Billy Graham

The Man I Knew

Greg Laurie

• Publisher: Salem Books
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781621579991
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religious Biographies

Billy Graham Was the World's Best-Known Evangelist—Loved and Admired by Millions. But Very Few Knew Him Personally. Pastor and bestselling author Greg Laurie was one of those fortunate few, blessed with an insider's view of Billy Graham's world for more than two decades. With the same painstaking research and eye for detail that distinguishes his previous biographies, Steve McQueen: Salvation of an American Icon and Johnny Cash: The Redemption of an American Icon, Laurie now turns to the life of his beloved mentor, offering the intimate perspective of a disciple and friend. As a strapping North Carolina farm boy, Graham surrendered his life to Jesus at a camp meeting led by a blustery itinerant preacher, but he never lost the mischievous twinkle in his eye or his fun-loving air. Laurie sheds light on Graham's lesser-known struggles—such as a broken heart before he met the love of his life and a crisis of faith from which he emerged stronger than ever. From the evangelist's private challenges and public successes to his disappointments and joys, Billy Graham: The Man I Knew provides a vivid portrait of one of history's most remarkable Christian lives.

CHAPTER ONE The Dairyman’s Son

Billy Graham was a modern prophet of God. One of the most recognized and trusted faces of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries; a confidante and spiritual advisor to presidents, diplomats, and royalty; a civil-rights champion; a president and CEO of a major company; an inventive entrepreneur; and a pioneer of Christian cinema. He broke ground in radio and an emerging technology called television.

Think of Steve Jobs, who wanted to make his “dent in the universe,” and in some ways did so with the creation of the smartphone. Think of Jeff Bezos, who created Amazon, the world’s most successful business, and then took it in directions no one else could have foreseen. Think of Walt Disney, who imagined things no one had ever dreamed of, and you get a glimpse of the man who, in his own way, eclipsed them all.

William Franklin Graham was born in a much kinder, gentler time in America. Think William Faulkner and Mark Twain, but further east of the Mississippi. He was born on his family’s three-hundred-acre dairy farm on the outskirts of Charlotte, North Carolina, on November 7, 1918 (four days before the World War I armistice) to parents William Franklin Sr. and Morrow Coffey Graham. Morrow, it was said, was made of pioneer stock, for she had been picking butterbeans in the field earlier in the day before Billy arrived.

From what I’ve discerned, they were hardworking and God-fearing people (they were devout Presbyterians) who ably provided for Billy and his three younger siblings: Catherine, Melvin, and Jean, who was fourteen years younger than Billy. They were initially raised in a white-framed farmhouse on a choppy dirt road. The land’s soil was rich, and the farm was surrounded by woods, streams, and foliage such as oaks and cedars. The home was filled with lots of love, ample food, and plenty of laughter. A few years later, when Billy was around ten, they moved to a two-story colonial red brick house with a pillared porch and paved paths, about 150 yards north of the old property. The new home was an instant upgrade, with one of man’s greatest inventions: indoor plumbing. (The luxury of walking down the hall in the dead of winter instead of outside to a freezing privy is not to be underestimated.) And it was a luxury—only 10 percent of American homes at the time had indoor plumbing and just 7 percent had electricity. These two innovations probably made the Grahams the envy of Mecklenburg County. (The house was later purchased by the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association, moved, and fully restored in 2007. It is now part of the Billy Graham Library complex in Charlotte, only a few miles from its original site.)

It was not the first structure on the property. Billy’s grandfather, William Crook Graham, a former Confederate soldier with a patriarchal beard, built an unusually tall log cabin from American chestnut trees culled from the grounds around 1870, not long after the Civil War. The cabin stood strong for nearly 150 years and has been preserved on the Anne Springs Close Greenway a few miles south of Charlotte.

Billy, who never met William Crook, certainly heard about him. Many in the area knew of William’s drinking exploits and sometimes outrageous behavior. “He’d get drunk and he’d stay drunk pretty much over Sunday,” William’s son-in-law once told Graham biographer John Pollock. He also mentioned the former soldier had accumulated lots of debt and made no attempt to pay it off.

Billy described his crusty and colorful grandfather in his autobiography, Just as I Am, as “a hard-drinking, hard-cursing veteran whose service with the Sixth South Carolina Volunteers left him with a Yankee bullet in his leg for the rest of his life.” (Billy’s maternal grandfather, Ben Coffey, also fought in the Civil War for the Confederates in the Eleventh North Carolina Regiment, Pettigrew’s Brigade. He was wounded at Gettysburg in Pickett’s Charge in July 1863 and is immortalized in the North Carolina monument at the famous battleground site.)

Graham’s regiment also saw plenty of action, fighting in eleven engagements over four years. About half the unit was killed at the Battle of Seven Pines in Henrico County, Virginia. They took heavy casualties in most of their fights. Many of the men who weren’t killed lost their minds. But Graham survived. Wounded at the Battle of the Wilderness and present at the surrender in Appomattox, he ended up walking back home after the war to Fort Mill, South Carolina, a distance of 230 miles—a mighty long way to walk even without a bullet in your body. He later acquired a farm in Sharon Township near Charlotte, North Carolina, for about one dollar per acre.

The land eventually became a dairy farm, but after surviving what Graham did, it’s hard to go back to farm life. After living in the shadow of death for four years, he probably couldn’t have cared less what anyone thought of him. Today he likely would have been diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder. It was not unknown back then, but people referred to it as “soldier’s heart.”

William Crook Graham was no saint, but he was a stubborn survivor. He fought, survived injury, and managed to get himself home alive through sheer strength of will. A Minié ball in his leg and a 230-mile walk ahead? A piece of cake after battles like Spotsylvania and Cold Harbor.

He also wasn’t keen on religion (no surprise there), though he was mentioned in a 1914 Charlotte Observer article as a member of the Sharon Presbyterian Church. It was his Scottish wife, Maggie McCall—also a member and buried in the church’s cemetery—who toiled and tended the spiritual needs of the Graham flock. She instilled solid Christian values in their eleven-member family, teaching them the Scriptures and ensuring they applied it to their lives. They weren’t going to end up like Pap if she had anything to do with it. Every one of them was church-going, and several of their grandchildren and offspring—Billy being the first—became preachers.

William Crook Graham passed away on November 14, 1914, at the age of seventy-three. He didn’t leave much to his children except unpleasant memories of binge drinking, boorish behavior, and a mountain of debt. The farm was in arrears; it was his sons William “Frank” (Billy’s father) and Clyde who ultimately picked up the tab in order to keep the place, later known as the Graham Brothers Dairy Farm. Fortunately, they had more horse sense than their father and were harder workers. (The third brother, Billy’s Uncle Tom, moved to Oklahoma and found success in the cotton-gin business.)

Frank, who only had three years of formal schooling, ran the day-to-day business affairs of the dairy farm while Clyde tended to the cows and milk-processing house. Frank’s wife, Morrow, crunched the numbers and ran the Graham empire from their kitchen table.

It wasn’t much of an empire in the beginning, but they were diligent, and it became one of the largest dairy farms in the area, boasting seventy-five cows and approximately four hundred customers. It was enough for Frank and Morrow to provide a nice roof over their heads and an automobile to shuttle them around (a ’31 black Chevrolet with red wheels!). Being farmers, food was guaranteed to be on the table. The Grahams grew tomatoes, lettuce, eggplants, okra, and squash.

It seems a dairy farm was also a good place to work off nervous energy, which Billy had in abundance. Billy’s father found myriad ways to harness his son’s seemingly endless vigor, starting with sending him out to feed and milk the family cows at 2:30 a.m. The first time he slept in past 3:00 a.m., he got a rude awakening, courtesy of Frank.

“I used to have to get up by at least three o’clock,” Billy told English broadcaster Guy Lawrence. “I remember one morning my father took a bucket of cold water and threw it in my face… I got up quickly that morning.”

It was hard, dirty work, with stale and pungent farm smells lifting from the hay, dust, and cow dung. Milking cows is not for sissies. If you’re not careful, you can get your teeth kicked in. You can also get knocked off your milking stool if you’re competing with a calf for her mother’s milk. You freeze in the winter and sweat in the summer. Billy was not fond of the daily chores, according to his brother, especially when he got hit in the eye by the swish of a cow tail. “Billy never liked (milking cows),” recalled Melvin Graham in a 1996 interview. “He only did it because Daddy made him… and he had to do it because he was still at home. I always did accuse him of leaving home when he was seventeen to get off the farm, get away from that farm work.” He milked twenty cows by hand in the morning and another twenty after he returned home from school. That’s a long day in itself, but after the milking, the shed had to be cleaned.

Billy was also enlisted to deliver milk, and that wasn’t much safer. He recalled to British journalist David Frost a customer delivery that almost turned deadly.

“About three o’clock in the morning, I was delivering milk. The snow had fallen and the dog had gotten after me in this particular house, and I ran in a direction that I had never taken before to get back to the milk truck,” Billy said. “A clothes wire had been strung and it caught me right in the neck. I did a double twist and almost severed my head from my body. Then the dog came and attacked me while I was down. I’ll never forget that.”

The farm instilled in the young boy a strong work ethic that would serve him well in later years. Another benefit of being a farmer was that during times of economic turmoil, they could live off the land and eat while others had to scramble for food and the other necessities of life.

Even still, the Grahams didn’t go unscathed. No one did. Frank lost his entire life savings of four thousand dollars in the 1929 stock market crash. Sadly, he never recouped his money. Frank was forced to wipe the slate clean.

Financially, things only got worse as the Great Depression lurched forward. The Graham Brothers Dairy Farm managed to scrape by through wit and grit, working from sunup to sundown. When milk dropped to five cents a quart, Frank went into survival—but never panic—mode. Billy recalled how his father’s keen sense of humor and ability to tell funny jokes never waned or showed the slightest sign of worry. My best guess is that Frank placed his trust firmly in God to pull his family through.

Billy would face many challenges as he grew older. I believe he learned how to be steady in a storm from his father. Farm people are notoriously tough. They are highly dependent on God’s grace in times of plenty and in times of drought. A wise man must save when times are good so that he has some left over in times of drought. These are pieces of wisdom that are sprinkled throughout the Psalms.

While Frank and Morrow faced those crushing times head on, Billy was still young enough to escape such harsh realities. He grew to love baseball and dreamed that one day he would become a professional athlete. He had visions of grandeur: playing in Wrigley Field in Chicago and Yankee Stadium in New York—a place that he would fill to capacity years later, and not because crowds wanted to see him hit home runs. Billy devoured the sports pages each morning and memorized the box scores of his favorite teams. Billy batted lefty and had a fair throwing arm and a decent glove, but he showed no signs of superstar potential.

Later, when Billy entered his first year of high school, the famed Babe Ruth came to Charlotte to play in an exhibition game. Billy and his companions on the baseball team were in the front row to cheer on the greatest batter who ever lived, whooping it up at top volume for their hero. Frank had even made arrangements for Billy to shake the Babe’s hand. It was a thrilling moment for the teenager. It should have been. Ruth remains one of America’s greatest sports heroes.

Billy’s other loves at that time were reading and tending to his animals; the family had a collie, cats (at one time up to twenty), and several goats. He recalled locking up the dog and a cat in the doghouse and leaving them together for the rest of the night. Billy said they were inseparable by morning. The pairing of the two animals left an indelible impression on him. “Maybe that is where the seeds of some of my ecumenical convictions got planted, wanting to help people at odds with each other find ways to get along,” he recollected in his 1997 autobiography.

Billy also got an early upper hand on racial relations in the Deep South. His family employed an African-American housekeeper named Susie Nickolson for nearly twenty years, and she became an aunt/motherly figure to the Graham children. Nickolson pitched in with the cooking and cleaning (though Morrow chopped wood for the stove), and occasionally stepped in when a family fight was about to erupt.

“I remember one night Mother and Daddy had to go to a meeting and I had a friend over visiting, and Mother left, I think, two cans of pork and beans,” recalled Catherine Graham in 1996. “Well, Billy Frank loved pork and beans… and we started fighting over those pork and beans with my friend there, and we were just in our early teens, and Susie stood over us wringing her hands, saying, ‘Please, Mr. Billy, please Mr. Melvin, please Miss Catherine, please don’t kill each other.’ And so, that’s the kind of family we were.”

Billy grew especially close to Reese Brown, the farm’s African-American foreman and blacksmith. Brown held the distinction of being the highest-paid farmhand in Mecklenburg County, but he earned every penny. Brown’s paycheck, and the fact that he was personal friends with Frank Graham, drew critical whispers from other farmers in the area because of Brown’s race.

But Brown was worth his weight in gold. Not only was he physically strong (he could hold down a bull when it had to be dehorned), but he was an unrelenting workhorse and set the tone with all of the other dairy employees. They could not slack around him. Brown was smart, loyal, dependable, and trustworthy.

He helped Billy in his cow-milking technique and later coached him as he learned to drive. In between, Billy received plenty of free life lessons. Brown, a U.S. Army sergeant during World War I, instructed Billy how to respect his elders and did not mind disciplining the lad if he stepped out of line. Billy, who fondly thought of Brown as an uncle, also played with his two children and gobbled down his wife’s tasty buttermilk biscuits when offered. It might have been a working farm, but it was also a family farm.

While Brown helped shape his character, it was Morrow who helped shape her son’s mind, introducing Billy to literature and nudging him to develop his mind as part of a daily habit. He read for pleasure on a daily basis. Because his mother taught him to read books, he basked in the superheroes of his day: Robin Hood, Tom Swift, the Rover Boys, and especially the adventures of the jungle lord Tarzan, locked in hand-to-hand combat with gorillas, tigers, and lions. He developed an effective Tarzan-style yell when hanging from a backyard tree, often scaring the horses and drivers who scuttled by on Park Road. Even that act didn’t go to waste, his father later said.

“I think all that yelling helped develop his voice,” Frank Graham later told a biographer.

Morrow also developed Billy’s biblical knowledge, starting at age four. She constantly rehearsed her children on Bible-verse memorization and the Westminster Shorter Catechism, which teaches all humans “to glorify God and enjoy him forever.” Billy recalled, “Every day was a different Scripture that she would read to us at the breakfast table. Then we would have a prayer. Either my father led the prayer, or usually in the early days, it was my mother.”

In the evening, Morrow prayed for each of her children to serve the Lord in some capacity. She could not have anticipated the special plans God had in store for her rambunctious and gangly oldest son.

Some of the first few verses Billy memorized were John 3:16, Psalm 90:7, Proverbs 3:5–6, and John 14:6. The last one states: “Jesus said, ‘I am the way, the truth and the life. No man comes to the Father but by me.’ ”

I find this interesting, because that verse would be emblazoned on massive banners on the various stages around the world where Billy stood to preach the Gospel.

John 3:16 was another verse he would quote thousands of times to millions of people. That verse, along with John 14:6, would be paramount to his preaching.

In the summer of 1932, Morrow wanted to deepen her understanding of her faith, so she joined a Bible class with the prompting of her sister, Lil Barker. She came to the belief “that the Lord has come in and lives in our hearts. I had never known that truth before.”

She came to know another kind of truth: God hears prayers. A few weeks after Morrow joined the Bible study, Frank was nearly killed when Reese Brown was using a mechanical saw to cut wood for the boiler room. When Frank approached Reese to ask him a question, the foreman turned his head to listen because of the...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Dedication
• Introduction
• Chapter One: The Dairyman’s Son
• Chapter Two: No Angel
• Chapter Three: A Bespectacled Messenger
• Chapter Four: The Old Has Gone, the New Has Come
• Chapter Five: Rose-Colored Glasses
• Chapter Six: God’s Not Deaf
• Chapter Seven: New Horizons
• Chapter Eight: God Speaks, on the Eighteenth Hole
• Chapter Nine: Ready to Roar
• Chapter Ten: Knees Down! Chin Up!
• Chapter Eleven: The Twenty-One-Year-Old Freshman
• Chapter Twelve: Saved by a Bell
• Chapter Thirteen: A Marriage Made in Heaven
• Chapter Fourteen: It Takes a Village
• Chapter Fifteen: London Fog
• Chapter Sixteen: Evangelism Races, Education Plods
• Chapter Seventeen: Inexperienced, but Enthusiastic
• Chapter Eighteen: Two Evangelists, Two Crises of Faith
• Chapter Nineteen: Kissed by William Randolph Hearst
• Chapter Twenty: Cowboys, Heroes, and Mobsters
• Chapter Twenty-One: King of All Media
• Chapter Twenty-Two: Far East Man
• Chapter Twenty-Three: Yankee Spellbinder
• Chapter Twenty-Four: Shaking Hands with Mr. History
• Chapter Twenty-Five: Gabriel in a Gabardine Suit
• Chapter Twenty-Six: JFK
• Chapter Twenty-Seven: The Decade That Took Down a President
• Chapter Twenty-Eight: A Man I Never Knew
• Chapter Twenty-Nine: Revival in a Suitcase
• Chapter Thirty: The Son Also Rises
• Chapter Thirty-One: California Christians
• Chapter Thirty-Two: From Russia with Love
• Chapter Thirty-Three: Transitions
• Chapter Thirty-Four: Lion in Winter
• Photographs
• Afterword
• Acknowledgments
• About the Authors
• Selected Bibliography
• Sources
• Copyright