TROUBLED MINISTER SAYS GOD CHOSE HIM TO SUFFER

SUSIE SPEAR

USA TODAY

LUCEDALE, Miss. - The Rev. Herman Fountain was so lonely as a school boy that he tried to buy friends with his lunch money, recalls his mother.

"He was so free of heart then," says Mrs. John Fountain, who lives about three miles from the Bethel Home for Children that is run by her son.

But today, Fountain says his heart is heavy. The fundamentalist preacher says debts and lawsuits are smothering him, while many in this country town of 2,500 shun him.

Fountain, 41, tells how his telephone, electricity, gas, water and sewerage have been cut off.

"We're living day by day, minute by minute," he says. "We're $30,000 behind. We're just spending money on groceries."

Then his eyes flash with defiance as he adds, "We have never closed this place down, and they'll have to kill me to do it. I'm willing to die."

Fountain has been locked in court battles for a decade now. He refuses to comply with a 1989 state law requiring home operators like himself to give the state Health Department the names of staff members, children and their parents. Just last week, the state Supreme Court rejected his efforts to delay enforcement until he can appeal to the Supreme Court.

"We have not given up pursuing this," says Special Assistant Attorney General Stephanie Ganucheau. "However, at this point we have not got enough good information to warrant us making a spectacle of ourselves, appearing we're on a witch hunt trying to single him out."

Fountain also has fought off accusations in and out of court that he abused, neglected and sexually molested children in his care.

A graduate of the Pensacola, Fla., Bible Institute, Fountain says he's been able to "spiritually reach" and discipline more than 1,000 children since opening Bethel in 1978 because of his firsthand knowledge of delinquency.

"I was pretty wild," Fountain says of his childhood spent in the working class south side of Oklahoma City. "I started smoking Marlboros by the time I was 9.

"I ain't got veins in my arms from where I shot up heroin. I used LSD, speed, marijuana ... Demerol, morphine, Dilaudid. I still have the desire for drugs. The only reason I don't smoke dope is because the Lord doesn't want me to."

Fountain says he finally turned to the Lord while using drugs on a couch in a New York City apartment in November 1973. Five years later, he opened the children's home.

"We parked a 25-foot camper right here on this ground and began to build," says Fountain, who came to Lucedale with his wife, Carol, their four children and three other youngsters. Today, seven buildings are their handiwork.

But, "it's like a ghost town now," he says. "At one time, this place was loaded. ... I'm getting over the shock now. The really rough parts are watching this place deteriorate, and the time when they were first gone," he said, referring to the June 1988, court-ordered removal of children from the home.

Discipline and physical labor were the recipe for reform of "spiritually starved" kids whose "failed" parents once left them with Fountain for about $750 in annual tuition, he says.

Kids who strayed from Bethel's straight path knew they'd be punished, Fountain says.

"When a child misbehaves, you don't have time to call the Welfare Department and ask permission to spank him," he says.

Asked if he ever left welt marks on a child, Fountain said, "Yes, there were some blistered hind ends."

It was Fountain's use of physical punishment that brought charges of abuse.

Former George County welfare worker Shirley Roberts says she felt "hopelessness" and "frustration" after almost 10 years of working with Bethel children who claimed they had been abused.

"I've seen evidence of physical abuse on children who came out of the home," Roberts says, listing black eyes, bruises, welt marks and switch marks.

The state has a right to information about Bethel and the children it houses, says Keith Scott, a local anesthetist. The ordained United Methodist minister says that in the late 1980s he acted as a foster parent for a former Bethel resident.

"He (the child) expressed great fear and said he had been abused over there," Scott said. "He did have a place on his chest where the skin was broken and he claimed he had been hit with a paper stapler."

God chose him, Fountain says, to endure assaults on his family and the state's legal assaults on his ministry.

Unlike the school boy who tried to buy friends, today Fountain says he is fulfilled and happy as a messenger of God.

His eyes hard and bright, Fountain leans forward and says: "Sometimes I get tired. This is a rugged life for me, but I'm compelled to do this. I have no choice."