Iowa State: The Nudist Christian Church (really!)

It started before I got to Iowa State but I don’t know when. All I know was that as I was going through my first semester at State, I’d walk down Welch towards campus and there at the corner of Welch and Lincoln Way would be this smelly bearded guy trying to hand out flyers and pamphlets on the corner and he was always touting ‘The Nudist Christian Church’.

Really.

He referred to himself as the pope or bishop or something like that and said he was always recruiting new members. I never knew anyone who admitted belonging though one of the guys in Lancelot (7th Floor, Wallace Hall) had a tie-dye Nudist Christian t-shirt. The guy’s name was “Zevs Cosmos”–God only knows what his actual name was. By late October, Cosmos disappeared. I was told that was normal, that he went to southern states for the winter and he’d be back again once the weather warmed up.

Cosmos never came back. I was told he decided Iowa wasn’t welcoming to nudism. Someone said Cosmos claimed he’d talked with God and Cosmos was now building a nudist colony in Arizona.

*** Now, to be clear, I think Cosmos was batty, absolutely positively mentally ill, but…for some reason when he popped into my mind this morning, I was struck by similarities to a different bearded itinerant preacher–a guy named Rasputin who held some views quite parallel to Zevs Cosmos. I guess Zevs was just born at the wrong time–maybe he was a century late…maybe he was forty years early (if you look at some church leaders today).

What I really wish is that I had one of those Nudist Christian shirts–or at least a photograph of one, a reminder of a brief craziness that hasn’t mattered in the direction life has taken me but when it pops into my mind, still causes me to shake my head in amazement at the world around me.