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Young Billy Frank was a big reader but a mediocre student who dreamed of becoming a big-league baseball player. But destiny had other plans for him, as Martin recounts in his exhaustively researched, revelatory biography A Prophet with Honor (Morrow). One day in 1934, 30 or so of the local farmers, squeezed by the Depression and despairing of their future, gathered at the Graham farm for a day of prayer. When Billy arrived home after school and saw the crowd in the grove, he explained to a friend, "Oh, I guess they are just some fanatics % who talked Dad into letting them use the place." Yet it was only a few months later that Billy had his own conversion experience. "I didn't have any tears, I didn't have any emotion, I didn't hear any thunder, there was no lightning," he says. "But right there, I made my decision for Christ. It was as simple as that, and as conclusive."
It didn't look exactly simple at first: he was turned down for membership in a church youth group on the grounds that he was "just too worldly." After graduation he enrolled at Bob Jones College, a Bible boot camp in Tennessee where hand holding was forbidden, and dating was limited to chaperoned chats in a public parlor. Between the rules and the course work, Graham soon found himself on the brink of expulsion and thought about transferring. The legendary Jones warned him about throwing his life away: "At best, all you could amount to would be a poor country Baptist preacher somewhere out in the sticks." Then he tempted him. "You have a voice that pulls," he told the young man. "God can use that voice of yours. He can use it mightily."
Such prophecy notwithstanding, Graham fled south to the Florida Bible Institute, where he could play golf and go canoeing and court a pretty classmate named Emily Cavanaugh. Her decision to break off their engagement hit Billy hard. "She wanted to marry a man who was going to amount to something," Graham's brother Melvin told Martin. The disappointment planted in Graham a determination to prove her wrong; it ripened alongside his commitment to discerning, and obeying, God's will. He would practice sermons aloud in old sheds or in a canoe in the middle of a lake. He ate a quarter- pound of butter a day to try to spread some bulk across his lanky frame, and he worked on his gestures and facial expressions as he traveled to tiny churches or declaimed outside saloons frequented by drunkards and prostitutes, sharing the Gospel.
Even early on, friends sensed in him an ability to move people that owed less to intellect than to the tug of sincerity. His sermons in those days were highly colorful and factually creative, to a point that would haunt him in later years. Heaven, he used to explain, measured 1,600 sq. mi.: "We are going to sit around the fireplace and have parties, and the angels will wait on us, and we'll drive down the golden streets in a yellow Cadillac convertible." Decades later, the vision has matured. "I think heaven is going to be a place beyond anything we can imagine, or anyone in Hollywood or . on Broadway can imagine," he says now. "There is a passage in Revelation that says we will serve God in heaven. We're not going to have somebody fan us or sit around on a beach somewhere."