The Source Family (Father Yod / James Edward Baker)

James Edward Baker (July 4, 1922 – August 25, 1975) was a former Marine, Hollywood stuntman, and restaurateur who reinvented himself as "Father Yod" and later "YaHoWha," patriarch of the Source Family commune. Baker claimed to have earned the Silver Star during World War II, though the Marine Corps' official list of recipients does not carry his name; he also claimed extensive jujutsu and judo credentials. After studying Vedanta and, later, Kundalini Yoga under Sikh teacher Yogi Bhajan, Baker broke from Bhajan in the late 1960s and developed his own teaching, blending Western esoteric tradition with Aquarian-Age millenarianism.

In 1969 Baker opened The Source, an organic vegetarian restaurant on the Sunset Strip that drew celebrity regulars including John Lennon, Julie Christie, and Marlon Brando and reportedly grossed $10,000 a day at its peak; he had already run two other Strip restaurants, the Aware Inn and the Old World. Around the restaurant, Baker assembled a residential commune that took over a former Hollywood Hills mansion built for LA Times publisher Harry Chandler, in Los Feliz, reaching a core membership of roughly 140–150 people by the early 1970s. Members adopted new names, lived communally, and followed Baker's dietary and lifestyle rules. Baker had one legally recognized wife, Robin Popper (married 1970, daughter Tau born 1974), but the group's internal record names fourteen women as his "spiritual wives" — Makushla, Isis, Astral, Heaven, Prism, Aquariana, Harvest Moon, Galaxy, Lovely, Paralda, Hypatia, Tantalayo, Venus, and Robin herself (renamed Ahom). The commune's house band, Ya Ho Wha 13, with Baker as frontman, produced a substantial catalogue of psychedelic devotional rock later reissued and studied by music historians.

In December 1974 the Family sold the restaurant and relocated to Hawaii. On August 25, 1975 — a date the group still refers to as "Black Monday" — Baker, who had no prior hang-gliding experience, launched off a roughly 1,300-foot cliff on Oahu's eastern shore. He crash-landed on the beach without visible external injury but could not move, and died nine hours later at age 53. The group dispersed in the aftermath.

Two former members, Isis Aquarian and Electricity Aquarian, published an oral-history account, "The Source: The Untold Story of Father Yod, Ya Ho Wa 13 and The Source Family," in 2007, and the group's archive underpins Jodi Wille and Maria Demopoulos's 2012 documentary "The Source Family." Sean Ono Lennon has credited the group's aesthetic as an influence on his own work, and the original Source restaurant was referenced in Woody Allen's "Annie Hall" (1977). With Baker dead for five decades and no surviving successor organisation, the case functions today mainly as a documented historical example of 1970s Los Angeles guru-led communal living rather than an active concern.