by Billy Graham
I needed to do a lot of studying, as well as work on my sermons. I was still blithely mixing my metaphors, as in this letter I once wrote to Ruth’s parents after we returned from vacationing down South: “Things were so piled up here in my absence that I have had quite a time catching up, but at last I can see daylight. It was hard to come back from a month of do-nothing and get down to brass tacks, but I am again in the rut.”
I had addressed them fondly for the first time as Mother and Dad in that letter; for the rest of his life, though, I generally referred to my father-in-law as Dr. Bell.
Occasionally Ruth’s sense of humor landed us in hot water, even with her parents. One day she sent one of her regular postcards home to her folks in North Carolina, keeping them informed on developments with the newlyweds. It was postmarked October 26, 1943, about ten weeks into our marriage. At the very bottom and squeezed up along the left side, she penned an apparent afterthought: “Guess what? Bill and I are going to have an addition to our family. He’s not so enthusiastic. Says it will be too much trouble, but I think it will be fun. More later. Adoringly, Ruth.”
The rejoicing in the Bell household down South immediately prompted her doctor father to send us by return mail a glowing letter of congratulations—a classic of paternal pride, love, and fatherly advice. What second thoughts they might have had about their son-in-law, I could not imagine, but Dr. Bell assured us of their prayers.
For the three of us. For Ruth. For me. And for “Junior,” the name Ruth gave the alley cat we had just adopted!
Instantly remorseful over her little joke, Ruth followed up the postcard the next day with a letter of explanation. It crossed her father’s in the mail. The damage was done.
I did not let her off easily. “Now they will never believe you,” I scolded her. “You’ve forfeited the privilege of ever getting another letter like that from your father when the real thing comes!”
She promised her folks that the next time she announced an addition to the family, it would not have whiskers and a long tail.
I rubbed it in. “Just think of your mother and daddy praying for a cat!”
Things could only get better after that.
In spite of my rough edges, the church people could not have been nicer to us. Attendance began to grow steadily, getting into the 90s by October and passing 100 two months later—about double the previous average.
It was still a basement church with high windows that we could not see out of. In the winter, visibility was obscured because of snow; in the summer, the weeds interfered. The “sort of junky” building, as Ruth described it, was redecorated free of charge by a member who was in the business, and the building committee met constantly to discuss completion plans. I preached twice on Sundays and attended youth meetings in members’ homes after the evening service. In addition to a midweek prayer meeting, Ruth and I both taught Child Evangelism classes on Wednesday afternoons. She went with me on many pastoral calls.
One day, as I was driving down the street, a man driving in the opposite direction pulled up next to me.
“You’re Billy Graham?” he asked.
“Yes, sir.”
“I’m Torrey Johnson,” he said by way of introduction.
“Oh, yes,” I responded enthusiastically. “I’ve heard you lots of times on the radio.”
“I’d like to talk with you,” he said.
“Certainly, any time,” I agreed.
He called on the phone a little later. “I’ve got too many things on my plate, with a large, growing church and my main radio program on Sunday afternoon,” he said. “I have another radio program called Songs in the Night, and I’d like to give that to you. I’ve prayed about it and thought about it, and I think you’re the one who should have it.”
I said I would think and pray about it too, and I would have a talk with the deacons at my church.
“Okay,” he said, “call me when you’ve made a decision.”
So I took it to the deacons at the church. It would cost $150 a week for the radio time on WCFL in Chicago, a station heard in the Midwest and into the South and East. A big decision! Little did I realize that it was one of the turning points of my life.
Ruth did not like the idea at first. Ministry at the Village Church—I had suggested the change of name from Western Springs Baptist Church because there were mainly Lutherans and Congregationalists (but very few Baptists) in the surrounding area—already was demanding more than enough of my time and strength. She figured I would be in the Army chaplaincy before long, and right after the war we would be on the mission field.
Initially, the church board rejected the idea due to lack of money. But when the needs for financing and staffing were provided, God’s answer seemed clear to go ahead. Bob Van Kampen agreed to provide the start-up funding. The quartet from the Wheaton College women’s glee club who had sung with me from time to time agreed to come on Sunday nights and sing for the live forty-five-minute program.
The first thing I wanted to do was to get a marquee name on the program. It was unlikely that listeners would have heard of our church, or of me. But what about George Beverly Shea, the handsome bass baritone who at that time was a staff announcer at the Moody Bible Institute’s station, WMBI?
In my bold fashion, I headed to Moody and went to the radio station office located on the top floor of the main building. There I asked for Mr. Shea. I could see him through the glass door of his office, but a secretary said he was busy in a meeting. Well, I did not want to waste a trip to Chicago, and I believed as much in the importance of his being on our program as I did in the Fuller brushes I had sold not so many years before. So I waited until I saw his door open for a moment, and then I brushed past his secretary.
“Mr. Shea,” I said, “I’m sorry to intrude, but I just have a quick proposal for you.”
“Yes?”
“My name is Billy Graham, and I’m pastor of the Village Church in Western Springs.”
“I’ve heard of you,” he offered.
“Torrey Johnson has asked us to take over his Sunday night radio show,” I said, too frightened to be flattered by Shea’s recognition of my name, “and I’m convinced that the program would be most successful if you’d agree to appear on it.”
“Well, I don’t know . . .”
I plunged on, outlining how I saw his singing fitting into the forty-five-minute program. I think he agreed to give it a try only because he could see that that was the only way he was going to get rid of me.
We did not have a typewriter, let alone a secretary, so Ruth helped me write the scripts. The program consisted of vignettes about three minutes long, in which the preacher would say a few things, and then there was a song. I preached for the radio program for the first time in early December, and several weeks later, following our Sunday evening service, we started broadcasting live from our basement church in Western Springs. We signed on with the program’s same theme song, “Songs in the Night,” inspired by Job 35:10, with lyrics by George Graves and music by Wendell P. Loveless.
Our church, which sat only 125 at the most, was filled for the first broadcast. Very few people except our own congregation knew that Bev Shea would be there. But one visitor was an emotionally troubled woman who had been following him around obsessively for some months. He was embarrassed by all her attention. At the end of the program, Bev whispered to me and asked if I could sneak him out.
I knew of an exit through the furnace room in back. We had to balance our way across a single plank in the dark to make our way through. Bev fell off, but he made his escape.
I built my radio talks around the events of the day. Keeping up with current events through newspapers and radio news programs, I began each message with a reference to something people would have been hearing and talking about that very day. Then I moved into a biblical message, showing that God and the Scriptures are relevant to every problem.
That first broadcast really put our church on the map. People started p
iling into our little building on Sunday nights to watch the show, and we got letters from listeners all over the Midwest. The Chicago Tribune sent a reporter out to write a story about our radio ministry. My filling station attendant in Hinsdale gave me $1 to support the program. A poor woman sent us 10¢. A carload of people listening as they rode took up a collection for us on the spot. When I went over the books with the chairman of the radio committee at the end of the first two months, our average income from listeners had been $105.07 per week. The Lord kept the budget in the black with other contributions.
To add to the excitement, station WMBI signed us up to broadcast our regular Sunday morning service from the church during March and April of 1944. One of our listeners wrote in to request fifty copies of my latest sermon—mixed metaphors and all. I was swamped by all the incoming mail, which I had to handle personally. We asked for volunteers. Only one showed up, a young woman from Knoxville, Tennessee, whose husband had a defense job nearby.
The year-end flurry of activity kept us from going south at Christmas, our first time away from our families at the holiday season. It made us terribly homesick to hear our landlords downstairs playing Christmas carols on their old Victrola while they bustled around trimming the house and wrapping packages. My cousin Steve Hunter, who was stationed at nearby Great Lakes Naval Training Station, came on Christmas Eve to spend the weekend with us; Ruth made us both hang up our stockings. And the Lanes invited us to Wheaton for Christmas dinner at their house.
By the middle of April, with an increasing number of people not only attending the church but coming to faith in Christ, Ruth and I began to feel that we might be there for several years. But two factors were working to redirect our lives.
First, there was discontent among a few of the deacons about my going away for evangelistic meetings so frequently. Of course, they had agreed to those meetings when I accepted their call, and the church letterhead listed me as “pastor/evangelist.” At the same time, they probably were justified, because I was accepting a number of invitations to speak in several surrounding states.
Second, from my standpoint, preaching throughout the Mid-west made me restless with the pastorate. It seemed to me, perhaps because of the war, that the whole world was ripe for the Gospel. I wanted to be moving, traveling, preaching, anywhere and everywhere. Ruth soon began to realize, as she later told me, that her life was going to be one of good-byes. Already it seemed I was gone as much as I was home.
That pattern was made even worse when I got another call from Torrey Johnson. He was heading a committee to start what was to be called Chicagoland Youth for Christ. The plan was to reach the flood of servicemen and young people who hit Michigan Avenue in Chicago on Saturday nights. The first meeting was to be held in Orchestra Hall, which sat about 3,000 and was internationally noted for its concerts. He asked me to preach an evangelistic message that first night.
Many of Torrey’s friends and advisers were against my participation because I was so little known. There were many famous preachers from all over the country who might have been more likely choices, but Torrey was interested in only one thing—someone to preach the Gospel and invite young people to receive Christ. He believed I was the one for the task. I was honored and overwhelmed.
That first Saturday night—May 27, 1944—proclaiming the Gospel live before a large crowd (the auditorium was nearly full), I was tense, very tense, but I found I had great liberty in speaking. When 40 came forward to receive Christ, it was one of the most humbling and spiritually encouraging moments of my life up to that time.
Other Saturday night Youth for Christ (YFC) rallies were springing up in Indianapolis, Philadelphia, and Detroit, and I was asked to go to each. When I filled in for Torrey Johnson on short notice in Detroit, I took my first plane ride.
Nevertheless, my constant absences understandably caused some concern in my Western Springs congregation. Things came to a head when I got back from a week of preaching services in Columbus, Ohio, in March 1944.
Good Presbyterian that she was, Ruth could not tolerate those Baptists “running their preacher,” she wrote home. “You can’t have a lot of respect for a pastor who is just a button for everyone to push.”
Still, I was probably out of line. I got upset when someone remarked that the church would have to cut my pay if I went off much more. What pay? Thinking of my very modest salary of $40 a week, I told them that I was their pastor, not their employee, and that if they deducted 1¢, they could start looking for another man. They were not used to that kind of straight talk, and maybe it was good for them. But to this day I am not sure it was right for me to say it.
Harder to take than that, though, was the superior attitude some of them had toward the new believers and people from other denominations who were coming our way. It was a judgmental attitude based on different lifestyles and associations. Take, for example, the concert pianist and orchestra conductor who was married to a former chorus girl—not the right type for our congregation, some thought. By contrast, Ruth and I found such people refreshing; we enjoyed their enthusiasm and earnestness in their newfound Christian life. They helped us to believe more than ever in the power of the Gospel to produce the more abundant life the Bible described.
One Sunday night, I bluntly (and perhaps brashly) told the people from the pulpit that some of them needed to confess the sin of troublemaking. I told them I would get the job done in Western Springs that God had brought me there for, regardless of their attitudes and opposition. Nobody talked back. But there remained an underlying tension that contributed to my restlessness about staying.
There were plenty of opportunities to leave for greener pastures. There was a big church in Fort Wayne, Indiana, that wanted me to come as pastor. And one in Chicago with an office staff, great music, a large salary, and a home for the pastor. As I recall, even Wheaton College got into the act, with a request for me to become one of their field representatives. None of the opportunities, however, seemed compelling enough for me to forsake our suburban basement flock, nor did I sense that God was calling me to do so.
But a couple of things happened to shorten the pastorate.
I was accepted into the Army’s chaplaincy program. I would have passed my previous physical in Chicago and joined up earlier but for the humiliating fact that I was three pounds underweight. I had requested a couple more months to fatten up. The Army granted the extension.
The second thing was completely beyond my control. Ruth had just gotten home from a visit to Montreat in September 1944, and I had worked hard to get the apartment in order, adding gladiolus in the dining room, carnations in the living room, and rosebuds in the bedroom. That was enough domestic activity to make any man sick! And I was. In bed. It seemed like a toothache, but one worse than I had ever experienced. Dr. Richard Matthies made a tentative diagnosis that sounded ridiculous to a twenty-six-year-old man and his wife.
Mumps?
Mumps it was. Ruth applied hot packs, but they did nothing to alleviate the pain. She thought I looked funny, but I felt frantic. That very night, attorney James Bennett was to speak in our church. A funeral was scheduled for Wednesday afternoon. The night of the funeral, I was to begin two weeks of meetings at a church in Roseland, on Chicago’s South Side. But mumps would keep me in bed for at least two weeks, it was estimated.
That did it! I had put on the three pounds the Army wanted, but now, because of the mumps, I could not go to Harvard, where the chaplaincy school was located.
Ruth, daughter of a doctor, thought it was hilarious. “I spent all morning telephoning, and others called, such as Mrs. Armour,” she wrote to her folks. “She just howled when I said Bill had the mumps. So did I. Everybody does when you say mumps. ” Since I was bedridden, Ruth went on to say, “I guess to be impressive I should say, ‘Graham’s maid speaking.’”
She talked about our plans to be in Montreat for Christmas: “The specialist said Bill’s throat has a form of nervous paralysis,” she wrote to her pa
rents. “It’s improving. The mumps will help him forget it.” She updated them a few days later, reporting that it was definitely mumps, on both sides, and said “Ha, ha” when she told of feeding me mainly liquids and strained baby foods, and giving me a bath in bed.
Before long, however, no one was laughing. The fever raged, and the two weeks stretched into two months as mumps turned into orchitis. People prayed on my behalf, and Dr. Matthies exerted his skills to keep me alive.
A radio listener who had heard of my plight sent Ruth and me a check for $100 to finance a recovery vacation in Florida. We gratefully accepted and left as soon as I was able, which was in December. I had lost a lot more than the three pounds I had gained for the Army (indeed, a lot more than was healthy for my already slight frame), and my eyes were dark and hollow. The doctors warned us that because of the orchitis, we probably would not be able to have children. I needed desperately to regain my strength, and Florida seemed like Heaven to me.
We rented rooms in a small, inexpensive hotel on Seventy-ninth Street in Miami, about a mile from the beach. Soon we discovered that Torrey Johnson and his family were renting on the same street, but closer to the beach. I looked him up and thanked him for his confidence in me and for all the opportunities he had sent my way. He invited me fishing. . . .
6
Youth for Christ
The United States, Canada, Great Britain, Europe 1945–1947
At the end of 1944, when I was still recovering from the aftereffects of mumps, Torrey Johnson took me fishing off the Florida coast. I was looking forward to a relaxing day in the sun, but once we were on the ocean, he launched into an idea that had been boiling inside him for weeks. The early success of Chicagoland Youth for Christ had awakened in him a dream he could hardly contain.
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.
