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T. Harry Williams Center for Oral History
How his father’s cousin misjudged the Rapture
George Braxton by Stephanie Dragoon, 2015.
GEORGE BRAXTON: For some reason, this thing around the rapture was what everybody talked. So that was dwelled upon a lot, the rapture. Well, now you got to realize this was, like, back in the 1920s, I think. You know, we didn’t have television . . . Well, a lot of people didn’t have radios. Most people didn’t have radios back . . . Nobody had electricity. Okay? So he [Braxton’s father’s cousin, Bud Lyons] was into the scripture and rapture. He was outside cutting wood one day and he heard this sound. He looked up and he saw this thing in the air coming. And in his mind, what he saw was the same way angels had been described. So he automatically in his mind thought the rapture was fixing to take place and the angels was coming down and he didn’t want to get left behind, okay? So he tried to get the attention of this thing he saw flying, and he couldn’t. So he ended up climbing on top of the house for a higher vantage point and he became so filled with the belief that he was going to ascend into the heavens with the rapture that he just jumped off the house and thought he was going to ascend and the angel . . . Well, he didn’t. He hit the ground. He broke an arm and a leg. He later found out that was an airplane he saw. [Laughs] That was the first airplane he ever seen in his life. [Laughs]
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