Billy Frank’s new dedication neither dimmed his delight in the company of young ladies nor stemmed his growing enthusiasm for racing his father’s Plymouth along back roads or driving it “right up on the sidewalk” in downtown Charlotte. In fact, when the family began attending the Tenth Avenue Presbyterian Church in Charlotte, a group of devoted young people who called themselves the Life Service Band turned down his application for membership on the grounds that he was “just too worldly.” At school his grades improved a bit, but he had to retake a final exam before he could graduate. “He wasn’t any dumb bunny,” close friend Wint Covington remembered, “but he certainly wasn’t the smartest one.” Neither did he completely conquer a tendency toward vainglory. Covington, whose father also made a good living, recalled that “we both had wristwatches, and none of the others did. During the depression, something like that would kind of lift you above the crowd. When we’d go into Charlotte for a movie, we wore jeans, but we’d roll up our sleeves to show our watches, to indicate we weren’t down and out.”
An objective observer might have concluded that Billy Frank’s conversion was shallow, but, “deep down inside me,” he has often insisted, “I knew something was different. I began to want to tell others what had happened to me. I began to want to read the Bible and to pray. I got hold of a little hymn book and began to memorize those hymns. I would say them because I couldn’t sing.” As a sign of the new maturity he sought, he dropped the second of his names. The double name, he felt, had a juvenile ring to it, “like Sonny, Buddy, or Junior.” Still, he gave little thought to a career in preaching, even when the Wilson boys and several other young men influenced by Mordecai Ham announced their intention to enter the ministry, but he was impressed by his friends’ efforts and has often recalled the first time he heard Grady preach. “Grady borrowed my watch to time his sermon. He preached on ‘Four Great Things God Wants You to Do,’ and he went on for about an hour and a half. He was nervous”—Grady contended his anxiety stemmed from seeing his girlfriend and Billy hold hands throughout the sermon—-“and all the time he was preaching, he was winding my watch, so when he finally got through, he had wound the stem off my watch and ruined it. But I was so impressed. I thought to myself, ‘I’d give anything in the world if I could stand up in front of people like Grady did and preach. That’ll never happen to me, I know.’” His occasional attempts to testify during sidewalk services organized by his church’s youth group were timid, fumbling efforts, more embarrassing than edifying. Still, he was fascinated by preachers, particularly the itinerants who passed through Charlotte and stayed with the Grahams or their friend, Vernon Patterson. He listened raptly to their expositions, fixed on their thrilling stories, and imitated their pulpit styles in front of a mirror, but the thought of actually joining their ranks lay distant on the horizon, like a cloud no bigger than a man’s hand.
4
The Boy Preacher
Despite Billy’s modest academic record, he expected to attend college when the time came. He favored the University of North Carolina, less because of its academic reputation than because two of his cousins had gone there, and because its president was a distant relative. Morrow Graham’s exposure to Fundamentalist culture, however, convinced her that the road to hell passed straight through the campuses of state universities, and she longed for him to attend one of the fundamentalist schools advertised in the Moody Monthly. Wheaton College in Illinois was her first choice, but it was so expensive and so far away that she began to consider other options. Her husband, who regarded college as an extravagance, wanted his son to stay home and help with the farm. An apparent solution presented itself when one of the South’s best-known evangelists, Bob Jones, came to Charlotte for a short series of meetings during Billy’s senior year in high school. Large and imposing, self-assured past the point of arrogance, unflinching in his willingness to say exactly what he believed, and equipped with a gift for ear-catching rhetoric, Jones had founded Bob Jones College (BJC), a small Bible school in Cleveland, Tennessee. The unaccredited school had no standing in professional educational circles, but it was gaining a reputation as a place where Fundamentalist young people could insulate themselves from the chilling winds of doubt that blew across secular campuses. Billy Sunday himself had given it his blessing, and Ma Sunday served on its board of trustees. Jones’s blunt, uncompromising style fascinated Frank Graham, and he decided his son could use some exposure to the hardheaded discipline that characterized the young school, particularly since the cost of attending was pegged at approximately one dollar a day. If Billy wanted to attend Bob Jones College, Frank would agree to send him. Billy resisted a bit, but when T. W. Wilson, who had “got saved” during Jones’s meeting and had gone to BJC for the 1936 spring semester, came home with glowing reports, he grew accustomed to the idea. The convincing argument came from Jimmie Johnson, a twenty-three-year-old evangelist who was Billy’s current idol. Johnson, who had stayed in the Graham home for a time during the summer of 1935, had his own portable tabernacle and enjoyed a rapidly growing reputation as a soul winner. “He was a handsome fellow and really did know his Bible,” Melvin Graham recalled. “Billy Frank thought if he could just preach like Jimmie Johnson, there wouldn’t be anything higher.” Johnson was also an ardent BJC alumnus, and that was all Billy needed. Bob Jones would be his college.
After Billy graduated from high school in 1936, Albert McMakin, who had left the Graham farm for a career in sales, cajoled him and the Wilson brothers into spending the summer in his crew of Fuller Brush salesmen, peddling their wares in the small towns and rural areas of the Carolinas. Some doubted Billy would succeed as a salesman. He didn’t really need the money and had never shown much enthusiasm for hard work. When McMakin picked him up at the start of the summer, Uncle Clyde made no effort to hide his skepticism. “You really taking him?” he asked. “Two weeks. I’ll give him two weeks to wire home for money.” Clyde’s gibe had its effect; when Billy lost all the money he made during the first week, he refused to seek help from home. The doubt had been unfair. Cows had not been Billy’s calling, but he proved well suited to salesmanship. He worked hard, he learned how to make customers pay attention while he rummaged for their free gift at the bottom of his bag, he prayed before he began his calls and between houses, and he believed in the product. “Sincerity,” he would later observe, “is the biggest part of selling anything, including the Christian plan of salvation.” He learned how to talk his way into front doors and out of hostile or embarrassing situations. And as successful salesmen will, he got caught up in the selling process itself. “Selling those brushes became a cause to me. I was dedicated to it, and the money became secondary. I felt that every family ought to have Fuller brushes as a matter of principle.” Even though he confesses to having spent a fair amount of time enjoying the sun and sand at Myrtle Beach, he netted between fifty and seventy-five dollars a week, and when the summer ended, his sales topped those of any other Fuller salesman in North or South Carolina.
Life on the road had its surprises. In one episode the boys found particularly shocking, they recognized a drunken man as an acquaintance from Charlotte, a man they had believed to be an upright Christian. Apart from adultery, few behaviors seemed more egregious to southern Fundamentalists than the use—not to mention abuse—of alcohol. Grady recalled that the sight of the stumbling, disheveled sinner stunned Billy, causing him to determine to put his confidence “in Christ, not man,” since “man is weak and made of clay.” To counteract such disillusioning wickedness, the boys spent their evenings in Bible study and prayer, and they hooked up with Jimmie Johnson every chance they got. One Saturday night in Monroe, North Carolina, where Johnson was holding a revival, mosquitoes and bedbugs drove Billy and T.W. out of their fifty-cents-a-head tourist court. Knowing the evangelist wouldn’t mind, they took shelter in his tabernacle. Grady and Albert McMakin lasted the night at the tourist court but joined them early the next morning. When Johnson showed up, he was glad to see the b
oys and talked Billy and Grady into going with him to the city jail for a service. Neither boy had ever been inside a jail, and the sights and sounds and smells still hanging over Saturday night’s ingathering of miscreants assaulted their senses with striking impressions of fallen mankind, but they watched in silent admiration as their hero delivered a short homily. Then, at least in part as a practical joke not uncommon among preachers, Johnson introduced Billy as a new convert who wanted to tell what Jesus had done for him. As Jimmie had known it would, the request caught Billy off guard, but he had heard plenty of testimonies and knew approximately what to do, so he sucked in his breath and offered the remarkably inappropriate greeting, “I’m glad to see so many of you out this afternoon.” As he continued, he warmed to his task, to the point of overstating the darkness of his own preconversion condition: “I was a sinner and a no-good! I didn’t care anything about God, the Bible, or people!” Then he launched into the time-honored proclamation he had heard Mordecai Ham and a procession of other revivalists make, and had practiced before the mirror himself: “Jesus changed my life! He gave me peace and joy! He can give you peace and joy! He will forgive your sins as He forgave mine if you will only let him into your heart! Jesus died so he could take your sins on His shoulders.” Then, his heart still pounding with excitement, he picked up his sample case and hurried from the jail. He had offered no invitation and no prisoners had made “decisions,” but the basic affirmation of that first impromptu sermon—that Jesus died so that sinners might be forgiven, have their lives transformed, and find peace with God—would remain the central tenet of his preaching for more than fifty years.
At the end of the summer, Frank Graham drove Billy and the Wilson brothers down to Tennessee to enroll in Bob Jones College. As soon as they spied out the land, Billy and Grady began figuring ways to conquer it. In his first foray into politics, he plotted with Grady to “take over the freshman class!” His plan was simple: “I’ll nominate you for president, then you nominate me for vice-president.” His rousing nominating speech propelled Grady into office as planned, but when the new president took the chair, he no longer had the opportunity to nominate his friend, and Billy got no office. From this botched beginning, the rest of the semester went downhill. Dr. Bob, who saw himself, and wanted others to see him, as the South’s premier evangelist and Fundamentalism’s most influential leader, resolutely sought to mold students in his own likeness. On the positive side, he was unquestionably talented and committed to high academic and spiritual standards, as he understood them, and students at his college kept a packed schedule of classes punctuated by daily chapel services, evening vespers, and regular devotions in dormitories. Less admirably, he was obsessively self-important, rigidly dogmatic, and vehemently intolerant of anything that resembled an opinion different from his own. The educational goal he set for his students was mastery of carefully screened material and suppression of independent or original thinking. Jones also felt a special need to corral the “lust of the flesh” in his young charges. To this end, he forbade students to have any kind of physical contact, including hand holding, with members of the opposite sex. Dates amounted to fifteen minutes of conversation, once a week, in a chaperoned parlor. The administration also monitored mail to make sure that nothing lascivious, doctrinally unsound, or uncomplimentary to the institution passed between it and the threatening world outside. Students who chafed under such measures learned to heed the warning of signs posted in dormitories: “Griping Not Tolerated.” The slightest infraction of this or any other rule, stated or unstated, could draw a heavy dose of demerits, and a student who amassed 150 demerits faced automatic expulsion.
Billy tried to fit in, but he and a new friend, Wendell Phillips, grew a bit careless about some of the regulations, amassing a perilous stack of demerits—Phillips estimated that “we both had about 149.” To make matters worse, Billy’s classwork was a shambles. He had never learned to study in high school, and he simply could not keep up the frenetic pace the school imposed. In his disillusioned and depressed state, allergies and the flu found him an easy target. He began to lose weight and spent long spells in the school’s infirmary. When he went home for Christmas, a Charlotte doctor suggested he might fare better in a warmer climate. Fortuitously, an evangelist visiting in the Graham home recommended the Florida Bible Institute (FBI), a new school in Temple Terrace, just outside Tampa. Morrow had seen an advertisement for the school in the Moody Monthly and persuaded Frank to take the family to visit one of her sisters, who had just bought a small hotel in Orlando. During that four-day visit, which included a reconnaissance of the Bible college, Billy fell in love with Florida, whose warm climate and lakes and palm trees and flowers seemed paradisiacal in contrast to the wintry cheerlessness at Bob Jones.
When the holiday ended and he returned to BJC, Billy told Wendell Phillips of Florida’s wonders. Phillips was looking for an excuse to leave, and a last-straw confrontation with Dr. Bob sealed both their decisions. Jones found out that the boys were speaking positively about another college and summoned them to his office for a maledictory address. The old tyrant charged both of them with disloyalty, one of the most serious sins in his catalogue. Phillips acknowledged that he was leaving and, while Jones fulminated, “just looked him straight in the eye and grinned. That was bad.” Billy, however, retreated “like a wounded dog with his tail between his legs. He wouldn’t even look at Dr. Bob. He just sat there and bit his nails. He was quite a nail biter.” The college’s founder had already written off Phillips as worthless, but he somehow sensed Billy’s potential. “Billy,” he prophesied, “if you leave and throw your life away at a little country Bible school, the chances are you’ll never be heard of. At best, all you could amount to would be a poor country Baptist preacher somewhere out in the sticks.” Then, unexpectedly, Jones softened his tone. “You have a voice that pulls,” he said. “Some voices repel. You have a voice that appeals. God can use that voice of yours. He can use it mightily.”
Billy’s deep reluctance to challenge authority made it hard for him to act on his inclinations, but Wendell Phillips set out for Florida immediately. Within a few days, he was writing letters in which he described Florida Bible Institute as a Shangri-la where students free from stifling regulations could pluck luscious temple oranges from trees right outside their dormitory windows and could swim and play golf all year round. In the days that followed, Wendell received several phone calls from Billy, who had gotten sick again and sought some final bit of evidence that he ought to join his friend in paradise. Then came a call from Morrow, who had only one question: “Wendell, do they teach the Bible there? That’s what I want to know.” Phillips assured her that “they teach nothing but the Bible. There is hardly any other subject. It is not a liberal arts school. You couldn’t go on to be a schoolteacher, or anything else, except something with the church.” That was good enough for Morrow, and a few days later, the Grahams loaded up the gray Plymouth one more time and headed for Tampa. The decisive break between Billy Graham and the Fundamentalism symbolized by Bob Jones would not come for twenty more years, but the first fissures had already appeared.
Florida Bible Institute suited Billy perfectly and offered delights he had never known. Its main facility was a former country club and luxury hotel that had gone broke during the depression—an early brochure included a picture of a roulette wheel left by the original owners, a testimony to the transformation that had occurred. The school’s founder-president, W. T. Watson, himself a Bible-school product, had acquired the property on very favorable terms and ingeniously turned it into a hybrid college, conference center, and Fundamentalist resort hotel, with most of the ninety or so students defraying the cost of their schooling by serving as staff. Billy wasted no time getting involved with the program. Within hours of his arrival, an administrator gave him keys to a car and asked him to take a group of guests on a tour of Tampa. Higher education had not rusted his skills as a salesman: “I spent the afternoon explaining the virtues
of Tampa, which I didn’t know anything about, and they seemed happy.” Their happiness, no doubt, reflected his own. His father sent him six dollars a week to cover his expenses, and he logged enough hours as a bellhop, waiter, caddy, and high-speed dishwasher to keep him in spending money, but he never ran out of time to play. He swam and canoed in the swampy, snake-infested Hillsborough River, which bordered the campus. He played tennis with about the same proficiency he had shown in baseball. And he spent as much time as he could on the school’s eighteen-hole golf course, whacking the ball with an awkward cross-handed grip and wielding a putter as if it were a croquet mallet or sometimes just loping joyously across the fairways, a lanky Ichabod with a scout knife dangling from the belt of his chartreuse slacks. He admitted that for most of the first year, “I was really just a glorified tourist who was taking a few Bible courses,” and a more studious classmate acknowledged that “he was not a digger. He got a lot by osmosis.”
Academically, the institute represented little, if any, improvement over Bob Jones College, but Watson supplemented the work of the regular faculty, most of whom were pastoring local congregations as well, by inviting a stream of big-name Fundamentalist leaders to serve as short-term visiting instructors. Billy reveled in their presence. As he had once fastened onto the minor-league revivalists who passed through Charlotte on their way up, he now took every opportunity to learn from such old-timers as William Evans (a friend of D. L. Moody’s and the first graduate of Moody Bible Institute), E. A. Marshall (who taught the first missions course at Moody) radio preachers Gerald Winrod and R. R. Brown, evangelists Gipsy Smith and Vance Havner (“the Will Rogers of the Pulpit”), A. B. Winchester (whose trademark was the catchphrase “My Bible says”), Billy Sunday’s old chorister, Homer Rodeheaver, and Fundamentalist patriarch William Bell Riley. As these venerable veterans warmed themselves over the embers of adulation offered by older people who still remembered them and tried to build a new fire in the young men they hoped might take their place, Billy studied their strengths and weaknesses, determined to find some way he could perform comparable service to the Lord and to the church. (“Billy always wanted to do something big,” Dr. Watson remembered; “he didn’t know exactly what yet, but he couldn’t wait just to do something big, whatever it was.”) He attended their lectures and took notes on their sermons. He sat in rapt fascination while they held forth in informal sessions in the hotel’s lounges. He served their tables, he polished their shoes, he caddied for them, he carried their bags, he had his picture taken with them, and he wrote home to tell his mother how much he longed to be like this one or that one— “It’s hard to find any particular one that you could say affected him,” Watson noted; “I think they all had a part; he’s a combination man, Billy is”—and eventually to reveal that “I think the Lord is calling me to the ministry, and if he does it will be in the field of evangelism.”
A Prophet with Honor Page 9
