by Billy Graham
During the war, he argued, servicemen and -women on weekend leave from their bases often went for a fling in nearby cities. Many Christians wanted to give them an alternative to the taverns and honky-tonks. They organized Saturday night youth rallies in several cities, quite independent of each other, that drew large crowds. Snappy Gospel music, interesting testimonies, and (most of all) short, youth-oriented sermons combined to attract thousands of lonely, insecure, and frightened teenagers and young adults. While still at Western Springs, I had spoken at several such youth rallies. From Torrey’s point of view, the big one had been in Chicago, where I was the first speaker in Orchestra Hall.
As we sat bobbing in the boat, Torrey began selling me on his blueprint for evangelism—and my part in it. He wanted to help organize youth rallies throughout the United States, Canada, and eventually the world. He planned to call the movement Youth for Christ International. He would get his Midwest Bible Church in Chicago to let him work half-time; the other half he would spend raising money to open a YFC office downtown. I almost immediately agreed with him that this plan was of God.
“But you’ll need more money than that,” I said.
“I’ll leave that to Bill Erny,” he replied confidently. “He’ll get it done.”
Bill Erny was a businessman who knew about money. He was also the only one who could talk straight to Torrey, giving him advice and counsel and saying no to him when necessary.
But how could I say yes to Torrey? In an informal way, independent YFC groups were already flourishing. Roger Malsbary had charge of the group in Indianapolis; Walter Smyth was coordinating in Philadelphia; George Wilson was responsible in Minneapolis; and Jack Wyrtzen handled New York—you could hear him on the radio, opening with the words, “From Times Square . . .”
But there was no real coordination among these groups, said Torrey. They had sprung up independent of each other and were only loosely connected. What he wanted to do was bring them all together to form a national organization, with perhaps twenty-five to fifty organizational components. “I think you’re the man to be our first full-time employee,” he said. “Would you pray about becoming our national—and international—organizer?”
I was learning to trust God for every step of my life. I generally prayed about everything, but it seemed unnecessary to pray about this opportunity! My strength was returning, and I was ready to travel, ready to preach, ready to evangelize. I wouldn’t be much of an organizer or paperwork man, I told Torrey, but I could not hide my enthusiasm. It was all I talked about with Ruth for the next several weeks. Finally, we decided that I should take the job.
But what would I do about my year-old pastorate? And what about my pending chaplaincy? Having seen my ministry expanding, the board of deacons at Western Springs graciously (and a few of them joyfully) accepted my resignation. The Army’s chief of chaplains granted me a discharge, since the end of the war seemed in sight, agreeing with my logic that I could make a far greater contribution to the spiritual well-being of servicepeople by organizing and preaching at youth rallies than I could serving as a chaplain.
And so it was, in January of 1945, that I walked into the first-ever office of YFC in Chicago, on Wells Street in the Loop. I felt excited and exhilarated: this was where I belonged, and I could not wait to get started. But the office was a sorry excuse for corporate headquarters—a couple of bare rooms alongside the elevated train tracks, furnished with boxes. Maybe there was even a chair.
With me was Amy Anderson, Torrey’s longtime secretary. One day early on she came to the door of my office. “There are two people here from Jackson, Mississippi: Dr. and Mrs. Overton,” she told me. In they came.
“We want to start a youth meeting in our town. Would you come help us?” they asked.
I didn’t have to think twice, because it was the only invitation I’d had. I said yes.
Of course, I felt no temptation to bask among those comforts of the Wells Street office. When more invitations came, as they soon did, I was glad to be out of town most of the time. Torrey worked from his office at the church. I was a traveling salesman again—not displaying a case of brushes this time, just brandishing my Bible.
At the beginning of 1945, in addition to Atlanta and Norfolk, I was preaching all over the Midwest. One day, as I was boarding a train with Al Smith, who was leading my singing, someone handed me a telegram from Chicago. I put it in my pocket, got onto the train, and was well on my way to Indianapolis before pulling it out. The doctor’s dire warnings about my possible inability to become a father were proved false: Ruth was expecting! I was elated at the news! I could hardly wait to get there so that I could send her a telegram and wire her some flowers.
Good as the news was, it meant we had to make some major changes. We were more in love with each other than ever, and the idea of living apart, even temporarily, caused me a lot of heartache. But working full-time with Youth for Christ would keep me on the road for more than half the time. Ruth did not want to stay alone in Chicago while I was away, especially now that she was pregnant, we agreed that she would be much better off among friends and family in familiar surroundings. We went back to North Carolina and moved in with her parents in the little, close-knit mountain community of Montreat. Her father was practicing medicine in nearby Asheville, and we were grateful she could be with them while I was on the road. Although we felt sure it was what the Lord was prompting us to do, we knew it was only a temporary, though happy, arrangement.
At that time, the military had priority on everything. To civilians like us, planes were available only on a standby basis. A very generous businessman, Mr. Walter Block of Kenosha, Wisconsin, gave an Air Travel Card to Torrey and one to me. As long as I was with YFC, I had that card and could charge a ticket to his account.
Sometimes I traveled by air, but mostly I went by Greyhound bus or by train. Because the railroads gave clergy of all denominations half-price tickets, I could take the Northwestern Railroad anywhere, have a bunk, and get some sleep for half of what the others were paying. I traveled across the country in those days, stopping in cities of all sizes.
Typical of the earliest YFC meetings was one in Atlanta’s City Auditorium on February 24, 1945, where I was introduced to the crowd of 5,000 as “the director of the Songs in the Night broadcast in Chicago.” I doubt if anyone in Atlanta had ever heard of the program. But with me on this night were a chalk artist, an Army major general, several servicemen who gave their Christian testimonies, and musicians galore—guitarist, pianist, soloist, sextet, trio, and the Salvation Army band! The press reported that this new movement, only a year old, was active in three hundred American cities.
For several months, Ruth was able to join me in various places. That made the traveling life more bearable. While we were in Atlanta, Ruth noticed a change in me.
“Every time we pass a ‘kiddie shop,’” she wrote to her parents, “Bill wants to stop and window-shop. He notices every little baby in sight now, and he used to ignore them completely. Guess I ought to write a book on Preacher Will Be a Papa.” (She had recently read the book entitled Papa Was a Preacher.)
As the months went by, Ruth grew bigger and bigger. She enjoyed shopping for maternity clothes. By June she could just squeeze into a size fourteen. From Pittsburgh, where I was preaching, she wrote home. She called my being with her “the nicest honeymoon we’ve had yet.”
“Bill has to speak only once a day, which makes it nice.” I hoped she meant nice for us to have time together, not nice that she had to listen to only one sermon a day!
In early July we were together in Ocean City, New Jersey, where I was preaching. We enjoyed some time sunning ourselves at the beach, but Ruth described her particular problem in a letter to her sister Rosa in Montreat: “Have the front of me toasted fairly nicely. But getting the other side is something else. A hard flat beach and I don’t fit face to face. Bill suggested I scoop out a hole for my tummy.”
That trip to Ocean City produced another
amusing incident, as Ruth described in a hastily written letter to her parents: “When we first got there, we put some clothes in the cleaners with the promise we could get them in three days. The third day we were busy so we called for them the fourth. Found the place locked up and the man off on a two weeks’ vacation. So Monday morning before we left we called on the police and after half an hour of pleading, got them to go down and break in for us. There was much ringing of burglar alarms and looks of amazement from the shoppers (it being on the main street) and loss of dignity on the part of the cops who had to climb ladders, open transoms, shut off the alarm and glare at wisecrackers who’d stick their necks in at the door and warn the cops if they didn’t get out they’d have to call the police. But they were good sports and seemed to enjoy it. Found Bill’s jacket and my green mesh dress but no yellow coat anywhere. Left money with the assistant pastor to have it mailed when the wretched proprietor returns.”
On that same trip, we included a side excursion to New York City over the Fourth of July. Ruth noted that the Statue of Liberty looked as she expected, “only she was facing the wrong direction.” Harry Emerson Fosdick’s Riverside Church, a bastion of theological liberalism, was “impressive in a pagan sort of way”; it was devoid of any Christian symbol, even a cross.
Everywhere, through contact persons in various cities, I met with local pastors and lay leaders to form committees and plan rallies. In the first year, this took me from coast to coast (with plenty of places in between) and to most of the provinces of Canada, mostly by train. Additional preaching opportunities ranged from Moody Church in Chicago to Princeton Seminary in New Jersey.
Unfamiliar as I was with pregnancy timetables, I did not take Ruth all that seriously as she walked with me to the car on Septem-ber 21, 1945. She did not want me to make this trip. She wanted desperately for me to be with her when the baby came.
“Bill, the pains have already begun.”
“No, I don’t think so,” I replied confidently, as if I knew anything about labor.
“Yes, they have. The baby will be here soon!”
But I predicted it might take another two or three weeks. I kissed her good-bye and headed for a speaking engagement in Mobile, Alabama.
That evening, Virginia Leftwich Graham was born into the world, the daughter we would forever call Gigi and who enriched our lives immeasurably.
When I arrived home from Alabama and looked down at the baby in the bassinet that Ruth had trimmed with her wedding veil, I could only repeat over and over, “Hello, darling! Hello, precious!”
Proud parents that we were, we thought our daughter was perfect, from her shapely head to her pudgy toes. Her eyes were the largest Ruth had ever seen in a baby, and the way Gigi stared wide-eyed at her mother made Ruth think, This child has seen more, knows more, than I. If the poet Wordsworth was right about our arriving in this world with “intimations of immortality,” that was true in Gigi’s case.
When Gigi was a few months old, Ruth left her in the Bells’ care from time to time and came along with me to places from Minnesota to Massachusetts. It was nice for both of us, but it emotionally pulled Ruth in two directions at once.
EUROPE 1946–1947
In March and April of 1946, Torrey led a group of six men—me among them—to Great Britain and the Continent to launch YFC there. For most of us, it was our first trip abroad.
The trip over was something of a fiasco. The military-type DC–4 plane with bucket seats left out of Chicago in the morning. Hearst newspaperman Wesley Hartzell was with us, as was Stratton Shufelt, music director of Moody Church in Chicago. Charles Templeton—a Toronto YFC organizer and pastor of Toronto’s Avenue Road Church, one of the largest congregations in the city—was with us, and I remember how sick he got on the trip.
We stopped in Toronto and Montreal, and we were supposed to stop in Gander, Newfoundland. But as we neared Gander, the pilot announced over the loudspeaker system that because of a heavy snowstorm, we were going instead to a small U.S. airfield nearby.
Apparently thinking that the plane’s passengers were a vaudeville troupe, the social director at the military base hastily scheduled a late-night performance. Torrey didn’t tell him we were a Youth for Christ team! The audience in the packed theater whistled and cheered during the first part of the meeting as Chuck told stories. They roared at Strat Shufelt’s rendition of “Shortnin’ Bread.” But when Torrey appeared on the stage, they started to yell.
“Where are the girls?” I heard. “Show us the legs!”
When Strat sang again, they booed.
Backstage we had prayer, and then I had to go out and face them. I apologized for not being the entertainment they had expected and gave my testimony.
The base commander was furious and wanted to throw us in jail, but eventually we were able to resume our trip.
Meantime, in London, Gavin Hamilton had organized a group of evangelical pastors to greet us and listen to our talk on Youth for Christ work in America. But our plane, after being refueled at Shannon, Ireland, was diverted to Scotland because of bad weather over London. As a result, we had to travel down to London by train and arrived late for the meeting.
The pastors seemed patient, though, and they asked each one of us to give a talk. None of us had spoken to a British audience before. I had some advantage because the majority of them had some connection with the Plymouth Brethren; I had met with Brethren in Wheaton and knew their methods and terminology. So when I got up, I told them that Dr. H. A. Ironside, pastor of Moody Church in Chicago, had a saying: any real evangelical theologian always milked the Plymouth Brethren cow!
Among evangelicals in England, Dr. Ironside was well known as one of the great preachers in the world, though I don’t think he was ever ordained. He had been a Brethren and had been a missionary to the Native Americans in Arizona and New Mexico, and he knew the Bible better than anybody I think I ever met. I remember sitting beside him once at the Moody Church, where he was to speak at a Youth for Christ meeting. He went sound asleep and began to snore, and when it was his time to speak, I just nudged him with my elbow. He got up, opened the Bible, and spoke from the passage he had opened to at random. It was tremendous!
Alan Redpath, pastor of Duke Street Church in Richmond, a suburb of London, was impressed with my words and came up afterward to ask if I would preach for him on Sunday. I said I was happy to do it.
To rest after the long plane ride, we spent several nights at Hildenborough Hall, run by Tom Rees, Britain’s leading evangelist. He and his wife, Jean, had developed the Hall as a large conference building for young people. The speaker that particular evening was Stephen Olford, and we were invited to attend the meetings and to each give a word.
Chuck Templeton and I went around together all the time on that trip; we roomed together and had a lot of fun, becoming real pals. A Canadian, he impressed us all with his knowledge of the history and culture of places like Ireland.
The travels of Odysseus held no more wonders than ours for us, as we visited England, Scotland, Ireland, Sweden, and Norway. Everywhere we traveled, we were joined by local church leaders who contributed mightily not only to our success but also to our survival.
The whole city of London looked to us as if it had been destroyed. St. Paul’s Cathedral was still standing; so were the Houses of Parliament, although they had been bombed. The people were in a happy mood. The war was finished; no longer did the sirens wail, sending people hustling into the Underground. The British still ruled one-fifth of the world: India, Canada, and Australia were still being run by the Colonial Office.
We stayed mostly in homes and run-down hotels wherever we went.
To cover all the territory, we split up into teams, and this led to diverse adventures. We were there less than a year after the end of World War II, and we encountered shortages, hardships, and rationing everywhere. Food especially preoccupied us, as it did most people there. There was envy for the Dublin team, who enjoyed fruit juice and real coff
ee for breakfast, along with ham and eggs. Wes observed that the only eggs in London were in museums; in Britain, he added, “everything edible has become extinct, and cold plaster of paris has become an acceptable substitute for ice cream.” He and Torrey reveled in the huge smorgasbord featured on a Danish steamer.
The team visiting Stockholm and Oslo held sixteen meetings in four days, with crowds of up to 4,500 and a couple of thousand turned away. In Norway especially, where people were still recovering from the oppressive Nazi occupation, enthusiasm for YFC ran high.
During the first three weeks, I was in the group that toured Great Britain from one end to the other, holding three and four meetings a day, almost every one packed to capacity. We might be in a public hall on a Saturday night, in a fashionable church on a Sunday night, and in a moviehouse on a weekday night after the film. The people, still reeling from the war, were starved for hope and hungry for God.
After a whirlwind tour of Holland, Denmark, Belgium, and France with Chuck Templeton during the next three weeks, we finally headed home.
Right after we got back to the United States, we had a board meeting of Youth for Christ at a hotel in Swampscott, Mas-sachusetts. A scant two weeks after that, I preached at the first of a half-dozen rallies spread over the summer from Toronto to San Antonio, and from New Jersey to Oregon, as well as at a couple of youth conferences.
Gavin Hamilton urged me to come and hold campaigns in Great Britain. He would be glad to stay over there, he said, and set up the meetings. I felt in my heart that my future was in this type of evangelism. Torrey pointed out that it would cost a lot of money, however, and said I would have to raise it all myself.
I asked Ruth to leave our year-old daughter, Gigi, with the extended family of grandparents, aunts, and uncles in Montreat and join me as soon as she could. I asked Strat Shufelt if he would come with me as song leader, since he was well known in Britain. He was a handsome man with a lot of charisma, and he loved the Lord with all his heart. He and his wife, Marge, agreed to go with me; but two or three weeks before we were to leave, he called to say they just couldn’t leave their two little girls.
