Aimee Semple McPherson

Aimee Kennedy was a Canadian farm girl who married the evangelist Robert Semple at seventeen, sailed with him to China, and buried him there before she turned twenty, coming home with a newborn daughter. She started over preaching from a car she drove across the United States, and by 1923 she had built Angelus Temple in Los Angeles, seating 5,300, filling it three times on a Sunday. She preached with costumes, sets, and a brass band, took out one of the first radio licenses granted to a woman, and ran a commissary that fed hundreds of thousands through the Depression with no questions asked. In May 1926 she disappeared while swimming at Venice Beach and reappeared five weeks later in Mexico saying she had been kidnapped; a grand jury investigated, her critics said she had staged it, the charges were dropped, and the truth has never been settled. She died in 1944 of an accidental overdose of sedatives, and the movement she founded now spans some 150 countries.