End of the world fails to materialize; Camping 'a little bewildered'

BY CHRISTOPHER GOFFARD LOS ANGELES TIMES, Staff Writer

LOS ANGELES -- Sue Espinoza was planted before the television, awaiting news of her father's now-infamous prediction: cataclysmic earthquakes auguring the end of humanity.

God's wrath was supposed to begin in New Zealand and then race across the globe, leaving millions of bodies wherever the clock struck 6 p.m. But the hours ticked by, and New Zealand survived. Time zone by time zone, the apocalypse failed to materialize.

On Saturday morning, Espinoza, 60, received a phone call from her father, Harold Camping, the 89-year-old Oakland preacher who has spent $100 million -- and countless hours on his radio and TV show -- announcing May 21 as Judgment Day. "He just said, 'I'm a little bewildered that it didn't happen, but it's still May 21 (in the United States),'" Espinoza said, standing in the doorway of her Alameda home. "It's going to be May 21 from now until midnight."

But to others who put stock in Camping's prophecy, disillusionment was profound by late morning. To them, it was clear the world and its woes would make it through the weekend.

Keith Bauer, a 38-year-old tractor-trailer driver from Westminster, Md., took last week off from work, packed his wife, young son and a relative in their SUV and crossed the country.

By late afternoon, a small crowd had gathered in front of Camping's Oakland headquarters. There were atheists blowing up balloons in human form, which were released into the sky just after 6 p.m. in a mockery of the rapture. Someone played a CD of "The End" by the Doors, amid much laughter.

There were also Christians, like James Bynum, a 45-year-old deacon at Calvary Baptist Church in Milpitas, holding signs that declared Harold Camping a false prophet. He said he was there to comfort disillusioned believers.

"Harold Camping will never hand out poisoned Kool-Aid," Bynum said. "It's not that kind of a cult. But he has set up a system that will destroy some people's lives."