In Search of Edith Roller
I first met Edith in the pages and pages of journals that she wrote in the 1970s. She recorded what time she woke up, what she ate, the distances of her runs, what she was reading, and what time she went to bed. I found her meticulous recording keeping intriguing, but not all that different from apps that want you to record your calorie intake and exercise. She maintained throughout her journals a kind of objective distance, what seemed like an attempt to record her daily routines and encounters for history.
Little is known about Edith’s early life, and what we think we know about her life has never really been verified. According to her obituary, she was born in Colorado in 1915, went to the Colorado State Teachers College in Greeley, served for the United Nations in Greece, perhaps worked for the Office of Strategic Services (later to become the CIA), and returned to civilian life by obtaining a Master’s degree in Creative Writing from San Francisco State. She worked at SF State as the secretary of the academic senate until she resigned in protest of a new administration that she called “fascist.”
This bold last step would bring her into the orbit of Jim Jones who would adoringly call her “the Professor,” and give her the task of recording her experience in the Peoples Temple in San Francisco and their Agricultural Project in Guyana, which would become better known as Jonestown. Like over 900 of her fellow congregants, Edith would die at Jonestown in 1978 drinking the lethal mixture of cyanide and Flavor-aid. Yet through the ups and downs of the Peoples Temple and their political (mis)fortunes, Edith was there keeping track of the meetings, Jones sermons, their political protests, right alongside what time she woke up and who she at dinner with.
Yet what do we really know about Edith Roller and how do we know it. The obituary I mentioned earlier was no official record of her death, it was a web notice on FindAGrave.com, not the most reliable source of historical data!
