Tammy Faye's Childhood Was Much SADDER Than You Knew

Before the eyelashes, the mascara and The PTL Club, Tammy Faye Bakker was Tamara Faye LaValley, the oldest of eight children in a tiny house with no bathroom in International Falls, Minnesota. Her parents were both Pentecostal preachers, her father left when she was about three, and the church treated her divorced mother in a way Tammy Faye never forgot and finally put in print in her 1978 book, I Gotta Be Me. This is the true story of Tammy Faye's childhood: the outhouse, the tub from the garage, the stepfather who raised her, the church rule that said makeup would get her struck dead, and the night at ten years old that decided her whole life. Jim Bakker died on October 5, 2026, at 86, sixty-five years after he married the girl from the Falls. Follow Tammy Faye from her Pentecostal upbringing to Falls High School, the fiancé she left behind, the Greyhound bus to North Central Bible College in Minneapolis, meeting Jim Bakker, why they had to leave college, their April Fools' Day wedding in 1961 that neither family attended, their first jobs and first apartment, and what finally happened to the mother her church once condemned. 🔔 Subscribe for the real stories behind the legends, every week. 💬 Did you grow up in a church as strict as Tammy Faye's? Tell us in the comments. #TammyFaye #JimBakker #TammyFayeBakker