Billy Graham

William Franklin Graham Jr. was born on a dairy farm outside Charlotte, North Carolina, on November 7, 1918. He was converted at sixteen under a travelling evangelist named Mordecai Ham. He milked cows before school, and said later that the discipline of it never left him. He studied at Bob Jones College, then Florida Bible Institute, then Wheaton College in Illinois, where he met Ruth Bell — the daughter of a missionary surgeon in China. They married in 1943 and stayed married sixty-four years, until her death in 2007. The decision that shaped everything came in a hotel room in Modesto, California, in 1948. Graham and his young team — Cliff Barrows, George Beverly Shea, Grady Wilson — sat down and listed the things that had wrecked other evangelists. Money. Sex. Exaggerated crowd numbers. Running down the local pastors. They wrote rules against all four. Graham took a fixed salary from then on and never handled an offering. He would not travel, meet, or eat alone with a woman other than his wife. The attendance figures he reported came from stadium officials, not from him. In a career of seventy years, no financial or moral scandal ever attached to him. His breakthrough was a tent campaign in Los Angeles in the autumn of 1949. It was scheduled for three weeks and ran eight. The newspaper chain owned by William Randolph Hearst is said to have sent its editors a two-word instruction: "Puff Graham." National coverage followed. Then came the cities. London in 1954 for twelve weeks. New York in 1957 — sixteen weeks at Madison Square Garden, ending in a crowd at Yankee Stadium. He insisted on integrated seating in the American South before the law required it, personally pulling down the ropes that divided the white and Black sections at a Chattanooga meeting in 1953, and he invited Martin Luther King Jr. to pray at the New York crusade. He preached in 185 countries. His organization put the number who heard him in person at around 215 million, with hundreds of millions more by radio, television, and satellite. He held meetings behind the Iron Curtain — Moscow in 1982, which drew heavy criticism, and again in 1992 — and in North Korea. He counseled every American president from Harry Truman to Barack Obama, a closeness he later said had sometimes cost him; the Nixon tapes caught him in remarks about Jews that he publicly repented of in 2002. His message never moved. The Bible says. You are a sinner. Christ died for you. Come. He left the road in 2005 after a final New York crusade, weakened by Parkinson's disease, and lived quietly at Montreat, North Carolina. He died there on February 21, 2018, at ninety-nine, and was buried in a plain plywood coffin built by inmates at the Louisiana State Penitentiary. Sources: Billy Graham, Just As I Am; William Martin, A Prophet with Honor: The Billy Graham Story; Grant Wacker, America's Pastor: Billy Graham and the Shaping of a Nation; the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association's published crusade records.