Dawson Trotman clambered back into a motorboat one day last week after two hours of waterskiing on Schroon Lake, N.Y. He was dog-tired, but before he settled down he asked one of the two girls in the boat, Allene Beck, if she could swim; when she shook her head, he traded places with her so she would be in a safer spot. Minutes later the speeding boat bounced on a wave, and both of them, the 50-year-old man and the girl, shot into the water. He swam to her and held her head above water until the boat could circle back and she was hauled aboard. But as hands reached down to seize Trotman's hand, he sank out of sight.
So died Dawson Trotman, "the Navigator," light and power of a movement that echoes the words of the Scriptures around the world. Billy Graham interrupted his evangelist crusade in Oklahoma City to "preach his funeral" at Colorado Springs, Colo., and devoted his week's Hour of Decision broadcast to him. Radio Preacher Charles E. Fullen did the same with his Old Fashioned Revival Hour.
The Sailor & the Cop. At 18, Los Angeles-born Daws Trotman, as he later recounted, "gambled and was very deep in the world." He was courting a girl named Lila, as religious as she was pretty, and she took him with her to some church meetings. At the second meeting Dawson was the only one there who had memorized six Bible verses that had been assigned at the first meeting. The same thing happened at the third meeting. The following week he was "taken of the Lord," converted to evangelistic Christianity, and welcomed to membership in the interdenominational Church of the Open Door in Los Angeles.
Memorizing the Bible was the key to conversion, as Trotman saw it, so he handed out scores of Scriptures to youth groups he organized. One day in 1934 a mother asked him to look up her son, a sailor on a ship off Long Beach. Sitting in his old car by the waterfront, Trotman quoted the Bible to the boy until a policeman grew suspicious. A few minutes later, Trotman had talked the cop into joining him and the sailor in a session of prayer. The sailor said: "I'd give my right arm if I could do what you just did." Dawson challenged him to try.
It was the beginning of a movement that Trotman called the Navigators, for its nautical origins. For that sailor converted a friend with the technique he had learned from Dawson Trotman, and that convert in turn convinced another. Soon Navigators were spread across the seven seas. At one point during the war there were Navigators in more than 1,000 U.S. Navy ships and stations.
B Rations. Evangelist Graham urged Daws Trotman to join his Fort Worth crusade in 1951, and asked him how to keep people to their religious conviction once they had made their "decisions" and signed their pledge cards. Nav igator Trotman organized the system of Biblical instruction courses—"B Rations" (for Bible) of verses to be memorized. Graham and his team have used them ever since as the core of their system for following up Graham "converts" (TiME, Oct. 25, 1954).