Just As I Am

by Billy Graham

  My sexual restraint could not be attributed to ignorance of the facts of life. Naturally, all of us boys discussed those appealing topics that our parents did not. I had an added tutor in Pedro; he was a pretty rough character, though really good-natured. He confided in me all his erotic experiences with women, probably embellished for my wide-eyed benefit.

  It was Pedro who tried to teach me to chew tobacco. The day my father caught me with a chaw in my cheek became Pedro’s last day to work for us! And me—I got a thrashing to remember. My experience with cigarettes was similarly aborted by Daddy. He smoked only the proverbial “good 5¢ cigar.”

  When it came to alcohol, though, he was an absolute teetotaler. He came up with an unusual way to give Catherine and me the cure before we even had a chance to get the habit. At repeal of the Pro-hibition Amendment, Daddy brought home some beer and took the two of us children into the kitchen. He gave us each a bottle and ordered us to drink it. All of it. I was around fifteen, I guess, and assumed that there had to be a method to his madness. Both of us instantly hated the taste of the brew and registered our disgust in no uncertain terms.

  “From now on,” Daddy said, “whenever any of your friends try to get you to drink alcohol, just tell them you’ve already tasted it and you don’t like it. That’s all the reason you need to give.”

  His approach was more pragmatic than pious, but it worked. And it helped keep me fit for my favorite pastime, baseball. I made the team only as a substitute, playing sometimes when someone was sick. It turned out that I was a fairly good fielder because of my long reach. I was not a good hitter, though; I batted from the left side of the plate, cross-handed somehow, the same way I later played golf.

  I did not know if my father’s being chairman of the local school board (though he never had but a third-grade education himself) had anything to do with Coach Eudy’s choice to put me at first base. I preferred to imagine that it was determined only by my athletic merits. Maybe at some point I even dreamed about a sports career, but the talent for baseball obviously was not there. I did make it into the Charlotte Observer once, though; playing basketball for Sharon High School, I got into a game as a sub, and somehow my name made it into a sports column.

  The main game I played at home (along with occasionally tossing horseshoes with my father in the shade of a big oak tree) was pitching ball at lunchtime and in the evenings after chores with the husky McMakin boys—Albert, Wilson, and especially Bill. Although Bill was a couple of years older than I, he became my closest friend on the farm. The two of us did a lot of fishing and hunting together.

  The McMakin family had a remarkable influence on my life as far as morality and hard work were concerned. Redheaded, fast-talking Mr. McMakin raised the most beautiful tomatoes in the county, as well as other kinds of vegetables, for sale in the markets in Charlotte. I worked for him as much as for my father, and I enjoyed doing it. One summer Albert helped me raise thirteen of those prize tomato plants myself, in anticipation of earning the proceeds.

  Ironically, I was not much aware of a professional baseball-player-turned-preacher who was then in the heyday of his evangelistic ministry. His name was Billy Sunday. Daddy took me to hear him in Charlotte when I was five years old. I was overwhelmed by the huge crowd and properly subdued by my father’s warning to keep quiet during the service lest the preacher call out my name and have me arrested by a policeman!

  In about 1930, I gave my first speech. I portrayed Uncle Sam in a pageant at Woodlawn School, with a long beard and a tailcoat. My mother was a nervous wreck after teaching me the speech and listening to me practice it until I knew it word perfect. My knees shook, my hands perspired, and I vowed to myself that I would never be a public speaker! But Mrs. Boylston, the principal of Woodlawn, told Mother I had a gift for it.

  My sister Jean, the last of my siblings, was born in 1932. She was still a child when I left for college, but I remember she was a beautiful little girl. I vividly remember the alarm that gripped our hearts when she contracted polio about the time Ruth and I got married—and our gratitude to God when she recovered.

  My father and mother were strong-willed people. They had to be, or they could not have endured the hardships and setbacks of farming in the twenties and thirties. They accepted hardship and discipline in their own lives, and they never hesitated when necessary to administer physical discipline to us. Sometimes I got it for teasing Catherine or tricking Melvin into trouble, but usually it was for misdemeanors of my own.

  In all the strictness of my upbringing, there was no hint of child abuse. While my parents were swift to punish when punishment was deserved, they did not overload me with arbitrary regulations that were impossible to respect. In fact, they were very open. My parents never once told me to be in at a certain time when I went out on a Friday or Saturday night date. I knew that I had to be up by three in the morning and that if I stayed out past midnight I would get only a couple of hours of sleep.

  I learned to obey without questioning. Lying, cheating, stealing, and property destruction were foreign to me. I was taught that laziness was one of the worst evils, and that there was dignity and honor in labor. I could abandon myself enthusiastically to milking the cows, cleaning out the latrines, and shoveling manure, not because they were pleasant jobs, certainly, but because sweaty labor held its own satisfaction.

  There had to have been tensions between Daddy and Mother, from time to time, that we children were not supposed to see. I suppose my parents occasionally disappointed each other, and certainly they sometimes disagreed about serious as well as trivial things. But in any quarrels between them that I witnessed, I never heard either of them use a word of profanity. My mother and father (mostly my mother) could storm at each other once in a while when provoked, but they weathered every tempest and sailed on, together.

  When they read the family Bible in our home, they were not simply going through a pious ritual. Mother told us that they had established a family altar with daily Bible reading the very first day they were married. They accepted that book as the very Word of God, seeking and getting heavenly help to keep the family together.

  Every time my mother prayed with one of us, and every time my parents prayed for their sons and daughters, they were declaring their dependence on God for the wisdom and strength and courage to stay in control of life, no matter what circumstances might bring. Beyond that, they prayed for their children, that they might come into the kingdom of God.

  2

  The 180-Degree Turn

  Itinerant Evangelists and Traveling Salesmen

  In 1934, Charlotte, North Carolina, had the reputation of being one of the leading churchgoing cities in the United States, but at the approach of Dr. Mordecai Fowler Ham, it began to tremble.

  A stately, balding man with a neatly trimmed white mustache, wearing eyeglasses that made him look like a dignified schoolteacher and sporting impeccable clothes, Ham was in fact a strong, rugged evangelist. He had a great knowledge of the Bible and had educated himself in a number of other areas as well. He remained in the city for eleven weeks, preaching every night and every morning, except Mondays.

  A few Charlotte ministers and several members of a group called the Christian Men’s Club (which had been organized by Billy Sunday at the close of his meetings in 1924) had invited Dr. Ham to preach in a 5,000-seat tabernacle. Actually, the tabernacle was a sprawling, ramshackle building constructed of wood over a steel frame with a sawdust groundcover, especially built for the occasion on property at the edge of town, on Pecan Avenue, adjoining the Cole Manufacturing Company.

  Mordecai Ham had been pastor of the First Baptist Church in Oklahoma City, a leading congregation in the Southern Baptist Convention. He had once studied law and had been a traveling salesman before his ordination to the ministry. He arrived in Char-lotte under a considerable cloud of controversy. One charge leveled against him was that he was anti-Semitic, but I had no way of knowing if that was true; I did not even know what that term mean
t then. Part of the controversy was along denominational lines. The Baptists in the South generally supported him, but denominations like Methodists and Presbyterians did not care much for either his message or his style.

  He did not mince words about sin, either in the abstract or in its specific expressions in the local community. His candid denunciations of various evils got reported widely in the newspapers. People were drawn to the meetings, maybe out of curiosity to begin with. I did not attend, however, and everything I heard or read about him made me feel antagonistic toward the whole affair. It sounded like a religious circus to me.

  There were two newspapers in Charlotte at that time. My best friend was Julian Miller, and his father, a churchgoing man, was editor of the morning paper, the Charlotte Observer. Julian’s dad generally treated Dr. Ham with more respect, while the editor of the afternoon paper, the Charlotte News, frequently had a negative article about him.

  At first my mother and father did not take a position one way or the other about Dr. Ham.

  My father had been reared as a Methodist, in the best old mourner’s-bench revivalist tradition. One of my earliest recollections is Daddy’s attending the Dilworth Methodist Church. As an eighteen-year-old in 1908, he had driven his horse and buggy three miles one Sunday night to attend an evangelistic meeting in the one-room Butt’s Chapel (where the Dilworth Methodist Church met then) at the edge of Charlotte. This was in spite of a friend’s warning him, “If you don’t want to get religion, don’t go in there.”

  The way my father told it, he had been out late to a dance the night before and did not feel up to churchgoing on Sunday morning. “I was under conviction from the time I hit the door,” he remembered. “Well, when the preacher dismissed the congregation, I sat on. A couple of members came back to me and wanted to know if they could help me. I said, ‘I don’t know what’s wrong with me. I’m in bad shape.’ They said, ‘Come up and let us pray with you.’ They did, but I went on for about ten days and nights, unable to eat or sleep. I cared nothing for this world nor anything the world had to offer. I wanted something that the world couldn’t give, and I believed that I would know it when I got it. That was what I was looking for.”

  The spiritual struggle went on for days but finally came to an end. As my father told it: “One night, just as I turned off Park Road—the road I lived on—onto Worthington Avenue, God saved me, and my eyes were opened and old things passed away, and all things became new. I will never forget that moonlit night.”

  When he walked into the meeting house, the preacher saw the change on his face, called him up front, put his arm around my father’s shoulders, and announced, “Here is a young man whom God has called to preach, I’m sure.”

  Despite his strict moral code and rigidly ethical behavior, churchgoing seemed to be more a part of my father’s self-discipline than a joyful commitment. His Christian faith became nominal, which I supposed was about the same as minimal. My Uncle Simon Barker, Aunt Lill’s husband, who had been soundly converted, used to spend hours talking to him about religion. He listened patiently enough to Uncle Simon’s exposition of various Scriptures while smoking his big cigar. There were times when he seemed to be bored; there were times when he seemed to be interested. I did not understand everything they said, but it made a strong impression on me.

  About that time, just a few weeks after my sister Jean was born in 1932, my father suffered a near-fatal accident. Reese Brown was using a mechanical saw to cut wood for the boiler down behind the milk-processing house when my father came up to ask him a question. The racket from the saw made it hard for Reese to hear, so he turned a little to listen. In a split second, the saw caught a piece of wood and flung it with terrific force right into my father’s mouth, smashing his jaw and cutting his head almost back to his brain. They rushed him, bleeding nearly to death, to the hospital.

  For days the outcome was uncertain. Mother summoned her friends to intensive prayer. After he was stabilized, surgeons rebuilt my father’s face, which left him looking a bit different; but eventually his recovery was complete. Both my parents ascribed the full recovery to God’s special intervention in answer to prayer. After that episode, what Uncle Simon said seemed to make more sense to my father. He got much more serious about his spiritual life.

  I have no doubt it was partly that experience that prompted Father to support the Christian businessmen in Charlotte who wanted to hold one of their all-day prayer meetings in our pasture in May 1934. The group had held three similar meetings since they started praying together eighteen months earlier. My mother invited the ladies to the farmhouse for their own prayer meeting.

  That afternoon, when I came back from school and went to pitch hay in the barn across the road with one of our hired hands, we heard singing.

  “Who are those men over there in the woods making all that noise?” he asked me.

  “I guess they’re some fanatics that have talked Daddy into using the place,” I replied.

  Years later my father recalled a prayer that Vernon Patterson had prayed that day: that out of Charlotte the Lord would raise up someone to preach the Gospel to the ends of the earth.

  At that time, in 1934, it certainly wasn’t obvious that that someone might be me. My father knew that I went along with the family to church every week only “grudgingly, or of necessity,” to use a biblical phrase. I believe he sincerely wanted me to experience what he had felt a quarter-century earlier. In fact, he privately hoped and prayed that his firstborn son might someday fulfill the old Methodist evangelist’s prophecy by becoming a preacher in his stead.

  The church outside Charlotte in which my mother had been reared (and in which my grandfather had been an elder) was Steele Creek Presbyterian, called the largest country church in America at that time. My parents’ later membership in the Associate Reformed Presbyterian Church in Charlotte was a compromise between them, encouraged by her sisters, who attended there. (The ARP, as it was called, traced its roots back to a very strict group that had seceded from the Church of Scotland in the eighteenth century.) Later Mother also came into fellowship with some Plymouth Brethren neighbors, and under their influence she studied the Scriptures more deeply than before.

  In addition, she read the writings of noted Bible teachers Arno C. Gaebelein, Harry A. Ironside of the Moody Memorial Church in Chicago, and Donald Grey Barnhouse, a renowned preacher who pastored Tenth Presbyterian Church in Philadelphia. I could see that she took their writings seriously, but whenever she talked to me about the things they said in their magazines, I thought it was nonsense.

  A local minister told Mother she would go crazy reading the Book of Revelation, the last book in the New Testament, but it was while reading about the Second Coming of Christ that a sense of her own religious conversion became meaningful to her. All of this spiritual development was going on quietly in her life for about two years before the Ham meetings in Charlotte.

  At the beginning of the Ham-Ramsay meetings, even my mother was somewhat skeptical. Yet she sincerely desired to hear the visiting evangelist for her own spiritual nurture, and she wanted to encourage my father in his search for certainty of salvation. They went, and both found what they were seeking. “My experience,” Daddy said, “is that Dr. Ham’s meetings opened my eyes to the truth.”

  He commented on the dissatisfaction he had felt previously in simply moving his membership from one church to another. The Gospel had a new reality for him that made a marked difference in his life from then on.

  Mother, in her quietly pointed fashion, got to the nub of the issue: “I feel that Dr. Ham’s meetings did more, especially for the Christians, than any other meetings we’ve had here.”

  Despite my parents’ enthusiasm, I did not want anything to do with anyone called an evangelist—and particularly with such a colorful character as Dr. Ham. Just turning sixteen, I told my parents that I would not go to hear him.

  One day a few weeks into his campaign, I read in the Charlotte News about his charge
regarding immoral conditions at Central High School in Charlotte. Apparently, the evangelist knew what he was talking about. He claimed to have affidavits from certain students that a house across the street from the school, supposedly offering the boys and girls lunch during noon recess, actually gave them some additional pleasures.

  When the scandalous story broke, rumors flew that a number of angry students, on a night yet to be determined, were going to march on the tabernacle and demonstrate right in front of the platform. Maybe they would even do some bodily harm to the preacher. That stirred up my curiosity, and I wanted to go just to see what would happen. But how could I save face after holding out for nearly a month? That was when Albert McMakin stepped in.

  “Why don’t you come out and hear our fighting preacher?” he suggested.

  “Is he a fighter? ” I asked. That put a little different slant on things. “I like a fighter.”

  Albert added the incentive of letting me drive his old vegetable truck into town for the meeting, loaded with as many folks, white and black, as he could get to go along. We all sat in the rear of the auditorium to see the show, with a few thousand other people—one of the largest crowds I had ever been in.

  As soon as the evangelist started his sermon, he opened his Bible and talked straight from his text. He talked loudly, even though there was an amplifying system. I have no recollection of what he preached about, but I was spellbound. In some indefinable way, he was getting through to me. I was hearing another voice, as was often said of Dwight L. Moody when he preached: the voice of the Holy Spirit.

  Bumping along in the truck on the way home, I was deep in thought. Later, after I stretched out on my back in bed, I stared out the window at a Carolina moon for a long time.

  The next night, all my father’s mules and horses could not have kept me from getting to that meeting. From then on, I was a faithful attendant, night after night, week after week.