Morrow neither suffered the doubts nor felt the exhilarations her husband had experienced. “I couldn’t tell you the day or hour when I was converted,” she would later say, “but I knew I was born again.” When the Grahams married, they dedicated their union to God, reading the Bible and praying together on their wedding night, and keeping the “family altar” each night in their home. The primary impetus for that practice seems to have come from Morrow, who thought it would be a positive influence for her new relatives. Even if they chose not to participate, which was usually the case, she recalled, “They knew it was going on.” From the start, at Morrow’s suggestion, the Grahams attended the Associate Reformed Presbyterian Church, a small sect whose rock-ribbed Calvinism featured complete acceptance of the literal truth of the Bible and full adherence to the seventeenth-century Westminster Confession of Faith. Morrow drummed Bible verses into Billy Frank’s head as she scrubbed his back in the washtub; fittingly, the first one she taught him was that great golden text of evangelism, John 3:16: “For God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have everlasting life.” She also kept a Scripture calendar on the breakfast-room wall, and each morning she tore off a verse the children were expected to memorize before they left for school or, during the summer, before they went out to play. “She wasn’t real, real strict about it,” Melvin recalled, “but she constantly kept it before us, so that if you didn’t do it, you’d get to feeling a little bit guilty.” Prayer accompanied every meal, of course, and each evening after dinner, the family gathered in the family room for further devotions. Morrow would read Scripture and other inspirational material, and Frank would pray. “He could really pray a good prayer,” Melvin says admiringly. “His hands would tremble and his voice would shake a little, but people used to love to hear him pray.” The children, as soon as they were old enough, would recite or read verses and offer simple prayers. By age ten, each child memorized the Shorter Catechism, a marvel of pedagogy that compresses the heart of Calvinist theology into 107 concise questions (“Are there more gods than one?”) and authoritative answers (“There is but one only, the living and true God”) and proclaims that “man’s chief end is to glorify God, and enjoy him forever.”
Though by no means entirely cheerless and gray, religion as practiced in the Graham household tended to find its form in rules to keep, its motive power in terrors to fear. On weekends Morrow cooked all of Sunday’s food on Saturday so that no work other than milking and feeding the cows needed be performed on the Lord’s day. The children observed a sabbatical ban on games and newspaper comics, and Melvin still recalls the amazement he felt when his father signaled the first break with this austere legalism by taking the family to an ice-cream parlor on the way home from church one Sunday evening. The major terrors were hell and a leather belt, but even religious diversion had ominous overtones. When Billy Sunday came to Charlotte in 1923, Frank took his five-year-old boy to hear him, but the only thing Billy remembers is that “my father said, ‘Be quiet, or he’ll call your name from the platform.’ I sat there frightened to death.” If the strictness of his upbringing produced a certain gravity in Billy Frank, it did not break his spirit or drain his energy. Early on, he learned to channel aggression into practical jokes and to allay anger by his ever-present and overwhelming affability. A school-bus driver whom he tormented by cutting off the vehicle’s external gas valve, making the bus sputter to a stop a few moments after the Graham children dismounted, admitted that “you couldn’t get mad at the skinny so-and-so.” A classmate concurred. “He just liked everybody so enthusiastically that everybody had to like him,” she recalled. “It was just this lovable feeling that he himself seemed to have for everybody. You couldn’t resist him.”
Because they lived in the country, the Graham children had few playmates. When he was about ten or eleven, Billy Frank solved this problem by developing an unexpected addiction to reading. “Read!” marvels Melvin, “he could outread anybody I ever saw!” He read Tarzan, then clamored into the woods to reenact the stories, usually casting Catherine and Melvin as obedient simians. He rode the purple sage with Zane Grey and explored distant lands with Marco Polo. And with the aid of an abridged edition of Gibbon’s classic Morrow found in a secondhand book shop, he traced The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire before he turned fourteen. Morrow also obtained, and Billy Frank seemed to enjoy, biographies of preachers and stories of brave missionaries in faraway lands. The hundreds of hours spent with books—in the hayloft, in his large, cluttered upstairs bedroom, or most often, lying on his back in the middle of the living room floor with his legs propped up on a chair and chewing his fingernails to the quick—did little to improve a generally lackluster performance in school (“He didn’t pick up his lessons too quick,” brother Melvin noted), but exposure to worlds beyond the Piedmont stirred a lifelong fascination with the unfamiliar and a longing to explore new territory. His appetite for learning also produced an abiding ability to listen intently when others were talking. When guests came to visit, he typically staked out the largest available chair and sat wide-eyed and wordless, gnawing his nails and soaking up every sentence.
As he grew, Billy Frank became a full-fledged member of the dairy’s workforce, rising at two-thirty or three o’clock to milk the cows, then returning from school to haul and pitch hay before it was time to milk again, and working in the fields during the hot, humid summers. Melvin relished these tasks and tagged along at his father’s side from early boyhood, eager to take his turn long before he was able. This pleased Frank Graham, who felt a real man would work with his hands, work hard, and like it. Billy Frank did as he was told, but only because he was told. To finish the job and get back to the house as quickly as possible, he became the fastest milker on the farm, but he never came to view manual labor as inherently virtuous. He did, however, learn and reap the benefits of diligence. The Grahams weren’t exactly wealthy, but they always had enough and the income was steady, so that even a bank failure that cost them their savings in 1933 put no real dent in a fairly comfortable lifestyle. In a 1964 autobiographical series for McCall’s, Graham wrote of “the hard red clay where my father eked out a bare existence.” But the reality was a good deal rosier. His schoolmates remember him as the most affluent member of their circle, and a former tenant recalls that Frank Graham confided to him in the middle of the Great Depression that the dairy was bringing in a clear profit of $500 a month, a sum roughly equivalent to an annual income of $50,000 in the 1990s. Frank also managed to augment his farm income by shrewd trades of cars and real estate. Melvin recalled that “Daddy might buy a car for a thousand dollars, drive it for a year, and sell it for fifteen hundred dollars. I was amazed. My daddy was my idol.”
When adolescence attacked, Billy Frank eagerly embraced its two leading attractions: baseball and girls. For several years, he spent most of his spare daylight hours on the ball field and dreamed the big-league dream— “That was just his life, to play ball”—but desire could not offset the lack of several crucial skills, most notably the ability to hit. He played first base on his high school team for a season, filled in for four innings with a semipro team, and shook Babe Ruth’s hand when the Bambino came through town on a barnstorming tour, but these were the high points of his diamond career. He had greater success with the girls. Catherine recalls that “he was in love with a different girl every day. He really did like the girls. And they liked him.” In appearance, he was as unfinished as a young giraffe. His pipe-cleaner limbs and narrow torso seemed almost too spindly to support the large head, but his broad smile and the blue laser eyes that flashed out from their dark surrounds gave him a unique appearance that if not yet handsome, was certainly arresting. In any case, access to his father’s car counted for more than a Charles Atlas frame and facilitated long pleasurable evenings in the company of young ladies. He acknowledges having enjoyed spending time with girls but insists that other liberties
remained in the realm of fantasy: “I never went any further. I never touched another woman till I was married, in any way beyond kissing.” He credits this triumph of virtue over hormones to parental influence, noting that Frank and Morrow Graham expected their children “to be clean, and never doubted that we would be. They trusted us and made us want to live up to their confidence.”
Effective as it was at filling young minds with Scripture and keeping their bodies pure, the legalistic piety practiced by the Grahams lacked the comforting assurance and energizing power of full-bore Evangelical religion. That changed, decorously but decisively, in 1933. The first shift came when Morrow’s sister, Lil Barker, urged her “to get down deep into the Word and see what God really has to say to you,” and persuaded her to attend an independent Bible class taught by a Mrs. Whitted. This class introduced her to the writings of such Evangelical giants as Arno Gaebelein and Donald Grey Barnhouse, whose books she acquired from mail-order houses in New York. It also introduced her to dispensationalist teachings, which she found fascinating. Encouraged by Lil and her husband, Simon, a fervent dispensationalist, Morrow eventually began attending evening Bible classes at the Plymouth Brethren Church, a sect once led by John Nelson Darby, the father of dispensationalist teaching. Frank’s difficulty with reading made Bible classes an unpromising avenue of spiritual growth, but the loss of his savings in the bank failure and a near-fatal farm accident, in which a chunk of wood thrown off by a mechanical saw smashed his face, underscored the essential fragility of life and moved him to take a more active interest in matters spiritual.
The following spring, in a desperate attempt to break free of the miasmic lassitude produced by the depression, with its merciless mortgage foreclosures, ruinous bank failures, and debilitating disappearance of businesses and jobs, a group of thirty or so members of the Charlotte Christian Men’s Club, a men’s group formed in the aftermath of Billy Sunday’s 1924 revival, met in a grove of trees in Frank Graham’s pasture for a daylong session of prayer and fasting. At the same time, Morrow hosted an all-day prayer meeting in her home. Standing, sitting or kneeling on blankets, and leaning against their cars, the men importuned God for some insight, some direction, some inspiration that would enable them to endure the doldrums in which they were adrift. In particular, they girded themselves for an evangelistic effort they hoped would generate some wave of vitality in what they regarded as Charlotte’s moribund spiritual life. The percentage of churchgoing folk in Charlotte was reportedly the highest in the nation, but these men felt the churches had become self-satisfied and smug, with little real concern for lost souls. As the intensity and confidence of their prayers began to mount, they called on God to use them “to shake up the whole state of North Carolina for Christ.” Before long they had expanded their horizons to include the entire world. No transcript of this session exists, but one shining arrow fired toward heaven in a moment of high aspiration has been recovered, perhaps polished a bit, and set aside like a museum piece. At some point, Vernon Patterson, the group’s leader, launched what must have seemed an improbable entreaty when he earnestly prayed that “out of Charlotte the Lord would raise up someone to preach the Gospel to the ends of the earth.” Surely, none of the modest group gathered there among the pines considered for a moment that the evangelist envisioned in that long-shot request was pitching hay into feed troughs a few hundred yards away, and no one would have been more surprised than he. When a friend who had come home with him after school asked why all the cars were there, Billy Frank told him, “Oh, I guess they are just some fanatics who talked Dad into letting them use the place.”
The revival for which the men were preparing stretched from late August to the Sunday after Thanksgiving and featured the vivid, fire-breathing preaching of a colorful old war-horse named Mordecai Ham. True to revivalist tradition, Brother Ham had a reputation for attacking the lethargy of the local clergy, which doubtless influenced the Charlotte ministerial association’s decision not to support his meeting. He also generated controversy and opposition (as well as approval) by anti-Semitic rantings and racist slurs so notable that newspaper editors sometimes urged him to leave their cities. In the Charlotte campaign, however, he seemed to have concentrated mostly on those durable touchstones of revival preaching: sin and salvation.
Perhaps because their minister was cool toward the revival, the Grahams did not attend for the first week or so, but Billy Frank eventually accepted an invitation from his father’s chief tenant, Albert McMakin, to drive a truckful of young people to the services. About the same time, Frank and Morrow also began attending, and the revival became the family’s major evening activity for the next two months. When he joined the 4,000 eager souls inside the sprawling sawdust-floored, tin-roofed, raw-pine tabernacle, Billy Frank quickly succumbed to the aroma of the evangelist’s sulfuric fulminations. “This man would stand up there and point his finger at you and name all the sins you had committed,” he recalled, years later. “It made you think your mother had been talking to him.” To avoid Ham’s penetrating gaze, Billy Frank joined the choir, despite a consensus view that he “couldn’t sing a lick.” There he sat down by Grady Wilson, who shared his nonmusical motivation. Grady and his older brother, T.W., were sons of a plumber who knew Frank Graham from the Christian Men’s Club and had been present at the prayer meeting on the Graham farm. T.W., often shortened just to T, was tall and handsome, with large, surprised eyes and an insouciant nose that a decade later, often caused people to mistake him for the popular young radio comedian, Bob Hope. Grady was shorter and stockier, with an open, happy face, an irrepressible enthusiasm, and a rustically humorous slant on life that enabled him to spot the comic wherever it existed and invent it where it did not. Billy Frank knew of the two boys but since they attended different high schools, they had never been around each other much until the revival. The friendship that grew out of experiences they shared on those cool fall evenings would endure for the rest of their lives.
As proprietor of a bulging mental storehouse of Scripture and vice-president of his church’s youth group, Billy Frank probably never imagined he was not a true Christian, but Ham’s preaching magnified his consciousness of sin, convincing him he had not fully surrendered his life to Christ. Finally, when the evangelist made his appeal and while the congregation sang an invitation hymn whose closing words were “Almost persuaded . . . Almost—but lost!” Billy Frank Graham and Grady Wilson “went forward” to register a decision that would forever alter their lives. Decision is the proper word, as Graham has related to many an audience: “I didn’t have any tears, I didn’t have any emotion, I didn’t hear any thunder, there was no lightning. I saw a lady standing next to me and she had tears in her eyes, and I thought there was something wrong with me because I didn’t feel all worked up. But right there, I made my decision for Christ. It was as simple as that, and as conclusive.” The conclusiveness seems more solid in retrospect. At home later that evening, Billy Frank announced to his approving parents, “I’m a changed boy,” but upstairs in his bedroom, he privately wondered if he would feel any different the next day. Finally, he dropped to his knees by the side of his bed and said, “Oh God, I don’t understand all of this. I don’t know what’s happening to me. But as best I can figure it, I have given myself to you.” Since he had no truly impressive sins to repudiate, he made mental notes on the modest improvements available to him: greater seriousness about his schoolwork, increased consideration for others, more attention to Bible study and prayer, and, most importantly, a resolve to manifest that distinctive mark of the Evangelical Christian, bearing witness to the Good News. Family members have found it a bit difficult to depict the occasion as a momentous turning from darkness unto light. Catherine said, “He was much nicer to me after that” and remembered that he stopped attending movies for several years. At the Junior-Senior Banquet, he abandoned his date rather than hang around where others would be dancing. Melvin also saw a shift in his brother’s priorities but allowed that “
it didn’t change all at once, now. It took a little while.”
A Prophet with Honor Page 8
