(2 of 10)
His face recalls his father's. the eyes are not so deep set; the jaw may not be quite so Rushmore ready. But the resemblance, if not deceiving, is striking. The voice, but for being perhaps a semiquaver deeper, is the very one that has moved millions. Yet evidence abounds of the Franklin Graham difference. In his office in Boone, North Carolina, are artifacts not associated with his father: the half-dozen military rifles mounted on the wall. A little way down the road stands his beloved Harley-Davidson Wide Glide. Hangared at a nearby airstrip is the six-seat twin-turboprop Mitsubishi plane in which he logged 450 hours last year as a pilot. "If there's a machine or device that makes noise, goes fast and blows smoke," he has written, "I want to have one." Or at least try one out. In 1987 neighbors called the local sheriff when he took on the task of chopping down a neighbor's tree--with 720 rounds of machine-gun fire from a borrowed weapon. Not exactly the kind of Christian soldier one usually finds at a revival meeting.
He is a solid man, 6 ft. 1 in. and 208 lbs. He is polite, his yes sirs and no sirs bespeaking good breeding, a breeding that might be called hard fought. Franklin's father, always off on a crusade, was a distant if benevolent presence. The boy's rearing was left largely to his spirited mother Ruth. "Stubborn but never villainous" is her description of the result. Franklin began smoking as a child by picking up discarded butts, and it became a potent symbol of rebellion. Ruth at one point attempted aversion therapy by making him smoke a whole pack, but she hadn't reckoned on his strength of will: "By the time I finished all 20," he writes, "I must have vomited five or six times...but it gave me great satisfaction not to give in." On another occasion the mother, provoked beyond reason during a fast-food jaunt, locked her son in the car trunk. When she opened it again, he cheerily placed his order for "a cheeseburger without meat, French fries and a Coke."
High-spirited sparring gave way to something more sullen when Franklin was sent off to a Christian boarding school on Long Island, New York. "Whatever was expected of the student body, I wanted to do the opposite," he says. "I got a kick of staying one step ahead of the 'law.'" If Billy was the ultimate preacher, then Franklin made a run at being the ultimate Preacher's kid: fighting, taunting the police of Montreat into high-speed car chases and cultivating a fascination for firearms and rock music and a taste for hard liquor. By the time he managed to get himself expelled from a tiny technical college in Texas for keeping a girl out overnight (their plane was socked in by fog), it had already become clear that an addiction to piloting small airplanes was overwhelming any commitment to real study. At 19 he persuaded his father to let him deliver a Land Rover from London to a religious hospital in Jordan. He made the trip steering with one hand and brandishing a bottle of Scotch in the other.