Here Comes the Yogiman 103
with the help of Bagchi (now Swami Dhirananda) and published with the aid
of Satyananda and Bose. Soon thereafter, Yogananda set out from Calcutta to
Boston on The City of Sparta, arriving to deliver his lecture on October 6, 1920.
Yogananda spent the first two years of his American residency in Boston.
There, despite initially empty lecture halls, he managed to gather several key dis-
ciples who would be instrumental in the growth of his following and his later suc-
cess. Alice Hasey, later initiated by Yogananda into Kriya Yoga as Yogamata, was
particularly helpful in these early days, inviting Yogananda to live in her Boston
home. On Christmas Eve 1920, Yogananda met Dr. Minott W. Lewis, a Boston
dentist who, along with his wife Mildred, would become one of Yogananda’s ear-
liest and possibly closest American disciples. Mildred Lewis, who was a friend
of Alice Hasey, was actually the first to see Yogananda when the two women
attended one of his lectures at their local church. Yogananda would subsequently
live in the Lewis household for nearly three years.
During this time, Yogananda appeared regularly at Unitarian Churches in
the area and was eventually able to establish a small center overlooking Mystic
Lake. Wendell Marshall Thomas, who included Yogananda in the 1930 book
based on his doctoral dissertation, Hinduism Invades America, describes what
must have been a fairly typical lecture that he himself attended. The event was
held the Union Methodist Episcopal Church in New York City, cosponsored
by the Dharma Mandal, or Fellowship of Faiths. The main floor of the church
was “comfortably filled” with women and a “sprinkling” of men, some of whom
were Hindus. There was an organ recital, an Episcopal rector offered a prayer
for unity among men, and then a representative of the Dharma Mandal read a
short play. After a call for participants in a staging of the aforementioned play and
some advertisements of Yogananda’s books and an English universalist journal,
Yogananda was called up to speak:
Yogananda was introduced as an Indian lecturer, writer and philosopher.
As he rose from his seat in the audience to mount the platform, several
persons in the audience rose also, perhaps out of gratitude for some ben-
efit conferred by Yogoda, perhaps in honor of the spirituality of the East,
perhaps in accord with the Indian pupil’s respect for his master. The swami
is short and plump, with a striking face. His raven hair hung over his shoul-
ders in wavy locks— even longer than is usual among Bengalis— and he
wore the vivid orange over his Western attire. His first act was to read one
of his own poems, which he called “The Royal Sly Eluder,” a record of his
personal search for God in ocean, tree and sky, a search which ended in
hearing God’s voice within the soul, calling out “Hello, playmate, here am
I!” The swami’s voice was loud and clear, his pronunciation good. He then