Ruth, a Portrait: The Story of Ruth Bell Graham

by Patricia Cornwell

  From the beginning her class was popular. A gifted teacher, she was adept at sensing the mood of the group and responding impulsively with her blend of homespun logic, candor, and piercing humor. She stirred the students until they rallied to her causes, which included holding street meetings, helping the poor, and distributing hundreds of large, bright yellow DON’T MISS CALVIN buttons throughout the campus when church attendance had dropped.

  Hers was no mean task. The small college was not immune to the rebellion and hostility that had infected the people of the so-called generation gap. In fact, since Montreat-Anderson College was known as the place where you go if you can’t go anywhere else, a sizable band of society’s rebels, along with those afflicted by academic indolence, landed there. “Ruth,” Calvin said, “never paid any attention to the generation gap. For her, it didn’t exist. She was not shocked by anyone’s hair to his knees or clothes. I can remember some people that were very physically unattractive or terrible misfits that other people would not like, would not want to be around and would not work with. And yet, she would take time with these people and show them kindness.”

  One day Calvin said to her, “Don’t you think you could more profitably put your time on some other people where you could get more mileage?”

  “Well, God loves these people too,” she replied. “Just because they’re unattractive or warped in their thinking doesn’t mean the Lord doesn’t love them. And if we don’t take them, who is going to take them?”

  It was as though the Qingjiang mission station had been relocated in Montreat. The new minister rooted out the needs and then telephoned Ruth.

  “I sometimes feel guilty for calling her so much,” he later admitted as he sat in his small, paneled church office, where autographed portraits of astronauts, baseball players, and LBJ were propped on crowded bookshelves around his cluttered desk. He was typically dressed in a shapeless sweater, baggy Levis, and Wallabees, an unruly shock of gray hair falling over his brow. “But I’ve always got kids who have medical payments to be made, who are about to flunk out or don’t get their grades because they can’t make their final payment. And she has always assisted. She’s very generous with other people, but not with herself.” He would later speculate that she had helped hundreds of people through college.

  When Calvin wasn’t telephoning Ruth, he was calling on her father. Dr. Bell had retired from a successful surgical practice in 1955 and was respected for his professionalism and his humanity. He was known to charge the poor only what they could pay, or nothing at all, just as he had done in Qingjiang. Observers speculated that he gave away at least a third of his gross income. His load had not lightened upon leaving the mission field. A doctor, he was on call at night. A prominent Presbyterian layman, he was often out of town. Sometimes he worked around the clock while his wife sat up anxiously, crocheting or reading, until fatigue or one of her headaches drove her to bed.

  Though Virginia Bell began her daily entries with “head,” “no head,” or “terrible head,” she rarely mentioned her pain to others. Likewise, Ruth was stoical. She rarely admitted even in her journals that she was ill.

  “You never really see her down or depressed,” Calvin said, “or if she is, she covers it in such a way that you don’t know it. I’ve seen her when she’s had migraine headaches that were so severe that she was almost unable to see how to walk and yet she wouldn’t complain. I’d say, ‘Do you have a headache?’ because she was glassy-eyed and it was evident the light hurt her eyes and she was really in pain. She would brush it aside with the comment that it didn’t amount to anything. The only time I’ve known her to hide out is when she gets one of those severe headaches. She’s been plagued with them and she never made a to-do over them at all. And she always works very hard at beating the schedule of getting well.”

  In fact, Ruth was a terrible medical frustration. Cheerful, cooperative, and stoical in the hospital or clinic, she was quite another sort of patient at home, denying ailments and treating them herself. A few of her unsavory remedies were buttermilk with a twist of lemon and blackstrap molasses over toast, which had all the appeal of bread dipped into a bucket of tar. She derived infinite delight from offering these awful creations to houseguests. She experimented with different types of analgesics and swallowed a variety of obscure vitamins, lecithin, and alfalfa, conveniently storing the tablets in empty lipstick tubes which she carried in her pocket or purse.

  If a doctor ordered her to stay in bed for two weeks and do “absolutely nothing,” her notion of compliance was to putter about the house in a flowing robe and do all the chores she normally did. “What the doctors don’t know won’t hurt them,” she would say. That attitude prevailed in most of her dealings with people. She avoided confrontations, gently if not humorously contradicting only once in her mellow Virginia accent. If her antagonist of the moment remained obstinate, Ruth would simply smile and say no more. What she would do next, no one could predict. She was as quietly stubborn as the Sphinx and just about as inscrutable.

  If all else failed, that wit of hers could sting, just a little. In 1996, when she almost died from spinal meningitis, GiGi was at the hospital helping her frail mother from the bathroom back to the bed, and daughter could not get mother to slow down. Finally, GiGi impatiently blurted, “Mother, why do you have to walk so fast?”

  “To get it over with,” Ruth shot back, as she walked on without pause.

  When a visitor appeared and chided Ruth that she wasn’t taking good care of herself and was too eager to get home, this was met with smiling silence. The guest went on to fix Ruth a high-vitamin, healthy drink, not known for being savory. Ruth took one sip.

  “I guess it tastes better if you drink it fast,” she said, setting it down on the tray and not touching it again.

  “I’ll be back to see you soon,” promised the visitor. “Unless you tell them not to let me in.”

  “Now that’s an idea,” said Ruth.

  Her children used her extended hospital stay as an opportunity to clean out and organize their mother’s house. Since Ruth rarely threw anything away, the job was daunting, and not the least bit appreciated.

  “Anybody who goes into someone’s drawers and cabinets should be thanked with a switch,” Ruth announced from her sickbed.

  She would always have a mind of her own, but her rather profound stubbornness was not completely born of self-interest. Rather, it was part of her determination to keep on course, to carry on with her duties no matter how she felt or who or what was interfering. She had observed the missionaries’ self-sacrifice and tenacity in China and expected no less from herself. Like her childhood heroes, she enjoyed an extraterritoriality of sorts, for she was not always guided by the standards of the society she lived in. Her sense of justice was bigger than the law, which in her mind wasn’t always moral, and she didn’t necessarily do the practical or the expected. She followed her own impulses, signals transmitted by her faith, her tenderheartedness, her eccentricities, and her spiritedness.

  The result was an unpredictable, disorganized, baffling human being, far more loving than legalistic, but never to be underestimated. She had an unusual live-and-let-live attitude toward nature, allowing bats, cobwebs, flying squirrels, goats, nonpoisonous snakes, or perhaps a runaway turkey to inhabit her homestead with impunity. Creatures, like children, seemed strangely drawn to her, and a guest marveled one morning when a tiger swallowtail alighted on Ruth’s shoulder and rested there a good minute before floating away.

  Hummingbirds sometimes watched her eye to eye as she planted geraniums. Flying squirrels carried Christmas yarns from the attic and built nests in old jeep tires. Field mice hid birdseed in her shoes. Once a train of ducklings followed her from a lake shore, across a lawn, and through the front door of a nearby house. Harmful creatures were not tolerated. Nor were they feared, at least not by her. Copperheads and rattlesnakes she killed with a marshmallow fork kept by the family room fireplace.

  She was spontaneou
s, impulsive, and delightfully uninhibited, walking into a shop in the Atlanta airport on one occasion and requesting a psychedelic package of rolling papers behind the counter.

  “These are great to write notes on and stick in your Bible,” she cheerfully explained to the clerk.

  “Oh yeah,” the young woman sarcastically drawled.

  A practical joker, she was not above squirting Grady Wilson’s new pastel suit with disappearing ink or sneaking a slice of rubber Swiss cheese into his sandwich. She cooked beef bouillon with tiny meatballs for lunch and placed a bowl of tinted water and live tadpoles in front of associate Lee Fisher. He didn’t notice anything odd until he dipped for a meatball and it swam away from his spoon. She served a guest a slice of pie covered with shaving cream and left a dead black snake inside a bag outside a friend’s kitchen door and hid behind a tree to watch her open it.

  Her life, like her dresser drawers and closets, was dominated by clutter. It was common for her to have twenty or thirty books scattered around the house, each in some stage of being read. She might devour a volume from beginning to end or abandon it after the first twenty pages if it lost her interest. Finishing a book just because she had started it, she once said, “was like going into the pantry and thinking you had to eat all the peas before you could open anything else.”

  Though she eventually had a bona fide office upstairs, complete with a desk, library, and disarray of knickknacks, her “office” was wherever she was. Often, particularly when she was weary, she worked on her bed, propped up amid her jumbled projects. When she traveled, the clutter traveled with her like iron filings after a magnet and relocated where she next slept. The dining room table also made a fine desk, and on it one might find a heap of maps, scrapbooks, and photographs. Wherever she had been there was a trail of notes, written in her unique calligraphy on snippets of white or yellow paper or Post-its. These included grocery lists, reminders, telephone numbers, spiritual insights, sermon ideas and illustrations, quotations that she found particularly amusing or profound, and ideas for improving the house. Reminders might be stuck on a cupboard door, next to a telephone, inside a book, under bed covers, in her Bible, on a table, taped to a car visor or wall, or perched on a log in a cold fireplace.

  Ruth’s proclivity for disorganization wasn’t helped by her reluctance to throw anything away. Most of her memorabilia, including ticket stubs, dried wedding bouquets, her wedding dress, cartoons, poems, and letters, eventually migrated to the attic. Billy was nothing like her in this department, as in most others. After he left home for his next frontier, Ruth would rummage through the garbage to retrieve items, such as his college diploma and a hundred-dollar check, that had been lost amid other “trash” he had pitched into his wastepaper basket.

  Ruth’s unfinished projects included people. She opened her door to all, and was known to invite into her living room the sort her neighbors would have feared to let into their yards. Had she ever kept a guest book, it would have held the names of drug addicts, thieves, the delusional and deranged, and juvenile delinquents from the local detention center who had committed crimes of vandalism or murder. She would buy pizzas, barrels of fried chicken, or bags of hamburgers for her scarred, skeptical acquaintances, and challenge them with the Christian faith.

  Through her own ministry, she kept her husband in touch with students, on occasion coaxing him to speak at the local college and small community gatherings, or teach her Sunday school class. Important people, ranging from celebrities to politicians, visited the Graham house. But it was the lonely, the misfits, Ruth welcomed with special warmth. They were the people she virtually adopted.

  Her first “orphan” was an elderly man named Arthur Radcliffe, a midwesterner who had taught horticulture in North Carolina and later managed a flower shop. An eccentric bachelor, “Old Man Art,” as he was called, was as sinewy as a licorice stick. Ruth had become acquainted with him through the Montreat Presbyterian Church, where he was an usher.

  When Radcliffe reached his seventies, about the time Ruth started teaching her Sunday school class, he was placed in a Greensboro, North Carolina, nursing home. Miserable when separated from the soil and plants he loved, he ran away and hitchhiked back to western North Carolina. One day he appeared on Ruth’s doorstep.

  “I’m not going to let the highway patrol take me back!” he declared in a desperate voice. “I’ll die before I’ll go back to that nursing home. Why don’t you just let me die right here in this old cabin you got at the end of the road?”

  She renovated it and he moved in. He papered the walls with magazine photographs of flowers and plugged the cove with plants and shrubbery. Whenever a friend would drive up to visit, Radcliffe could be found stretched out in the loamy soil, digging and planting, because he was too feeble to stand or squat. He died two years after moving into the cabin, and Ruth carried out the wishes of his handwritten will. His body was given to science and a white pine was planted on the ridge in remembrance of him.

  At Christmastime, not long after Radcliffe had become part of the earth that once was so much a part of him, a rumor circulated about a family virtually starving in an abandoned toolshed on a brambly patch of dirt in Black Mountain. On a raw December day, Calvin Thielman and two deacons investigated. They found the unheated shanty and a mother and five small children living inside. There was no plumbing. The only convenience was an electric lightbulb glaring over a crazed mosaic of broken concrete flooring. The father, a carpenter named Luther Dover, was dying of cancer in Asheville’s Memorial Mission Hospital. When Calvin visited the ward several days later, he found Dover on his back, the skin covering his gaunt face as thin as cigarette paper.

  “I went up to your house and went out to your family,” Calvin finally drawled after moments of small talk. “It looks like it’s going to be a pretty rough Christmas for the children. And some people at our church have more than they know what to do with. They would be glad to help give the children some things for Christmas and to help you have a place to live if that would be all right with you. We don’t want to do anything without your permission and I guarantee you it won’t take anything away from anybody else, it won’t take anything away from them.”

  Dover’s eyes filled with tears. “I reckon they would appreciate that,” he whispered.

  When Billy Graham heard the story of the Dovers, he sent for Calvin. “I’m always hearing that the government is giving away money right and left,” he said. “Find out if they’re receiving the aid they should be.” He handed Calvin a generous check, adding, “There’s more where that came from.”

  Ruth discovered the ages of the Dover children and bought clothing and toys for them. By mid-December, the Dover family had been moved into an abandoned house. Plumbers had replaced its rusty water pipes. Rooms were furnished and Dover’s doctor allowed him to come home for the holiday. Shortly after the family moved in, Ruth’s Sunday school class arrived with sacks of groceries. Christmas Eve she sent her husband and the children down the mountain to deliver the gifts she had chosen and wrapped.

  Several days later, Dover, gasping for breath, was carried back to the hospital in the bed of a pickup truck. Calvin went to see him and found him wracked with pain and receiving little attention.

  “Can’t you give him oxygen or something to make him more comfortable?” Calvin asked an orderly.

  “Well,” the man stalled, “I have to get clearance from the head doctor and I don’t know where to get him …”

  Outraged, the preacher stormed through the hall, telephoned Ruth, and told her the situation.

  “You let me handle it,” she told him.

  She knew when to throw her weight around and didn’t hesitate when the need arose. She was calmly settling the matter over the telephone before Calvin had walked twenty paces. “And boy!” he recalled, “when I went back down the hall the nurses were moving and everybody else was moving. A private nurse was by Dover’s side and a doctor had arrived.”

  The last mo
ments of Dover’s life he held his wife’s hand. “I’m gonna die,” he whispered. “I want you to see that all my debts are paid. And I want my children raised as Christians.”

  Cloaked in wool, her breath turning to smoke against the wintry air, Ruth stood at the edge of the small crowd when he was buried in the mountainside cemetery. Not known to all who clustered around the new gash in the frozen earth, she had paid for the funeral.

  15

  CHAPTER

  The Terror by Night

  WALKING THE MOUNTAIN PATH WITH FRANKLIN

  Whether it was a loud car or motorcycles I loved these things when I was growing up. I never pretended to be the stereotype of a fellow with a Bible under my arm. But my parents pretty much let me be me.

  —William Franklin Graham III

  The six of them, children and mother, perched around the kitchen table, beginning the day with readings from a box of multicolored Bible verses. Momentarily they heard the heavy, booted feet of Gregg Sawyer in the foyer, arriving to begin his chores.

  “Morning,” he said.

  Ruth invited him to read the Scripture lesson, something she always did if one of the workmen appeared during breakfast. He shyly withdrew one of the cards from the box she handed him, seated himself, and commenced cleaning his glasses between his thumb and forefinger.

  He read Hebrews 12:6: “Whom the Lord loveth, he chaseth …”

  His misreading was a harbinger of life with Franklin when he reached his teens. It would indeed seem that the Lord would chase him as he veered from the straight and narrow, his problems and temptations nipping at his heels.

  Franklin would require his mother’s full attention, something she could not always give. He needed the strong hand of a father, but the pressure of Billy’s ministry was staggering. By the time Franklin was old enough to drive, more than thirty million people had attended his father’s crusades, while millions more had heard him over the radio or on television. Billy was so recognizable that he could no longer eat in restaurants without people lining up ten and twelve deep to ask for his autograph. He could not appear in an American hotel lobby or airport without being mobbed.