Evangelist Billy Graham leaves the White House
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He was born 36 years ago in a weather-boarded log house on a farm near Charlotte, N.C. Billy Frank, as everyone called him, began milking when he was eight on his father's prosperous. 200-acre dairy farm, getting up at 3 a.m. to do it. But when he was 14, he went tooling about in the family car any time he wanted. "I was pretty wild in those days," he confessed once. "All I thought about was girls and baseball." But the girls he thought about and dated were "good" girls. "I never touched a girl in the wrong way, and I thank God for it."
In 1934, Mordecai Fowler Ham, a fiery-eyed, long-fingered Kentucky revivalist, began to blaze away at Charlotte from a tabernacle on the edge of town. Billy Frank Graham somehow sensed that he was a sitting duck for Mordecai Ham, and carefully stayed away. Finally, at his mother's urging, Billy went to the tabernacle with his good friend. Grady Wilson. For a week the two boys quailed under the gimlet gaze of Mordecai. who seemed to be searching out their most secret sins. Then they joined the choir so they could stand behind him, but there was no hiding place. After the second week. Billy gave up. Quietly, he left his seat and walked down to stand in prayer, with Grady Wilson right beside him. "I opened up my heart then," he says, "and knew for the first time the sweetness and joy of God, of truly being born again."
Nobody seemed to see any particular change in Billy. The only foretaste of his future pre-eminence came in the summer after high school, when he became a Fuller brush salesman. He not only outsold every other salesman in North Carolina but the district sales manager as well.
After failing at Bob Jones College, Billy went to the Florida Bible Institute near Tampa. Still, he might never have become a preacher—his marks at the institute were poor—if he had not met Emily Cavanaugh.
Decision on the Golf Course. Emily was as beautiful as she was good, and Billy fell head over heels in love with her. Things seemed to be going well enough between them until one October night, when she told him that she wanted to marry a servant of God who would do big things—and it was clear to her that Billy would never amount to much. Instead, she had decided to marry a fellow student who was going to Harvard Divinity School.
Billy was desolate. That night he prowled the school golf course praying and weeping, and at last made a fateful decision: he would devote his life fulltime to God.
To get preaching practice. Billy began at a Tampa mission for derelicts, drunks and dope addicts. His first church sermon came on Easter evening in 1938, and was a dismal flop. But Billy went on practicing —mostly exhorting the fish and alligators of a nearby swamp to leave their evil ways and be saved. He preached his first real revival at the Baptist Church of East Palatka, Fla. in June 1939. Halfway through the week-long series, word spread that Preacher Graham, nominally a Presbyterian, had never been immersed. One look at the shocked and sour faces before him and Billy was inspired to announce that he would be baptized at the revival's end along with his own new converts. No less than Si converts were baptized. Says Billy: "That was the first little inkling I had that maybe the Lord could use me in evangelism."