world "organically unified in all its essential aspects."
The courses at these schools focus on human development and on a constant effort at building greater unity among all people:“carrying on the divine work of bringing forth jewels from the mine of humanity,”; “...the means of bringing to light hitherto unsuspected capacities among the friends,”; “...fulfill its true function of deepening the knowledge, stimulating the zeal and fostering the spirit of fellowship among believers...”; “...attract new souls to the spirit and teachings of the Faith.”
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Geyserville Bahá’í School and History
From Bahá’í News, 1974, by Marzieh Gail
Except when otherwise specified, the historical material in this article consists of conversation with John (in 1939) written down by me as he spoke, and of written information supplied by Louse. Tablets, letters and cables were copied in the presence of John or Louise from documents supplied by them. This account varies in many respects from that in the Geyserville Press of July 26, 1946; certain of the statements there published were—through no fault of the paper and owing to the natural cares and confusion attendant on the funeral—erroneous.
A brief review of John’s life, using data supplied to the writer by him, and after his passing, by Louise, will be of value to historians:
John David Bosch was born at Neu-St. Johann, Canton St. Gall, Switzerland, on August 1, 1855. His parents were Michael Johann Bosch and Maria Biegmann; he had three brothers and three sisters, and was his parents’ fifth child. When he was nine, his mother died, and he was then brought up by his oldest sister, whom he loved all his life. After attending elementary and repletitionary school in Neu-St. Johann, he left Switzerland with a sister and her husband (the Zuberbuhler), arrived in America in 1879, and went to Amboy, Nebraska where on arrival the Zuberbuhlers purchased a farm. He practiced his trade of cooper, “helped with the building of the railroad, and also farmed.”
He was in Los Angeles, California between 1884 and 1889, and became a citizen of the United States in Los Angeles County in 1887, the document also being registered in Sonoma County in 1892. He married Kathe Krieg in ’85 or ’86, the marriage ending in divorce around ’89. It was about this period that he went to Germany, France and Spain to study wine-making. After holding various good positions in the Valley of the Moon, he purchased the thirty-five acres constituting the original extent of his Geyserville property on October 26, 1901 from Emily B. Smith of Geyserville.
In 1905, John became a Bahá’í, his teachers being Mrs. Beckwith, Mrs. Goodall, Mrs. Cooper and Thornton Chase. John was delegated from California and Honolulu to the first Bahá’í Temple Unity Convention, Chicago, March 21, 1909. In April, 1912, when superintendent of the Northern Sonoma County Wineries, he went East to be with ‘Abdu’l-Bahá, and on his return was instrumental in appealing to the Master to visit the West. He was Thornton Chase’s literary executor. On January 19, 1914 he married Louise Sophie Stapfer of Zurich Switzerland, in San Francisco. In 1920, with Louise, he left for Tahiti in March, pioneering there and leaving in September. In November, 1921, he and Louise were present in Haifa at the time of the Master’s passing.
Appointed by the National Spiritual Assembly with two others to locate a place for the establishment of a center “along the lines of Green Acre.” John offered his property for this purpose, the institution beginning its functions in 1927. From this period on, he continued to serve in many ways until his long, final illness. He passed away July 22, 1946, and was buried in Olive Hill cemetery, Geyserville, following a befitting memorial service held July 24 in the Bahá’í Hall, Geyserville School. Under the auspices of the National Spiritual Assembly, a memorial service was also held for him in the Bahá’í House of Worship, November 24. His tomb is covered with a long plaque (the work of John Quinn) made of hammered bronze and bearing the Greatest Name. The underbrush has all been cleared away, exposing a whole new range of mountains, the western mountains that shut Geyserville off from the sea. When we saw the place recently, we knew we were watching one of the loveliest views in the world. It was a soft autumn day. “The mountains seem so near,” Louise said dreamily. “That means rain.”
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John & Louise: For John with Love
Personal memories of the illustrious John Bosch, early Bahá’í teacher, pioneer and friend of ‘Abdu’l-Bahá. Written on September 4, 1946. From Bahá’í News, 1974, by Marzieh Gail
Monday we went down from Cloverdale, driving a cautious thirty in the shiny blue De Soto-our first since the War. The low hills had that hard, baked feeling that seals you in, safe and dry from the wadded fogs of the Bay Region, down to the south, nonexistent and forgotten here in the bridge heat.
We turned off the highway into the Geyserville School grounds, up the curving road the Maintenance Committee has enlarged, to the parking space they leveled off with the bulldozer, south of the Big Tree. We got out and walked, and ate a couple of the purple, stained-glass-window plums, with sky-blue dust on them, fallen in the dust of the orchard. Reluctantly, we crossed the wooden bridge over the gulley, toward the ranch house. For nineteen years now, I had been coming to this place, and John had always been here, all that time, for me, and now he was not here.
Perhaps I was wrong. All around us, in the quiet heat and dust, I could feel him speaking. “Núrání,” he was saying,“Núrání, luminous, luminous.” It was the name ‘Abdu’l-Bahá had given him, long ago. It was the white, radiant name. Now John was saying it to me, in the old way-with his voice, that had so much light in it (I can only think of light in connection with him; the tall, transparent figure, the shining white beard, thick white silk hair, the light suit, the white felt hat. White candles, maybe; white sun on the hills; yards of white clothe for a turban. His hat, at least, I saw, a few moments later, hanging on its peg in the ranch house). His voice repeated the tones of ‘Abdu’l-Bahá’s voice as the Master Himself had spoken the name; vibrant and happy and as though everything in the universe was all right. Perhaps John was saying this to Harold and me now, because he knew how we felt with him not here. Or again, it was all in my mind; but what is the world; no one knows; no one can bound it.
We rang the doorbell and it seemed an incongruously natural, everyday thing to do. A handsome, brown Persian boy, Shídán, let us in. Louise is alone now, and Shídán is spending his vacation from college here at the School to be with her. Then Louise was at the door, bowed over, the gray hair cropped short, the blue-gray eyes smiling.
“We’ve come to take you for a drive.”
“Oh, no, I cannot—”
“But we want to go and say a prayer at John’s grave.” Shídán broke in, “Here’s the car you needed, Louise.”
“Well, get the shovels,” then Louise said, and started up the steep stairs, that she had gone up and down so constantly these years, serving John, who lay most of the time up there in the bedroom, withdrawing farther and farther from what we think is the real world but the dying and the dead know is only a reflection and shadow.
Louise moved rapidly over our heads, changing her dress, and Shídán told about the grave. Louise and John had bought their graves on a hilltop, in one of those dry, northern California cemeteries, all perpendicular dirt roads and lizarsa and purple-trunked manzanitas, rocks and unexpected flowers, or sometimes a rare, elegant gravestone, decorously out of place in the lost hills. Since the War, there had been no caretaker, and there never had any water here, except the winter rains. Louise, who hardly eats or sleeps, and works always, in the house and grounds, and at her correspondence that comes from all the friends of a long lifetime, was worried over this grave. She had been driven up there a few days before, and gathered the dry flowers left from the funeral to burn them; now she wanted the sandy gravel, piles up from when the grave was dug, leveled off or shoveled away.
“I can only take one shovel,” the boy confided to us, “or Louise herself will take the other and set to work and no one can stop her.”
We sat on the hilltop, gingerly, on the cement ledge of the rectangular, parched lot. John’s long body lay there beside us, under the gravel—as if he were lying in his bed, as we last saw him; the gravel folded lightly over him. I knew there was a coffin under the mound, but it was as if John were lying there, under the bedclothes. He seemed to share our problem about the grave.
A weaving of vineyards and blue mountains rolled away beneath us. The grapes climbed here almost to the cemetery line, clinging to the sandy hillside, close at hand, heavy blue bunches on the russet vines. I suddenly remembered John in his light clothing and white felt hat, with the vivid hills behind him, smiling, carrying a basket of blue grapes to give us. “I am a fruitarian,” he said.
The baked dust lay warmly around us. Louise wore a white and black print dress with a high collar, and over it a black coat. She sat on the ledge, her blue-gray eyes looking up at us. Then we had prayers, Harold’s from Prayers and Meditations, page 77, and Shídán’s low mourning-dove Persian chant. Shídán, looking like a sunny, brown Italian, began with the casualness of youth to shovel off the top of the plot, and smooth it. He, open-throated and strong, his brown hair gleaming in the sunshine, and Louise in terminal black, both against the far blue hilltops, talked back and forth through the spiced wind:
“This is the earth from the interior of the grave; this was removed for the hole to be made; now it should be put back on the plot again,” said Louise.
“No, these are only rocks,” said Shídán. “Look at the other plots-hard and smooth. Let me make this one like the rest.”
Each of them smiled a little and winked confidentially to us, about the other. Youth and age, amused at each other, for being youth and for being age. Each one hopeless, the other thought; to be put up with and served, but to shake one’s head over.
A line of pink flowers, amaryllis, like trumpet lilies only link, several on a stem, pulpy and delicate, jutted on naked green stalks from a barren neighboring plot. A lizard rustled over the grave, a taffeta rustle, soft, like a thought that escapes you. We sat on the concrete ledge in the warm circle of heat, looking down over the sky and the world. It was during the prayer that I understood how completely selfless Louise is; I could feel the presence of Harold and Shídán there beside me but I could not feel Louise there at all, and had to open my eyes to make sure she was with us, holding on to my arm. The earthly Louise is already as ethereal as John.
“The void, the void he has left...” She began in the careful, almost whispering voice.
Whenever John said “Louise” he said it in a special way. You know the word was important. He dwelt on it, italicized it; you knew he looked up to that word. Their marriage was a special marriage, as the Tablet revealed for them by ‘Abdu’l-Bahá proves. It was a marriage for always. Even now there has been no separation, really. There we were, sitting on the grave edge with Louise, and there beside us was John’s long, light form, light earth piled up, not away, but present and participating; after all, you can't bury sunlight.
“Louise,” he would say, and the word was prolonged, solemn, humorous. Once when I was trying to write this his biography and wanted to know how tall he was, to put it down for posterity, he couldn't remember. “Let's Measure you, John,” I said. We were in his high-ceilinged office in the old ranch house, with the polished walls of redwood. Everything was in its place, and all immaculate. “Let’s stand you up along the wall and put a pencil mark where your head comes. Louise won't see it.”
“Louise sees everything,” he said. John was five feet ten and so registered with the Swiss Government at Neuchatel in ’74 when they wanted him to be a soldier.
Once, trying to unravel his history from the neat envelopes he had filed it in, and the sentences he had decided on, probably years before, and no longer altered (because often, when I’d ask him again about some episode in his life, he would reply in the same brief, economical words as before), I asked him, “Where did you meet Louise?”
“I didn't meet her,” he answered. The meaning was clear. He couldn’t imply a time when they were not together.
“I started to correspond with her through Lua Getsinger.”
He had met Lua in San Francisco in 1912. She spent a week at Geyserville, staying in the long front room of what is now the Collison house. Lua said there was a young Suissesse at Briarcliff Manor, (the other finishing school with which Louise was connected was Rosemary Hall, Connecticut) serving as health officer, who was a Bahá’í. “So I dropped her a few lines.” He thought a Swiss girl from Zurich who had a position like that would be just right for him. She had also worked four years in Eliot, Maine, with Sarah Farmer. “Did you propose to her before she came out West?” “Just as much as I could by mail.”
“Was Lua very beautiful?”
“Most beautiful to me. She wore her regular costume. Looked more or less like a nurse, or like some of the Catholic sisters. Beautiful blue eyes. She was nearly at tall as Louise. Lua was a good speaker. Impressive. Spiritual. ”
“Who do you know now like that?”
“No comparison.”
The day we had this conversation John told me that his letter to the Master dated September 18, 1919, was very important so far as the future Geyserville School was concerned.
Louise and John were married in San Francisco by a Swedenborgian minister at the Swedenborgian Church.
John had been married once before. It was in Los Angeles. She was a German singer, a lovely, blonde soprano. When I asked why the marriage failed, John said: “She was a night woman, and I was a day man. My time was between six in the morning and six at night, but when I went with her she always wanted me to have late supper; it lasted till two or three o’clock.” He was married to her about three years, and let her spend a year and a half of that period studying music in Europe. He saw it wouldn’t work, and they were divorced in Los Angeles around ’89.
“Didn’t it break your heart?”
“Well I don’t know. It’s all forgotten. We loved each other and at the same time it was a mistake.”
Her name was Kathe. She became, John said, “only a small singer afterward.”
John: “Oh, beautiful music. I love that. I just melt — don’t you?”
John investigated everything, looking for truth, but couldn’t find what he wanted. Every two or three weeks he traveled from Geyserville to San Francisco, in connection with his work for the Northern Sonoma County wineries. One day in 1903, coming home on the Cloverdale train, John saw an acquaintance—a Mrs. Beckwith of Chicago, a woman of about his age (forty-seven), who used to go up to a sanatorium near Santa Rosa, and whom he had also met at Theosophical meetings in San Francisco. She called to him. He saw that she had a book.
“I said, ‘If I sit alongside of you, I’’m not going to let you read—we’re going to talk’ She laid the book down. I picked it up and started to read. I forgot to talk to her. I said to myself: ‘This is just what I wanted. The connecting link I was missing. ’ ”
The book was Phelps, Abbas Effendi, just published. (Phelps, Myron H., Life and Teachings of Abbas Effendi. G.P. Putnam’s Sons. New York & London. 1903.) Mrs. Beckwith told him, “To hear of this is the greatest of privileges, but will be followed by the greatest obligations. You had better not know of it if you cannot follow it all up.” She referred John to Mrs. Goodall of Oakland for further instruction.
It was his busy season, the time for picking grapes. For three months he couldn’t go. Then, one November afternoon, he went to Mrs. Goodall’s; he had no introduction, but mentioned Mrs. Beckwith and Phelp’s book, and that was enough. Kathryn Frankland was there. The two women talked to him. He bought all the available pamphlets, mostly by Thornton Chase, the first American Bahá’í, and the book Hidden Words.
From that day on he attended meetings. He told me that sometimes he had to choose between his Masonic club (he was a thirty-second degree Scottish Rite Mason), the saloons in San Francisco and the Oakland meetings:
“I would have one foot on the ferry and one on the wharf, but something inside would say, ‘I’d better go over to Oakland. ’ Sometimes they had from twenty-fice to forty-five women there and I was the only man and never said a word. I let them all talk by themselves. I kept going; I stuck with it.”
Dr. D’Evelyn became a friend, and Thornton Chase. In those days Thornton Chase had an important insurance position in Chicago, with a salary of $750 a month which diminished every year because the Faith meant more to him than his business. Whenever he was coming to San Francisco he wired John; they would stop at different hotels, but diner together. “He was very tall—about six feet two. He always ate two or threeice creams after supper; he always dug a big bite right out of the middle of it to start with. Around eleven o’clock, he used to say, ’Now, John, I guess it’s about time to take you home. ’ ”
Arm in arm, they would go to John’s hotel; talking steadily about the Cause. They would sit in the parlor. “About one o’clock I used to say, ‘Now, Mr. Chase, I guess it’s about time to take you home. ’ We used to wonder what the policeman on the beat thought about us. One night we brought each other home till four in the morning.”
John Bosch was now a Bahá’í. On May 29, 1905, he went down to the winery office very early and wrote ‘Abdu’l-Bahá: “. . . may my name be entered in the Great Book of this Universal Life. . . . My watchward will be ‘Justice’. Humbly Thy servant . . . .”
Afterward it turned out that the Master sent John a message on June 11, in care of Mrs. Goodall: “O thou John D. Bosch; Raise the call of the Kingdom and give the glad tidings to the people, guide them to the Tree of Life, so that they may gather the fruits from that Tree and attain the great Bounty.”
Luther Burbank was one of those to whom John gave the message. In 1907 John asked him for an appointment to tell him something new; he said to John and Mrs Brittingham, “I can only give you five minutes.” “We were there an hour and a half, ” John told me. He read the books, and was addressed jointly with John in at least one Tablet (June 24, 1912). Another visit to Burbank which John remembered took place March 30, 1913, when he called on the scientist with the Howard MacNutts and Julia Grundy. The Governor of Colorado and his wife were there, sitting in the parlor; Mrs. Burbank took the Bahá’í ’s through folding doors into an adjoining room, and an hour later he was still carrying on an animated conversation with them. John glanced into the other room and saw that the Governor and his wife were fast asleep in their chairs.
There were many Tablets and messages for John, through the years. On August 17, 1909, the Master wrote to Mrs. Goodall; “Exercise on My behalf the utmost kindness and love to John D. Bosch. With the utmost humility I pray to the Kingdom of Abhá that the soul may become holy, find capacity to receive the outpourings of Eternity and become a luminous star in the West.” Early in 1910, (May) the Master wrote to John: “According to the texts of the Book of Aqdas both light and strong drinks are prohibited. The reason for this prohibition is, that it [drink] leads the mind astray and is the cause of weakening the body. If alcohol were beneficial, it would have been brought into the world by the divine creation and not by the effort of man. Whatever is beneficial for man, exists in creation. . . . I hope thou mayest become exhilarated with the wine of the love of God. . . . The after effect of drinking is depression, but the wine of the love of God bestows exaltation of the spirit.” John was superintendent of The Northern Sonoma County Wineries. He had forty men in four wineries under him. In one year, he crushed up 15,000 tons of grapes, which makes over two and a quarter million gallons of wine. “I thought it over,” he said. It was not long before he decided to retire.
From Monclair, new jersey, June 24, 1912, the Master directed Johnn to write Herrigel, the German, to lead him to firmness, and contrasted his backwardness in the Faith with the strength and firmness of Miss Knobloch. This Tablet was addressed to both John and Burbank. An extract reads, “As to my coming to California it is a little doubtful for the trip is far and the weather hot and from the labors of the journey the body of ‘Abdu’l-Bahá has not much endurance. Nevertheless we shall see what God hath decreed. “On August 1, the Master wrote John from Dublin, New Hampshire: “O thou who art longing for the visit of ‘Abdu’l-Bahá! Your yearning letter was wonderful and eloquent and its effect upon ‘Abdu’l-Bahá was inexpressible. I long very much to fulfill the request of the friends, but I am yet in these parts, until later the requirement of wisdom will be revealed. If the western cities demonstrate their infinite firmness in the Covenant, this will act as an attractive magnet to draw ‘Abdu’l-Bahá. . . . ” On August 10, John wired; “I made special trip to San Francisco today. A great spirit of prayer, thankfulness, joy and hope filled the Assembly. Tonight ancticipating the coming of the center of the Covenant unity and firmness are manifest. This supplication begs earnestly for Thy personal presence, from D’Evelyn, Lua, Straun, Bozark and Chase. John D. Bosch.” ‘Abdu’l-Bahá answered John by wire August 13, from Dublin: “Your telegram was the cause of much happiness God willing I will depart for the western part give this glad tidings to each and all.” John told me this was the first telegram announcing the Master’s journey West. Mrs. Goodall received the second. John’s was sent him in care of Mrs. Ella G. Cooper, who forwarded it to him with this note: “Awful temptation to open this!! Do let us know if it is very encouraging—Greetings. E.G.C. ”
But it was not the same with Thornton Chase. That great man who had been a captain in the Civil War, a student at brown University and later superintendent of agencies for the Union Mutual Life Company, and was “the first to embrace the Cause of Bahá’u’lláh in the Western world”—felt that the Bahá’ís, himself included, were not worthy of the Master’s visit.
“John, don’t you think it’s too soon? The Bahá’ís aren’t ready.”
“Well I’m ready for Him,” said John.
As the Master reached San Francisco, Thornton Chase died. “It was too much for him, ” John told me.
All Thornton Chase’s Bahá’í papers and books, and five or six calligraphs by Mishkín-Qalam, were willed to John. Mr. Chase had sent on most of his Tablets to the Chicago archives, but John received about ten of them in a tin box. Mrs. Chase burned some fifteen hundred of her husband’s letter (not Tablets) before John could get to Los Angeles, he said.
In 1939 when we talked ove his life, John remembered the minutest details of the things that were important to him, and generally in the same words; the other things, not vital, he let slip away. Before urging the Master to come West, he, unable to wait, had been East to see ‘Abdu’l-Bahá this journey was always present in his mind.
When he heard that ‘Abdu’l-Bahá was on the high seas, he had felt a great urge to be with the Master. He went to San Francisco to get permission from the president of the California Wine Association, percy T. Morgan, to go East. Morgan said, “Why do you want to go, in this bad April weather?” John said: “Because I feel like it.” “Very well,” said the president, “if the wineries are in shape.”
He took the first train east. It didn’t go fast enough. In Washington he phoned Mason Remey to see if the Master had arrived there. Mason told him ‘Abdu’l-Bahá was still in new York, but was expected in Washington, John left on the night train. At five-thirty the next morning he was at the Hotel Ansonia; he went upstairs to see the door of the Master’s room. Dr. Getsinger was there and recognized john from a photograph. John asked for an early appointment with the Master and the master sent word “in a few minutes.” Then Dr. Getsinger called John in.
“I went in as a business man. I had some questions to ask. When I saw Him I forgot everything. I was absolutely empty.”
In the conversation that followed, ‘Abdu’l-Bahá told John all the things he had wanted to know.
“Foolishly I said, ‘Oh, ‘Abdu’l-Bahá, I came three thousand miles to see you.’ He gave a good hearty laugh—you know what a wonderful laugh He had [here John laughed as the Master had, that faraway morning, and I caught the sound of that worldshaking laughter: Olympian—knowledgeable—the laughter of omniscience—I don’t know how to say it; this was not the only time John seemed to me like a reflection of ‘Abdu’l-Bahá. There was something about his presence; something spotless or fragrant, but not as we know the words. I had noted this in Hájí-Amín, too, in Persia.] And He said, ‘I came eight thousand miles to see you.’
“’I told Him I was in the wine business and grossed fifteen thousand tons of grapes in one season, which makes over two gallons of wine. ‘Oh, ‘Abdu’l-Bahá,’ I said, ‘I’m a foreigner, born in Switzerland, and have not the command of the English language. I would love to be a speaker. All I am doing is to give away pamphlets and as many books as are printed.’
“He looked serious. He said, ‘You are doing well. I am satisfied with you. With you it is not the movements of the lips, nor the tongue. With you it is the heart that speaks. With you it is the silence that speaks and radiates.’
“We had tea together. I was there about half an hour. He said, ‘You are one of the family; you come in and out anytime you want to.’ ”
It was a cold, snowy day. In the afternoon John was in and out of the room, watched people coming by the dozens to see ‘Abdu’l-Bahá, listened to ‘Abdu’l-Bahá’s words to them. Around noon, he circled the block to look at the Hotel Ansonia. Back at the front door, he saw many people rising in the lobby: “When His majesty came—how straight he walked!—they all rose.
“ ‘Abdu’l-Bahá walked to the first of three waiting automobiles. The other two were already filled with bahá’ís and their friends. All at once I saw the Persian in the first machine pushing the air at me so I backed up, thinking he wanted me to go away [this Persian gesture for “come here” looks much like the American one for “go away”; it often confused the early American Bahá’ís]. Then I saw Mountfort Mills standing there making a pulling gesture at me so I went forward. ‘Abdu’l-Bahá grabbed my hand and pulled me into the rear seat; Mounfort closed the door and I was alone with ‘Abdu’l-Bahá.
“The believers had planned to show the city to the Master; the stores, hotels, banks; to give Him a good time seeing New York. Just as I stepped into the machine and was seated, ‘Abdu’l-Bahá looked at me. He just looked at me, and all at once with an immense sigh—or what you call it better than a sign—like the whole world would be lifted from Him so He could have a rest, He put His head on my left shoulder, clear down as close as He could, like a child, and went to sleep.
“I was still as a mouse; I didn’t want to move—I did’’t want to wake Him up. The trip was nearly a half hour and often I wondered what the others thought—that ‘Abdu’l-Bahá was looking out of the window all the time. ‘Abdu’l-Bahá woke up just as we stopped at the Kinney’s home.”
John had not been invited, he told me, but he went in, met the Edward B. Kinneys that day for the first time, and lunched there. At three the Master addressed one hundred and fifty people in the large studio, speaking perhaps a quarter of an hour. Edward getsinger placed an armchair in the middle of the room but the master did not sit in it. People were standing along the walls and ‘Abdu’l-Bahá walked from one to the other, and took their hands to say good-by. A young girl was on John’s right. ‘Abdu’l-Bahá smiled at her and walked past John to another young woman on his left. “He just turned His head and he didn’t look at me, just passed me and took the girl’s hand. If I ever had cold feet and weak knees it was then. It took me a few seconds till I remembered the words He had said in the morning: ‘You are one of the family now.’ That was why He didn’t say good-by to me. It was one of the worst punishments I ever had in my life, till I remembered.”
I asked John to describe the Master. He told me that ‘Abdu’l-Bahá’s eyes had a luminous white ring around the iris; that he had a wonderful smile and also a very serious look. John looked in the glass, trying to explain the Master’s complexion: “His skin-color was the color of my forehead.” John’s fair skin was lightly tanned by the California sun; I would have described his skin with a Persian term—“wheat-colored.”
“I never paid any attention to how He looked, I only know every time I was with Him I was way down below Him—way down in the bottom. Like nothing. His hair was grey and white and shining; a little curly. You always felt a nearness to Him even when He was far across the room.”
John said a person’s atmosphere or presence affected him strongly; he called it their aura.
John went to most of the meetings for about five days in new York and then someone put him on the same Pullman car on which the Master travelede to Washington. The Master would leave His compartment and come out into the main “palace” car. Going through Pennsylvania an interpreter called John, and it was then that “ ‘Abdu’l-Bahá gave me the name Núrání. He wrote it in His own hand.” John said Mahmud’s reference to this in his travel diary is inexact (cf. Persian text, 39). John does not think he asked for a name (certainly asking would not have been in character). All at once the interpreter called out and addressed John as Núrání, and John requested the Master to write his name down. John would linger on the vowels when he said the word, and I could hear the Master’s echo. He said it vigorously, positively, in the Persian way. It means luminous, filled with light.
Again, John was on the same Pullman when the Master left Washington for Chicago. For three days John attended meetings. He was present when ‘Abdu’l-Bahá laid the cornerstone of the Temple at Wilmette, but with his usual diffidence he let “an elderly woman” represent Switzerland on that occasion, neither of the two, however, taking active part. Many Californians had come to Chicago to see ‘Abdu’l-Bahá. He called them all to Him and they were with Him about one hour.
“On the last day ‘Abdu’l-Bahá played another trick on me. Dr. D’Evelyn and I wanted to have another meeting with Him before leaving on the ten o’clock train. We said good-by to ‘Abdu’l-Bahá. We heard Him speak at the hotel. But before that I invited Mrs. Goodall, Mrs. Cooper, Dr. D’Evelyn and Roy Wilhelm for supper. ‘Abdu’l-Bahá was walking in the park. When I was paying my hotel bill at the Plaza, a little before six, I had everything ready to leave on the ten o’clock train. I was standing at the desk, when ‘Abdu’l-Bahá came in. One of the Persians in His party called to me. The man at the desk said, ‘Those people want you.’ I stepped over to the elevator, and ‘Abdu’l-Bahá seized my hand and wouldn’t let go, and pulled me into the elevator and up to His room on the fifth floor.” [John did not give me the date. I assume it was May 2, the day that the master had given five public addesses.] Nobody was there except Dr. Baghdádí. ‘Abdu’l-Bahá did not speak until they were in the room. Then He went to His bed, lay down, and began talking with Baghdádí; He explained how He had recently addressed four hundred women, and described how the ladies looked. The Master had found them terribly funny; with keen enjoyment, He described them and their hats to Dr. Baghdádí. Then He said, “Now it’s time for you to go.” Somebody had given Him a big cake; He put that in John’s arms, with apples and bananas, so many that John had to get somebody else to push the elevator button. John obtained paper and string at the desk to wrap his gifts with. He had forgotten his dinner party. (The guests gave him up for lost, waited hopelessly anyhow, and the dinner finally took place.)
Much of John’s history cannot be assembled so early; the future must find it and set it down. He taught the faith in Germany in the early 1920’s. From 1927 on he was at various times active on the Geyserville School Committee and in meeting the thousands of people who came to the School. In 1935 he and Louise made a gift of the Geyserville property to the National Spiritual Assembly. . . . All we want to say here is that he was John, and that simply by living he served the Faith.
Of the founding of the Summer School Louise writes: “The National Spiritual Assembly had the idea of the word ‘Summer School’ first. I will find their letter where they inform John that he was made one of a Committee of three to find a location in California on which a Western green Acre could be established. George Latimer and Leroy Ioas were the other two. So they took some trips together, two or three, when John said to them: ‘Why don’t you take mine?’ In 1925 John had his 70th birthday and over 100 attended it (and I made 150 cups of the finest coffee). People from nearly every assembly of California came, also from Portland. The founding of a ‘Bahá’í Village’ then became the conversation for 2 or 3 years. In 1926 I made another 150 cups of coffee on the same date of John’s birthday, and in the evening of that day with 35 in number we started what later became the Summer School.”
The journey to Tahiti came about through Louise. She had been reading ‘Abdu’l-Bahá’s tablets of the Divine Plan: “I was reading that entire book from one end to the other and begging the Almightly to let me know when I had come to the place that was to be for me. When I reached the Polynesian tablet I perceived a stir, so I stopped and read it thoroughly, many time. The next morning, or soon after, I awoke a the earliest grey light of dawn, because something had wakened me. It was a voice that said, ‘Loti. Loti. ’ I sat up and thought, ‘Well, this is strange. What is this Loti?’ So I went to John’s small room next to mine to tell him about it but he was sound asleep.” When John wakened they consulted an excyclopedia and found that Loti was an author. Louise left Geyserville for San Francisco that same day to get Le Mariage de Loti—since this particular book included his name in the title—at the Public Library, but the book was out. About this time Mrs. Maxwell wrote her to come to Green Acre; it was hard for her to leave, as she was expecting guests:
“My husband had arranged a deer hunting. He did not hunt himself.”
“Why?”
Well, because it wasn’t in his life. He never even killed a chicken.”
In any event, Louise packed and went to green Acre, where she set out for Mrs. Farmer’s house to find Mrs. Maxwell. (Louise’s friendship with the Maxwell family is very old; Mr. And Mrs. Maxwell took her on her first pilgrimage to ‘Akká, in 1908). Mrs. Maxwell asked her to wait a few moments in the big upstairs hall, while she got ready for the luncheon. It was a warm day, but there was a draught through the hall from anopen doorway. Louise started to shut the door, when she saw a little book on a small table just inside. Thinking from the size that it was the Book of Iqán, she picked it up, and sat down on the top stair in the hall to read. “I opened the book and instead of the beloved title, to my surprise it said le Mariage de Loti. Imagine my feelings. That trip of three thousand miles I had to take just to get it.”
(It will be recalled that Julian Viaud owes his pseudonym to the Thitian people, who in 1872 named him Pierre Loti, loti meaning “rose” in Thitian.)
And so John and Louise left for Tahiti. John said that on the boat he encountered a fellowppassenger carrying another worl by Loti.. “For heaven’s sake, ” John told him, “don’t let my wife see that book!” Its title: Vers Ispahan (Towards Isfahan).
Louise has already described the essentials of their Tahitian journey, which lasted six months (cf. The Bahá’í World, III, p. 368). Prefacing the story, Louise writes that as a child she had learned from Robinson Crusoe that the Polynesians were cannibals and would “eat their enemies that they killed in warfare. So I mad eup my mind that if I ever grew up and traveled I woul dgive Polynesia a wide sweep . . . . But after having read ‘Abdu’l-Bahá’s words on Polynesia I was not afraid any more and after a most interesting thing happening . . . it came about all by itself and unsought for the both John and I went to that very part of the world . . . . ”
The first Tahitian Bahá’í was Ariane Drollet, a girl of nineteen.
John remembered things for me, sharp details. When they arrived, their trunks were taken from the ship to the hotel by wheelbarrow. At the hotel, there were no rooms; then a Mrs. Maui gave them her room. At a restaurant, the Tiarí, they met a young man named Martial Yorss; lunch times Louise would teach him the faith there. His wife was in the hospital. In Papeete, not long before the Boschs came, 3,500 persons had died out of a population of 7,000 from the black plague. They piled the dead in the streets and burned them. The Yorss’ four-year-old son had died, crying, “Oh maman, ne me laisse pas mourir—ne me mets pas dans ce trou noir!” (Oh mother, do not let me die—do not put me in this black hole!”) It was Martial Yorss who first translated Bahá’í writings into Thitian; the “number nine” pamphlet, but owing to various difficulties this never got beyond the proofreading stage.
The head minister, Pomeret, was against the faith, but a Protestant minister named Paul Deane was for it. Pomeret warned Deane agaist the Boschs. Pomeret said, “You’re too old to embrace a new Faith.” Deane answered: “I may be old, but my tongue is young.”
Deane studied Some Answered Questions, Dealy, Chase. He encouraged Ernest Marchal to study. He was seventy, deane was.
When friends are about to leave, the tahitioans give them names; John’s was: Teriitahi Papeete—“First King of the great family of Bahá’ís arrived among us.”
“They were all beautiful to me,” John said, “I like their dark skin. Theya re very generous; give away all their possessions.”
John told me about the beautiful madame Tepore, a leading personage, who lived on Mooria island. They went to visit her in a small gasoline boat, perhaps thirty feetl ong. When they were five kilometers out in the open oceanm their engine gave out. John says there was wonderful sand and wonderful fresh fish at Mooria Island, and the ocean was warm. They would talk to her in French about ‘Abdu’l-Bahá, and she would say, “Oh Jehovah!” “She loved us very much. When we returned to papeete, the first passenger on the little boat was an immense pig—the second was the minister—then some Chineese—then we followed.“ Madame Tepori stood on the pier, tears streaming, with outstretched arms— in white, against the dark, wooded mountains, two doves flying over her. “She had beautiful feet—always walked barefooted.”
Louise brought the people of Tahiti into the Master’s presence, on almost the last day of Hies earthly life. She placed before Him the photograph of a Thitian lady; he asked who it was; she said, the wife of a chilftain whose descendants have listened to the Bahá’í Message. He answered, “She was a good tree, she has borne good fruit!”
John Bosch was one of those whom ‘Abdu’l-Bahá chose as a companion for the time when He should leave the world. Afterward, the friends saw that the Master knew the moment of His passing and had prepared for it. He had tried to make them ready. Some who had asked permission to visit Him at that time, He gently turned away. But to John He had written, “I am longing to see you,” and when John and Louise, responding, asked to come, His cable replied; “Permitted.” They reached Haifa about November 13, 1921.
John was present on November 19 at the Master’s last public talk; ‘Abdu’l-Bahá pointed to John on this occasion and addressed the talk to him: the Master spoke of divine love, and how different it is from human love, which fails in the testing and in which there is no element of self-sacrifice. He told John that the Persian believers loved Him, although they could not voice their love, and that if John went to Persia they would if necessary give up their own lives to protect his. ‘Abdu’l-Bahá said: “When lovers meet it may be that they cannot exchange a single word, yet with their hearts they speak to one another. Thus do the clouds speak to the earth and the rain comes down; the breeze whispers to the trees; the sun speaks to the eyes of men. Although this is not actual speech yet this is the way in which the hearts of friends talk together. . . . . For instance, you were in America and I was in the Holy Land. Although our lips were still yet with our hearts we were conversing together.” (Cf. Star of the west, October, 1922.)
Surely besides the universal meaning, there was a special message here for John, something for him to remember during the long years that were to pass before he could again be in the presence of ‘Abdu’l-Bahá: “You were in America and I was in the Holy Land. Although our lips were still yet with our hearts we were conversing together.” When nine days had passed, John had once again to speak with ‘Abdu’l-Bahá in the words of his heart.
Three days before the last, John was in the garden and all at once he saw ‘Abdu’l-Bahá. “He walked as straight as if he had been a young man. He looked very well and strong. Erect. He walked like a general. When we had made one short round, about fifty steps, He left me. He went up to the garden, and came down and brought me a tangerine. In English he said: ‘Eat . . . Good’ I didn’t do like the Americans and put it away for a keepsake. I peeled it and ate it and put the peelings in my pocket.” This was the last time John spoke with the Master.
John and Louise told me many things about the time of the passing of ‘Abdu’l-Bahá. But they are not to be written here. Words are intrusive, and while they grope, mysteries pass on before them.
I know that John kept a vigil with members of the Household (the Greatest Holy Leaf) in the room from two to four that early dawn, kneeling by the bed, then sitting on the divan along the window. Once he rose, went to the bedside, and said, “Oh, ‘Abdu’l-Bahá!” John told me: “I still hoped he lived.”
John was present with members of the Household as the sacred casket was shut down. He helped to close it. John said he knew the living Master was there with them. “I felt he was there. Not in the body—even now I feel that again—His presence. I am sure he was there.” When others raised the casket up, John didn’t understand, but he did as the others, and lifted it to his right shoulder. Then all at once he remembered how, long before, ‘Abdu’l-Bahá had leaned down on his left shoulder and gone to sleep; and now, this time, the Master’s head was resting on his right shoulder. “It couldn’t have been planned,” John said.
On the long way up Mt. Carmel, Sir Herbert Samuel and the Chief of Police walked directly ahead of him. Once John looked back, and saw all the carriages, empty and left behind: the ten thousand mourners were all coming on foot, although the cortege took an hour and five minutes to reach the Shrine. Once when the tall Sir Herbert stopped suddenly, John stubbed against his heel; afterward he recalled the gentlness with which Sir Herbert asked his pardon.
John told me that already by seven that morning soldiers were lined up on both sides of the street and some were in the Master’s compound. As John had entered, on the left going up the steps, he saw an Arab soldier standing guard; the man was leaning on is gun and the tears streamed down his face.
They were always together, John and Louise, working, consulting. If Louise wrote a letter, she read it to John, and then she re-wrote it, incorporating his suggestions. In the middle of the night, if Louise happened to be staying at the old ranch house and John at the new, Louise would worry about John; she would coook him a rapid dish of scrambled eggs, and then, in heavy boots and poking the dark with her flashlight, would guide herself precariously throught he night, under the trees, over the bridge, to wake John up and feed him.
Summers their home was overrun with people crowding to the School. A few would come later, during the empty weeks after school closed, when the autumn hangs like a weight on the hills, and leaves drift down the shallow river; the prunes, ready for picking, are blue then.
After a while it became an accepted thing that John was ill. It lasted anyhow two years, with the good days and the bad ones. I saw him once during the long, last illness. He was propped up in the big bed; he was crisp and immaculate as usual, his beard rippling down like silken white over light pongee pajamas. Louise had turned his bed away from the California light, because his eyes were sore. I wondered what he looked at in his mind. The hills of home, maybe: wooded hills, wooden houses, the big white church of neu-St. Johann; across the road from the church, and separated from it by other buildings, a commodious three-story white house, set in trees on a corner lot— the house where John was born. Criss-cross of roads on thehills, dotting white houses; the white clouds, the warm security of the long Swiss valley.
I talked, stupidly and artificially as you do to sick people; it is another language, not yours, a kind of sick-room pidgin, since a sickness is its own world and you are a foreigner in it. Some of the time he knew we were there; anyhow, he could feel our anxiety for him; and once there was a flash of his old humor.
“That’s a handsome bed, John,” I told him.
“It looks better from the outside, ” he said.
He died at one0thirty in the morning, July 22, 1946. he almost rounded out his ninety-first year. On the 24th, they gave him a memorial burial. Louise writes: “Leroy Ioas was the speaker and the Message of the Coming of Bahá’u’lláh that Leroy renderd so wonderfully was the glory of this funeral. The Message was all so delicately disclosed and so eloquently revealed by Leroy to a deeply silent and attentively-listening audience of townspeople, relatives and friends . . . [in] the Auditorium where in front of the stage the body was lying in state. . . . Everything had been so perfectly arranged by the beloved friends that one could have thought it was a king who had died.” The Master once told John that the Persians loved him; there were many Persians there, at his burial; two of them, ’Alí Yazdí and Shídán Fath-A’zam, helped to carry his coffin. Tributes and flowers came in profusion, and about one hundred and fifty persons were there to say good-by.
From Haifa, the Guardian cabled to the National Spiritual Assembly—in addition to his personal cable to Louise: (“Deeply grieve great loss his magnificent spirit. Services immortal. Assure you loving sympathy fervent prayers. Shoghi.”) “Profoundly grieve passing dearly beloved, great-hearted, high-minded, distinguished servant (of) Bahá’u’lláh, John Bosch. His saintly life, pioneer services, historic contribution institution summer school entitle him rank among outstanding figures closing years heroic, opening years formative age Bahá’í Dispensation. Concourse on high extol his exalted services. Assure wife and valiant companion deepfelt sympathy. Advise hod special gathering Temple tribute his imperishable memory.” Rúhiyyih Khánum cabled Louise: “My father joins me deepest loving sympathy passing beloved John.” The Guardian wrote, through Rúhiyyin Knánum, to Mrs. E. C. Newell who had helped take care of John during his last days and had written o the Guardian on behalf of louise: “No doubt, when the Cause spreads more throughout Switzerland, this fatherland of his will grow to be proud of this historic and noble soul it produced; even though the best days of his life were spent in America. The influence of such a pure spirit grows as time goes by and he wishes you to assure dear Mrs. Bosch that the services she and her husband have rendered the Faith are very great and very deeply valued by him.”
George Orr Latimer, who spoke at the memorial in the Temple, said of him: “John, to those of us who remain behind, is like a comrade who rides ahead to link us with his eternity. He has found the trail out yonder and will be there to greet us when we are called to go. . . . ” Bijou Straun wrote: “His reputation in Sonoma County . . . was such that when a dispute arose between farmers both sides would choose John as a mediator and be willing to abide by his decision. . . . he was essentially a country man, in no sense a city man. He loved his home at Geyserville.”;
September, 1947. The country had never been as it was the spring after John died. All green and dancing. Copious rains fell and the light was liquid and the colors all running together. Pink ostrich-feather trees came out; fruit blossoms trickled away, until evenings, the orchards were faint materializations in the dim moonlight. When it cleared, the strange brightness reasserted itself, Sonoma County light, a white glow with the colors suspended in it. That spring was all smoke and blue iris along the roads and bird calls.
I thought, he is really more present than before, up here in the valleys and on the hills. He spoke so little in life, and generally told you things that you could understand without words. He spoke with his love and his silence, and they are here.
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Dedication of the Bosch Bahá’í School
From Bahá’í News, 1974, by Marzieh Gail
A simple dedication ceremony for the new John and Louise Bosch Bahá’í School was conducted by the National Spiritual Assembly at the new 67-acre campus in Santa Cruz, California on July 13. Approximately 400 people attended, among them Hand of the Cause William sears, and Mr. Amoz Gibson, a member of The Universal House of Justice.
The Bosch School was purchased as a replacemnt for the Geyserville school, which closed after nearly 50 years of service, to make way for an expanded California state highway system. Many older believers, whose childhood summers were spent at Geyserville, were among those attending the dedication of the Bosch school, named for the distinguished teachers and pioneers who donated the Geyserville property to the Bahá’í Faith in the 1920’s.
Negotiations to purchase the $375,000 Bosch school were begun soon after the National Spiritual Assembly knew that the Geyserville property would have to be abandoned to the state. While the negotiations were still in progress, the 1973 Geyserville summer session was held in rented facilities near Santa cruz. The first summer session began on the same weekend the school was dedicated.
The Bosch school is located sixteen miles north of Santa Cruz, at the north end of Monterey Bay. On the property are large stands of redwood, fir, oak, and madrone, stretches of open rolling land, and a small lake. From several vantage points on the grounds, set at an altitude of approximately 2,000 feet, the Pacific Ocean five miles distant is clearly visible.
The main lodge is equipped with a dining hall for seventy people, a fuly appointed commercial kitchen, game room, snack bar, and a dressing and locker room for the heated 30x60-foot swimming pool. In addition to the lodge, the campus has ten individual cabins (nine of them with fireplaces), three duplex cabins, and three completely separate homes. There is sufficient space at the school for 125 people.
The old Geyserville property was located 90 miles north of San Francisco, on 80 hilly acres near the Russian River. Highway modifications aqnnounced by the state of California during the 1950’s would have brought an amplified highway to within 100 yards of the main classroom building.
The dedication of the Bosch school on Saturday, July 13, had as much to do with Geyserville as it did with the new campus. The speakers frequently referred to the new school as a resurrection of its predecessor institution, as a transplantation of an old diamond to a new setting. The ceremony seemed calculated to both reassure the the believers old enough to recalla nd treasure the heritage of Geyserville of the intrinsic value of the new, and to introduce those recently drawn to the Cause to the value of the old in defining the direction in the expansion of the new. The nascent Bosch school was lashed tightly to the memory of Geyserville with the strong cords of Bahá’í history. Continuities were established, connections were demonstrated. In the end, the dedication of the new facility did indeed seem to represent the reestablishment of Geyserville in a more enhancing context, free from the blight threatened by a distorted view of human progress.
The continuum established between Geyserville and the Bosch school was evident in the act of dedication itself. A bronze plaque that for many years had informed visitors to Geyserville that the redwood grove in which they stood was consecrated to the memory of the late Hand of the Cause of God Leroy Ioas,was moved to a similar grove on the Santa Cruz property, which in like fashion was devoted to the memoryof Mr. Ioas. “This is not a new action,” Dr. Firuz Kazemzadeh said on behalf of the National Spiritual Assembly. “It is the transplantation of an action, a spirit, and an attitude . . . We Bahá’í’s draw strength from our past, but not in order to contemplate the past in perpetuity. The strength of our past, the inspiration of our history, serve as the building blocks of our future.”
In his presentation on that quiet California Saturday afternoon, Dr. Kazemzadeh outlined for his audience the origins of the Bosch school, which he found int he exemplary life of John and Louise Bosch, well-loved by the Master, and in the important associations of the Boschs’ Geyserville property with the early development of the cause in North America. Returning to the thought that in our past we can find the themes that will explain and help “This Bahá’í sense of history is an importnat element in th eway Bahá’í’s see the world. We talk about progressive revelation, which is actually a historic view of revelation. We believe in newness, in progress; but we also believe in continuity. We do not believe that the new faith abolishes the Faith of the past, we believe that in order to succeed today, one must have laid a firm foundation yesterday. We know that all time is a chain stretching from yesterday until tomorrow. And so today it is appropriate for us to take a look back tot he origins of the John and Louise Bosch School.”
Many of the outstanding Bahá’ís from an earlier period in America came to geyserville—famous among them for its spirit—and on hillsides, and among plum orchards, they discussed the Faith and taught “homemade” courses, he recalled. This distinguished company included such names as Ella Cooper, Leroy Ioas, Amelia Collins, George latimer, William Sears, and Charlotte Linfoot, he said. Miss Linfoot, the member of the National Assembly with the longest tenure, followed him to the rostrum.
No one had any idea, she said, that geyserville would ever become what it did. “We knew that we were going to have wonderful opportunities to hear more about the faith, but we had no idea as we went to this school year after year, that it would become a truly international institution, and that so many people would leave from there to pioneer and open so many parts of the world tot he Faith.” Though Geyserville had been dear to thehearts of all who came within the orbit of its influence and rhythm, the hearts of the Bahá’ís would have to grow also to encompass the new school they dedicated to service that day., Miss Linfoot said. “This school will be a living tribute to the memories that were so strong ans lasting at Geyserville,” she said.
The Hand of the Cause William sears, speaking at the dedication, said it was a special day for the Bahá’ís, to dedicate a new school in the presence of a member of the Universal House of Justice. He said we could not enjoy the pleasures of such momentous gathering without befitting action. John and Louise Bosch were examples to us in everything, he shared . . . the opportunity to follow in their footsteps and emulate their great deeds.
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