Just As I Am: The Autobiography of Billy Graham

by Billy Graham

  Paul Fischer astonished me when he offered to pay my tuition at Wheaton for the first year, and Elner Edman volunteered to help with other expenses. As to being admitted, I could hardly have had more influential references. Things began to look hopeful.

  Another force in my favor, which I really did not know about at the time, was Mother’s prayers. Four years before, she had heard Wheaton’s former president, Dr. James Oliver Buswell, preach at a church in Charlotte. She was so impressed that she prayed from then on that someday I would go to Wheaton College. My parents also became acquainted with Dr. Jim Graham, a former missionary to China; he was then a professor of Bible at Wheaton.

  With some misgivings and anxiety, I applied for admission and was accepted. Thus it was that I drove to Wheaton in September 1940 and began college. Many of my Florida Bible Institute credits were not accepted; the few credits that were accepted gave me second-semester freshman rank.

  Wheaton College had been founded in 1860 by a staunch antislavery Congregationalist minister from New England, Jonathan Blanchard. It was a fully accredited college of liberal arts and sciences, with several substantial buildings and a highly qualified faculty. Students, including the first blacks I had ever gone to school with, came from Christian homes in most of the forty-eight states and from many foreign countries as well. The college had a strong four-year Bible requirement, regardless of a student’s major, and that was appealing to me.

  Though it did not call itself fundamentalist, this venerable institution at the time demanded rigid adherence to a code of conduct that prohibited staff as well as students from using tobacco or alcohol in any form, dancing, card playing, or joining secret societies. The college also had scriptural convictions, with a conservative theological statement of faith that had been drafted in the mid-twenties. Trustees and faculty had to sign it every year as a condition of employment. All these requirements gave Wheaton a reputation in the collegiate world of being rather narrow and bluenose, but the integrity of instruction in all disciplines was widely respected.

  In the eighty years of its existence, only three men had preceded V. Raymond Edman as president: the founder; his son Charles Albert Blanchard; and a controversial Presbyterian clergyman, James Oliver Buswell, who had really put Wheaton on the academic map.

  “Prexy” Edman won my heart at once. Crossing campus one of my first days there, I was greeted by a person I did not recognize. “Hi, Bill!” he said. “How’s everything in North Carolina?”

  I found out the next day he was the president of the college. Perhaps his brother had told him about me after his visit to Temple Terrace, but I was still amazed that he knew my first name and what I looked like.

  On Wheaton’s elm-shaded suburban campus twenty-five miles due west of Chicago’s downtown Loop, I felt like a hick. Born and bred on a farm in the South, I doubted there was anybody in the entering class as green as I was. In the first six weeks, missing the old friends in sunny Florida and the recent exhilaration of preaching, I was so miserable that I began to wonder if I had made a mistake.

  The only student I knew when I first arrived at Wheaton was Howard Van Buren, who had been a neighbor of ours in Charlotte. He was a year or two ahead of me, a brilliant student who later became a noted heart surgeon.

  At twenty-one years of age, I was older than most of my classmates, which did not help my self-image. I was sure they were staring at my Li’l Abner appearance, what with out-of-style clothes and brogan shoes. I decided to do something about it. One day, tagging along with some other students, I went to Chicago’s Maxwell Street, a kind of open-air flea market. On Monday mornings, if you were the first there and a sharp bargainer, you could talk the merchants down to about a third of the asking price. For $4.95 I bought a beautiful turquoise tweed suit and wore it proudly to a football game in October. Then it started to rain. The pants legs shrank up my ankles, and the seat of the pants became so tight that I burst the seam. I couldn’t get home fast enough!

  When I talked at my customary rapid clip, people looked at me curiously, as if my heavily accented drawl were a foreign language. At six-foot-two, I was too tall to fade into the background. When I went out for the wrestling team, probably at about the 160-pound class, I looked like a python on the mat. Two defeats in intercollegiate matches ended that career. As colder weather came, I went along with my new friends and tried to learn to ice-skate on the frozen lagoon in North Side Park. Unable to keep my ankles straight, I gave up after a number of falls.

  I declared a major in anthropology, a subject I had barely heard of before. Why did I not major in Bible or public speaking, since I was committed to being a preacher? There were three good reasons.

  First, with such a full Bible background at Florida Bible Insti-tute, I was able to take a validation exam and transfer several hours of Bible credits. With that background, I now wanted to get as broad a liberal arts education as I could before going on to seminary for a professional degree. My choice of courses at Wheaton reflected this, ranging from classical Greek to economics to geology.

  Second, I considered the remote possibility that I might end up on the mission field. Anthropology would give me empathy for people in social settings different from my own and an understanding of social customs and primitive religions. A focus on anthropology would give me a liberal arts education in the best sense, obliterating any condescending notions I might have toward people from backgrounds other than my own. (There was one more reason I took anthropology. I was told it was an easy course and that the professor could not always read the students’ writing on the tests!)

  Third, Alexander Grigolia. The head of the college’s new anthropology department was popular among the students. “Don’t leave Wheaton without a course in Grigolia” became a favorite saying. Short and rotund, with flashing dark eyes and an accent that hinted at his Russian birth, he had received one Ph.D. in Germany and another at the University of Pennsylvania; he had a medical degree tucked in there somewhere too. In a corner of his crowded little office, ever watchful, stood his faithful colleague Josephine, with whom I was quick to make acquaintance; she was a full-sized human skeleton.

  Dr. Grigolia ardently convinced us that the origins of the human race were not up from the ape but down from the hand of God, as Genesis recorded. His humorous mistakes in the King’s English were a continuous source of merriment. Once when he was at the blackboard and a couple of students were whispering to each other, he said, without turning around, “Would someone please pipe down him?”

  As for my initial homesickness, the Lane family soon came to my rescue. Dr. Mortimer B. Lane taught courses in government and economics at the college. Before that, when he was in government service, he and his wife and their seven children lived in Switzerland. Quite well-off, they entertained students in their large, comfortable Victorian home near the campus. They welcomed me as one of their own. Early on Sunday mornings, as Plymouth Brethren, they hosted a small local assembly in their house. I began to attend that quiet communion service with students from other churches.

  One of the few students on campus to have a car of his own, I was soon drafted by the Student Christian Council, which sent student Gospel teams out to churches and missions on weekends. They assigned me to go with a singing quartet and preach at a church at Terre Haute in southern Indiana. I leaped at the chance to give my first sermon since arriving at Wheaton.

  The quartet must have liked what they heard. Their report back to the council director opened a flood of requests for me to speak here and there. Lest my dismal academic history repeat itself, I turned down most of the invitations, at least at first. I had pledged myself to give priority to studies, and my 87 percent average at the end of the first semester proved that it had paid off.

  Downtown, about a mile from the school, a church met on Sundays in the Masonic Lodge hall on Wesley Street. Dr. Edman had preached there when he was teaching history at the college; but when he was named president in 1940, he discontinued his ministr
y with the United Gospel Tabernacle, known locally as “The Tab” or “The Tabernacle.” The congregation was filling in with studentsupply preachers, and I was invited to speak one Sunday. The $15 honorarium they gave me was generous and much appreciated.

  Repeat invitations to the Tab followed. In their Sunday crowd of 300, packing that hall to capacity, were business and professional people, college students, and (most intimidating of all) professors—men such as philosopher Gordon Clark, biologist Russell Mixter, and scientist Roger Voskuyl, who would work on the Manhattan Project.

  In the summer of 1941, the Tab called me to be their regular pastor when I returned to college in the fall. Dr. Edman, who by then had become my friend and counselor, advised me to think it through carefully. After much prayer, I decided to accept the position.

  After my first year at Wheaton, I returned to Charlotte, where I was honored by the home folks with an invitation to preach for a week of meetings at the Sharon Presbyterian Church. I was nervous at first. It surely was another case where dependence on the Lord was my only hope. And it was another case where He proved Himself faithful beyond imagination. Good crowds turned out for the services, they listened respectfully, and a number of people made commitments to Christ that week.

  When I returned to Wheaton for the fall semester, I tackled my pastorate at the Tab with enthusiasm. I had to prepare and preach two sermons every week and lead a prayer meeting on Wednesday nights. What I lacked in content I made up in volume.

  My responsibilities at the Tab did, however, turn out to be detrimental to my studies. To do more preaching, I had to do less studying, and the dilemma really developed there. I missed a great deal in the classroom.

  On Sunday evening, December 7, 1941, someone told me that Pearl Harbor had been attacked. I had no idea where Pearl Harbor was—I had never heard of it. Then, on my way from the Tab back to my room, I heard from a newsboy hawking a special edition of the Chicago Tribune that the United States was at war with Japan.

  I got into my car and drove over to the Lane house. Students and friends who gathered there on Sundays were usually up on all the latest happenings in the world. As I entered the front door, Howard Van Buren met me and told me the grim story of Japan’s surprise attack on our naval base.

  The next morning, Dr. Edman called the whole student body together for a special chapel service. Prexy had been a soldier in the trenches in World War I. He knew, as General Sherman had said, that war was hell; he also knew that some of his students would die before it was over.

  My first thought was to volunteer. Not that I felt I would make a good fighting man. Indeed, as a cadet in the Army training program on campus, I had nearly cut one fellow’s head off with my bayonet when I made a sudden wrong turn during a drill. But, as an ordained Baptist minister, I knew there had to be a place in the Chaplains’ Corps for a person like me.

  I wrote immediately to the War Department to ask about the possibility of becoming a chaplain. They said I would have to finish college and then take a seminary course.

  In the next three semesters, schoolwork took on a new seriousness, and the pastoral ministry to members of the Tab’s congregation deepened along with the preaching. Life and death were not abstractions to us anymore, and the Wheaton township of seven thousand shared with the rest of the nation the anxiety and pain and grief of war.

  Yes, Wheaton was both a spiritual and an intellectual turning point in my life. It also became a turning point in another significant way.

  Part Two

  1943–1949

  A Ministry Begins

  5

  Ruth

  Courtship and Marriage, Pastorate at Western Springs, Youth for Christ

  “Saturday nights I dedicate to prayer and study, in preparation for the Lord’s day.”

  What kind of a romance could a college man have with a woman who said a thing like that? Dating Ruth Bell had to be creative. And I did my best. For example, on one occasion we took a long walk in the countryside surrounding Wheaton to a graveyard, where we read tombstone epitaphs! It was a far cry from careening through Charlotte in a jalopy.

  Ruth, born in China, had spent her first seventeen years in Asia. Her father, Dr. L. Nelson Bell, was a medical missionary in the eastern Chinese province of Northern Kiangsu, and her family lived in the hospital compound. Theirs was a hard existence, and certainly not a sheltered one. She remembers it as a happy, interesting childhood with strict but loving parents, among happy Christians, both fellow missionaries and Christian Chinese friends and helpers. But they were all exposed to everything from monsoons, sandstorms, and epidemics to bandit attacks and civil war. For high school, Ruth went to the Foreign School in Pyongyang, Korea (now North Korea).

  In more ways than one, she was one of the belles of Wheaton campus. This I learned during my first term from a fellow I met at the Lane home, Johnny Streater. To pay his way through college, Johnny ran his own trucking service. For a price, he would haul anything in his little yellow pickup. I gladly accepted his offer of work at 50¢ an hour and spent many afternoons at hard labor, moving furniture and other items around the western Chicago suburbs.

  Johnny was a little older than I and had been in the Navy before coming to Wheaton. He had a vision for the mission field and felt that God had called him to serve in China, where he intended to go as soon as he graduated. He told me about a girl in the junior class—one of the most beautiful and dedicated Christian girls he had ever met. Sounded like my type. I paid attention.

  One day we were hanging around in our sweaty work clothes in front of Williston Hall, the girls’ dorm, getting ready to haul some furniture for a lady in Glen Ellyn, the next town over, when Johnny let out a whoop. “Billy, here’s the girl I was telling you about,” he said. “It’s Ruth Bell.”

  I straightened up, and there she was. Standing there, looking right at me, was a slender, hazel-eyed movie starlet! I said something polite, but I was flustered and embarrassed. It took me a month to muster the courage to ask her out for a date.

  The Christmas holidays were fast approaching, and the combined glee clubs were presenting Handel’s Messiah. One day in the library in Blanchard Hall, I saw Ruth studying at one of the long tables. Johnny Streater and Howard Van Buren urged me to make my pitch to her right there. The expression of the librarian at the desk turned to a frown as we whispered among ourselves. Undaunted, I sauntered nonchalantly across to Ruth and scribbled my proposal for a date to the concert. To my surprise and delight, she agreed to go.

  That Sunday afternoon was cold and snowy. With Ruth Bell sitting beside me in Pierce Chapel, I did not pay much attention to the music. Afterward we walked over to the Lane house for a cup of tea, and we had a chance to talk. I just could not believe that anyone could be so spiritual and so beautiful at one and the same time.

  Ruth went back to her room (she told me later), got on her knees, and told the Lord that if she could spend the rest of her life serving Him with me, she would consider it the greatest privilege imaginable. So why did she make it so hard for me to get her to say yes out loud?

  If I had not been smitten with love at the first sight of Ruth Bell, I would certainly have been the exception. Many of the men at Wheaton thought she was stunning. Petite, vivacious, smart, talented, witty, stylish, amiable, and unattached. What more could a fellow ask for?

  Add to that the fact that her Virginia-based parents and their missionary companions were all in China under the auspices of the Southern Presbyterian denomination. Not the Associated Reformed Presbyterian Church I had grown up in, but close enough.

  “Billy, hold your horses!” I fell so head-over-heels in love with her that Johnny had to caution me. “You’re going too fast.”

  And there was one minor problem that kept coming up. She wanted me to go with her as a missionary to Tibet! My mind was not closed to such a possibility. Not completely. After all, I had chosen to major in anthropology with just such a contingency in mind. But missionary work was a lot
more comfortable to consider in the global abstract than in the Tibetan concrete.

  In that list of good adjectives I just assigned to Ruth, I omitted one: determined.

  She felt that God had called her to be a missionary to the remote borders of Tibet just as strongly as I felt that He had called me to preach the Gospel. In my case, though, there was not a geographical stipulation.

  Ruth was deeply impressed by the life of Amy Carmichael, that single—and indeed singular—woman whom God had called to devote herself utterly to the children of Dohnavur, in southern India.

  She reinforced her case by telling me about Mildred Cable, who had rejected the young man she loved because marriage to him would have cut across her call from God to do pioneer work in China.

  Two things I felt sure of: first, that Ruth was bound to get married someday; and second, that I was the man she would marry. Beyond that, I did not try to pressure her or persuade her—that is to say, not overly much. I let God do my courting for me.

  But as the months went by, I asked her to at least consider me. It would not have been right to let her assume that what seemed to be my heroic understanding of her concerns was a lack of interest or expectation on my part. We had lots of discussions about our relationship. I wouldn’t call them arguments exactly, but we certainly did not see eye to eye.

  In the meantime, Ruth enjoyed the social life at Wheaton, as I did, with many friends. One day she went canoeing on the Fox River in St. Charles, about ten miles west of Wheaton, with classmates Harold Lindsell, Carl Henry, and Carl’s fiancée, Helga. Somehow the canoe capsized, and Ruth went under. Since both men were staunch Baptists, I suspected them of wanting to immerse the pretty Presbyterian missionary kid from China!

  Because I was already an ordained Baptist minister, our divided denominational allegiance was another topic of conversation between us. Ruth stuck to her convictions.