Just As I Am: The Autobiography of Billy Graham

Part One

1918–1943

Foundations

1

Down on the Farm

Roaring Twenties and Depression Thirties

Day after day, the tall, spare farmer leaned on the board fence and searched the sky for clouds. In front of him, rows of corn were stunted, brown for lack of rain. He shoved his hat back on his head, exposing a strip of white forehead above a sun-browned face. No rain meant no crops. His shoulders slumped. His feet shuffled up the hot, dusty path back to the farmhouse, where I watched from the open door. My heart sank as I read the concern in his weary face. That man was my dad. . . .

When I was a boy growing up, Park Road outside Charlotte, North Carolina, was little more than a rutted dirt lane cutting across acres of farmland. Our white frame house with green trim sat back from the road and overlooked sprawling pastures dotted with our family’s dairy herd, set against the tranquil backdrop of trees and low hills. There I was born on November 7, 1918, four days before the armistice that ended World War I and one year to the day after the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia.

This was not the first house built on the site. A log cabin on acreage bought after the Civil War in Sharon Township, between the villages of Pineville and Matthews, was built by my grandfather William Crook Graham, 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.

My Aunt Eunice said the extent of her father’s religion was to be an honest man. Fortunately, his wife, a God-fearing Scotswoman named Maggie McCall, influenced the character formation of their eight daughters and three sons by teaching them precepts and principles from the Scriptures. They all grew up to be deeply religious, and a number of their grandchildren became preachers—I being the first.

The first death in our immediate family was that of my maternal grandmother, Lucinda Coffey. Grandmother talked often about her husband, Ben Coffey, who had been badly wounded while serving with the Eleventh North Carolina Regiment, Pettigrew’s Bri-gade, which led the advance on Gettysburg from the west on July 1, 1863. Shrapnel almost severed his left leg. While he was lying on the battlefield, a bullet grazed his right eye, blinding it forever. Doctors were forced to amputate his wounded leg some time later. On August 1, the company commander wrote a letter of commendation: Benny was such a good boy; . . . a better soldier never lived. His comrades testified to his concern for spiritual values. I never knew him; he died in 1916 at the ripe old age of seventy-four.

When Grandmother Coffey died, I was in elementary school, and my sister Catherine and I were called out of school. The manner of her dying became a legacy of faith for our family. She sat up in bed and almost laughingly said, I see Jesus. He has His arms outstretched toward me. And there’s Ben! He has both of his eyes and both of his legs. She was buried among many other members of our family in the large Steele Creek Presbyterian churchyard.

For a child of the Roaring Twenties who reached adolescence in the Depression of the early thirties, rural life probably offered the best of all worlds. As Scottish Presbyterians believing in strict observance of moral values, we stayed relatively uncontaminated by the Great Gatsby lifestyle of the flapper era, with its fast dancing and illegal drinking. And being farmers, we could manage to live off the land when the economy nose-dived in the 1929 stock market crash, even though my father lost his savings—$4,000—in the failed Farmers’ and Merchants’ Bank in Charlotte.

Not that those were not anxious times. Yet it never occurred to me or my parents to think of the rigors of dairy farming as hardships. We all simply believed in hard work. The fact was that the South had never fully recovered economically from the Civil War and Reconstruction. It is strange to realize now, in light of Charlotte’s present prosperity, that the region of my boyhood only sixty years ago was unbelievably poor.

In the Depression, our dairy farm barely survived when milk got down to 5¢ a quart. After the stock market crash of 1929, and the bank holiday that President Franklin D. Roosevelt ordered in 1933 under his National Industrial Recovery Act, my father nearly went broke. At first he was confident that his bank in Charlotte would reopen, but it did not. He couldn’t even write a check to pay his bills. He had to start over from scratch. It took him months to recover from the blow.

Yet business reverses never stifled my father’s sense of humor. While he had cause to be melancholy or depressed, he was anything but that. There were down moments, of course, when the rains did not come and the crops did not grow, or when a prize cow died. But in spite of the hardships, he found much to laugh about. People loved to come to our place from all around the neighborhood just to hear him tell his jokes. His dry sense of humor kept us laughing by the hour.

Growing up in those years taught us the value of nickels and dimes. My father early on illustrated for me the merits of free enterprise. Once in a while when a calf was born on the farm, he turned it over to my friend Albert McMakin and me to raise. When it got to the veal stage, we marketed it ourselves and split the proceeds.

We were not out of touch with what was going on elsewhere, but our newspaper carried mostly local stories. Radio was still in its infancy. Once my father made his first crystal set, he tuned in pioneer station KDKA from Pittsburgh. We gathered around the squawking receiver, holding our breath. When, after Daddy had done a lot of fiddling with the three tuning dials, something intelligible broke through the static, we all shouted, That’s it! We have it!

Later we were among the first in our neighborhood to have a radio in our car. When my folks went into a store to shop, I stretched out on the backseat and listened to those mysterious sounds—distorted broadcasts marvelously relayed by wireless from Europe. They had a hollow echo as if coming to us through a magic seashell. I was particularly fascinated by the oratorical style of speeches shouted in an almost hypnotic voice by a man in Germany named Adolf Hitler. He frightened me in some way, even though I did not understand his language.

However, there were more important things to think about in my boyhood North Carolina universe. It centered on the three hundred acres inherited from my grandfather by my father and his brother Clyde, where they ran Graham Brothers Dairy. Father handled the business affairs and the farm itself, with Mother doing the bookkeeping at our kitchen table. Uncle Clyde looked after the milk-processing house.

My father’s younger brother and dedicated business partner, Uncle Clyde seemed to depend on Daddy for nearly all the decisions having to do with the farm. The first few years of my life, he lived with us. He always liked a good laugh. He once placed an order with a traveling salesman for a whole case of wonder tonic that was supposed to restore his lost hair. He was only moderately disappointed when it failed to live up to its promise.

Even though a bachelor, he never had any women friends that we knew about. Yet when he decided to build a house across the road from us, my mother jokingly said, Maybe he’s planning to get married!

Little did we know! I’d had a teacher in the second grade by the name of Jennie Patrick. She came from a prominent family in South Carolina. I would never have dreamed that Uncle Clyde was secretly courting her! One day when he was pulling out of the driveway, all dressed up for a change, my father stopped him.

Where are you going, Clyde? Daddy asked in astonishment.

I’m going to get married, he stammered with a blush and a smile.

That was the only announcement we had—and the only preparation my mother had—that Uncle Clyde’s bride would be arriving soon.

Aunt Jennie proved to be a marvelous cook, and of course she had a special affection for me because I had been one of her pupils. She and Uncle Clyde eventually had two sons who grew up sharing the devout convictions of their parents. One of them, Ed, became one of the finest pastors I have ever known, with the largest Presbyterian congregation in the western part of North Carolina. His older brother, Clyde, worked at Ivey’s department store in Charlotte, where he was promoted a number of times through the years.

In the Wild West years, the eldest Graham brother, my Uncle Tom, went off to Oklahoma, where he married a full-blooded Cherokee woman. He did well for himself in cotton gins. Each summer when they came back to North Carolina for a two-week visit, driving the biggest car I had ever seen (with every kind of gadget on it), they stayed at our house. He was tall and heavyset, and how he and the equally ample Aunt Belle could sleep in that three-quarter-size bed in our guest room remained one of the unsolved mysteries of my childhood.

Our barns had tin roofs. On rainy days, I liked to sneak away into the hay barn and lie on a sweet-smelling and slippery pile of straw, listening to the raindrops hit that tin roof and dreaming. It was a sanctuary that helped shape my character. Whenever I visit a bustling city anywhere in the world now, I like to retreat from noisy boulevards into an open church building and just meditate in the cool, dim quietness. At our home in the Blue Ridge Mountains, my favorite spot is a little path above the house where I walk alone and talk with God.

We always had a collie—at least one—and what would any farm be without plenty of cats? Not knowing any better, I once took a cat and shut it in the doghouse with the dog. They hated each other with some ancient instinct when they went in, but after spending the night inside they came out as friends forever. 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 together.

When I was quite little, I kept pet goats. I had them pull me and my sister Catherine (who was a couple of years younger than I) around in my cart while we played dairy farm and pretended to be helping Daddy haul hay. One long-horned, red-haired goat named Billy Junior was a favorite of mine, but he attacked Catherine several times. She was quieter than the rest of us; maybe she seemed more vulnerable to the goat.

We were fortunate to have Catherine with us. As an infant, she swallowed an open safety pin. The unusual and complicated surgical procedure that had to be performed to close the pin inside her and remove it made medical news in our part of the country. Since my parents were at the hospital a lot of the time, I had to stay at my Aunt Lill’s house in town. We just had to wait to see whether Catherine would survive.

I had one narrow brush with death myself as a child. Once when I was sick, Mother thought she was giving me cough medicine, but she gave me iodine instead. If it had not been for a quick phone call to Aunt Jennie, who suggested some thick cream from the dairy to counteract the iodine, I might have died.

When I got too big for the goat cart, I rode my bike down the road, followed by a procession of goats and dogs (but never the proud cats), to the amusement of our few neighbors and the people who passed by in buggies and cars. My father kept a riding horse, Mamie, for us children. And as we got older, we rode the mules—Mag, Emma, and Bessie—bareback, sometimes standing up on the backs of the gentler mules.

It was a happy moment for me when, at almost six, I discovered that my folks had gotten me a baby brother. When Melvin got big enough to play with me, we bonded for a lifetime. We moved from the clapboard house with outside plumbing to a compact, two-story brick house with indoor plumbing that my father built for $9,000 when I was about nine. Melvin and I shared a room without much in it besides our twin beds and a white dresser.

Every day Daddy and Uncle Clyde worked hard from before dawn until after dark, with the help of several hired hands. I, and later Melvin too, joined them as we each got strong enough to be more of a help than a hindrance. Being older, I got initiated into the barn and dairy routines before Melvin did. My six-year seniority helped me stay in charge of things at first, but then my reedy growth and his developing bulk evened the score.

When I left home to attend college, Melvin inherited my room for himself. At one stage, he got into weight-lifting, and when he dropped those weights, the whole house shook. My parents thought his exercise program was tremendous, because he was getting so muscular. That made him a strong candidate for world-class plowing and other heavy farm duties. When I pumped my arms and invited Catherine to feel my muscles, she could find only little bumps. She giggled, but I already knew I was no Atlas.

Whether it was cows or horses or land, Daddy was a good horse trader, as the expression went, even when he was trading cows. He often took me along on his short trips away from home for the regular ritual of trading with people who wanted to buy one of our cows. On one such venture to a farm perhaps five miles from our own, I broke in as my father was telling the man all the good qualities of the animal under discussion.

Daddy, that cow really kicks when you’re milking her, I reminded him. She’s very temperamental.

He had some unforgettable instructions for me on the way home about my not interrupting his future business negotiations!

Family outings were few and far between, due to the lack of both money and leisure time. The only luxuries my parents allowed were indulged in on an occasional Saturday night. We all piled into the car and drove to the nearby country grocery store, or maybe even into Charlotte to Niven’s Drugstore. On those glorious occasions, Daddy bought us ice-cream cones or soft drinks—never both. We sat in the car with Mother, enjoying our treat while he went into the barbershop for his shave.

Mother and Daddy seldom went to entertainments. About once a year, they attended a neighborly social at a community hall a mile away, where there would be a potluck picnic and plenty of music. My father’s favorite song was My Blue Heaven. As for the movies, they went to see Will Rogers, Marie Dressler, and Wallace Beery. For that matter, so did we kids: we went as a whole family. This was in the days before censorship restrictions, and there was a surprising amount of nudity on the screen. Once the preview of a coming attraction suddenly flashed a breathtaking shot of a woman swimming nude. My mother reached over and grabbed my hand, commanding, Close your eyes! I wasn’t old enough to be shocked, but I was admittedly curious.

We always looked forward to spending two or three days each year on what was called a vacation. Usually we went to the beach. It took us from about four in the morning to two in the afternoon to drive either to Wilmington or to Myrtle Beach. After we got there, my father would inquire at various boardinghouses to see which was the cheapest. He usually was able to get board and room for about $1 a night per person.

My mother also liked to go to the Magnolia Gardens near Charleston, South Carolina. We saw the flowers, spent the night, and headed home. For me the best part was that we usually went along with Aunt Ida and her husband, Tom Black, and their several kids, including cousin Laura, who was more like a sister to us. They lived about four miles down the road from us and ran a dairy of their own.

The first long trip I can remember taking was to Washington, D.C., four hundred miles away. Cousin Frank Black drove the car, but he did not want to spend much time sight-seeing because he had to get back to his girlfriend. I think we went through the entire Smithsonian Institution—not the extensive complex it is today—in forty minutes. We did take the time, though, to climb every one of those steps up the Washington Monument.

One summer my father and Uncle Tom Black decided to take us all—two carloads—to Oklahoma to visit Uncle Tom Graham and Aunt Belle and the cousins out West in Tahlequah, Oklahoma. It was a hair-raising trip. Most of the roads we traveled weren’t paved; they were simply topped with gravel. It took us two or three days to drive to Oklahoma, and we had several tire blowouts on the way. One night in Arkansas, we had to stop along a desolate stretch of clay road to repair a tire. We had gotten separated from the other car, which was being driven by cousin Ervin Stafford; he had gone to school in Tahlequah and knew the country.

While my father fixed the tire, we kids waited in the quiet darkness, more than a little frightened. We thought we saw strange creatures peering out at us from behind the trees. A car came by and stopped.

Where y’all from? the driver asked.

North Carolina, Daddy answered.

Y’all better be careful, the stranger said. This road attracts robbers and cutthroats. You could get robbed or even killed here.

My father got that flat tire fixed in record time! But it was still a hard trip for a twelve-year-old. Daddy insisted on not paying more than $1 for a place to stay. Even in those days that was cheap.

Finally we arrived in Oklahoma, headquarters of the Cherokee Nation, home for those Cherokee who had survived the terrible march of the Trail of Tears. We had a wonderful two or three days with my uncle and his family in Tahlequah.

The variety of adventures made those some of my happiest years, even though when I grew big enough to help with chores, the work was truly hard. To this day, I can clearly remember the hours working in Mother’s garden, guiding the plow, and following the hind end of a mule to put the fertilizer on after the seeds had been sown. In the spring, summer, and fall, we had many acres of corn, wheat, rye, and barley, as well as the vegetable acreage, and Melvin, the McMakins, and I all worked in those fields. When that Big Ben alarm clock went off at two-thirty in the morning, I wanted to slam it to the floor and burrow back under the covers. But heavy footsteps thudded in the quiet hallway outside my upstairs bedroom, where I had taken my apple and the white tomcat to bed with me seemingly only minutes before. That sound told me that my father was on the move and expected me to hustle down the hill to rouse Pedro, one of the hired hands. Besides that, I knew there would be no breakfast until after we had finished the milking. I rolled out in a hurry.

Joe McCall, another of our workers, would usually call the cows in with his Whooee, whooee, whooee! Each one headed instinctively for her own stall, where we would fasten the stanchions around her neck and, if she was one of the rambunctious ones, put kickers—restraining chains—on her hind legs. I would then set my three-legged stool and tin milk pail on the floor under her working end, press my head against her warm belly, and get to work on the udder faucets, trying not to get hit in the eyes with her switching tail while I milked.

I repeated the process in twenty stalls each morning; and each afternoon, as soon as I got home from school, I milked the same twenty of our cows again. The job took my flexible fingers about two hours—a very commendable rate of around five minutes per cow.

That was followed by wielding a shovel to clean out the fresh, warm manure, and by generally straightening things up inside the cow barn. The other hands and I brought in fresh hay from the hay barn next door, or silage from one of our two silos, and refilled the feed troughs.

Carrying the five-gallon milk cans over to the milk-processing house where my Uncle Clyde worked was a favorite ritual for me. In the earliest years, before I was old enough to help with the milking, I watched the muscular men settle those huge, silvery cans down into the clear water of the spring to get them cool before bottling the milk for delivery to the homes in town.

I especially loved to watch Reese Brown work. He was the foreman on our place for fifteen years, perhaps the highest-paid farmhand in Mecklenburg County (at $3 to $4 a day), which made a few other farmers critical of my father. Reese was one of Daddy’s best personal friends. A black man who had served with distinction as an Army sergeant during World War I, he had great intelligence. Physically, he was one of the strongest men I ever knew, with a tremendous capacity for working hard. Everyone respected him, and I thought there was nothing Reese did not know or could not do. If I did something he thought was wrong, he did not mind correcting me. He also taught me to respect my father and was almost like another uncle to me. I used to play with his children and eat his wife’s fabulous buttermilk biscuits in the tenant house that was their home.

With the whole milking process finished about five-thirty, it was time to eat in the warm and appetizing breakfast room. While we worked in the barns, Mother chopped wood for the stove, did household tasks, and cooked for the hungry men. Now, with my sister Catherine and the maid helping her, she ladled out grits and gravy, fresh eggs, ham or bacon, and hot homemade rolls—a traditional farm breakfast—with all the milk we non-coffee drinkers wanted. Susie Nickolson, the black woman who worked for Mother for twenty years, was like a second mother to us children. It was a busy but easygoing time.

After all my heavy labor in the fresh air at daybreak, followed by Mother’s good food, I was ready for almost anything—except school. With only three or four hours of sleep some nights, I often felt tired in my classes. I think fatigue contributed to my course grades being as poor as they were. I had made mostly A’s when I was in elementary school, but in high school I was at the C level.

Maybe that was why I failed French in the tenth grade. Every day the following summer, classmate Winston Covington, whom I called Wint, and I had to drive over in his car to spend two hours with a teacher who sat us down and tutored us in French.

For that matter, the classroom was traumatic on my very first day in elementary school. Mother had packed my lunch and told me I was to eat it at recess. She did not say there would be two recesses! The first came at ten in the morning and lasted only ten minutes; by the time the bell rang for us to return to class, I had finished my lunch. The second, longer recess was the official lunchtime, and I had nothing to eat. I was mighty hungry by dismissal time at three o’clock and must have rushed out of the building. The principal did not like my haste and yanked my ear in reprimand.

At home, from my earliest years, Mother encouraged me in the habit of reading. The exploits of Robin Hood in Sherwood Forest entranced me. I read the whole Tom Swift series, and the Rover Boys. Among my favorite adventure reading were the Tarzan books; they came out every few months. I could hardly wait for the next one to be issued, and my mother would always buy it for me. In the woods in back of our house, I tried to imitate Tarzan’s vine-swinging antics and distinctive yell, much to the amusement of Catherine.

Mother saw to it that there was more serious reading too. Before I was ten, she had made me memorize the Westminster (Presbyter-ian) Shorter Catechism. Once I was visiting an aunt who ordered us to spend some time reading the Bible. In about ten minutes, I went back to her and boasted, I just read a whole book in the Bible. She thought I was a remarkable boy. (I had discovered the Epistle of Jude, the shortest book in the New Testament. One page!) Mother also prodded me to read The Book of Knowledge, an encyclopedia.

Dr. W. B. Lindsay, the minister in our church, was a sweet and godly man. He reminded me of a mortician, though, because as far as I knew, he never told a humorous story. I found his sermons biblical but boring. Still, I shared our family’s respect for him. He was what I supposed a saint should be. Discouraging thought, since I felt so far from sainthood! Dr. Lindsay’s wife . . . well, I could have given her a cheer! She sat in the front pew and shook her watch at her husband when it was time for him to quit preaching.

One day, though, in vacation Bible school, I threw a Bible across the room to someone who wanted one. Mrs. Lindsay, looming like a locomotive, steamed over to me and boomed, "Don’t you ever do that again! That book is God’s Word."

There was not much about Dr. Lindsay’s church to make it lively for me, not even in the youth group. We sang only metrical psalms—that is to say, only hymns taken from the Book of Psalms—in the services on the Sabbath (we were too strict to say Sunday). We did not always get back to church for the evening meeting; it was about a ten-mile trip in the Model A Ford over two parallel mud ruts. To make up for that, Mother liked to gather us around her to listen to a Bible story on Sunday afternoons before the milking.

One unpleasant complication about high school was a change in the school system that required us country kids to transfer from the Woodlawn School to the Sharon School at the edge of town. We newcomers glared at the students who were already there, and they glared back. It took at least six months for us to get adjusted to each other. That first year at Sharon, I got into more fistfights and wrestling matches than in all the rest of my schooldays put together. And a couple of times I got beaten.

Immediately after school each day, I returned home for the afternoon milking, putting on my old clothes and heading right out to the barn. My father usually had at least two or three men helping us, and I would get to talk to them and hear all the events of the day and swap stories with them. Then, after chores, there was baseball practice, and homework, and church activities, and get-togethers with my friends.

During summer vacations, there was no more leisure. In addition to the regular milking and other chores on the farm, I had to help our deliveryman Tom Griffin on our dairy route in Charlotte, which was then a city of more than 50,000. He was always a lot of fun, entertaining me with tales of incredible encounters with some of his customers; some of those stories would be rated R or X today. I remember delivering four quarts of milk every day to the home of Randolph Scott. He would later become a famous film actor; as adults, he and I occasionally played golf together, and I preached at his funeral.

Life on our small dairy farm was far from a sheltered existence. The natural cycles of birth and death were commonplace and unavoidable. Dogs, cats, cows. One morning we found a holstein lying dead and swollen on the bank of Sugar Creek, which ran through the middle of our place. A textile mill somewhere upstream was discharging poisonous waste into the creek, making it useless for swimming and deadly for drinking. We had to build a fence to keep the cattle away from it.

Whenever a cow died, we hitched up the mules and dragged the carcass to a far corner of the pasture, where we buried it. The rest of the herd followed along with us, mooing mournfully as if they could feel bereavement. At least our cow burials lacked the flowery fuss I had observed at the few human funerals I had already attended.

There was a graveyard not too far from where we lived. One day—this was when I was a little boy—my father and I walked by it when we were hunting. It was almost dark. I had to reach up and hold tight to his hand. Even when I grew older, I used to lie awake at night and wonder what would happen to me if I died. It upset me to pray, If I should die before I wake, I pray the Lord my soul to take. It only strengthened my distaste for the possibility of ever becoming an undertaker.

Driving cars was every boy’s obsession. I started as early as eight, when Reese Brown coached me in driving our GMC truck. By ten or twelve, I had graduated to our little Model T Ford. We did not bother with a learner’s permit (or even a driver’s license) back then in our part of the world.

When I was in the ninth grade, I started asking my father for the car to go to a basketball game, or maybe out on an evening date, thus launching a driving career that nearly came to an abrupt end. One night out on Park Road, I was showing off with some of my buddies. My closest schoolfriends were Sam Paxton, Wint Covington, and Julian Miller. Somehow I steered the car into heavy mud. In minutes that goo came up over the fenders. I had gone into a sinkhole. With considerable embarrassment, I went to a nearby house to phone my father and ask him to bring a team of mules to pull the car out. He made it perfectly clear to me that he was upset.

I might have had some tendencies toward crowd-pleasing wildness when I got behind a steering wheel. I sure tried to make that car go as fast as possible, especially when I had a girlfriend along with me. Certainly, that was the case more than once with a particular girl—one who liked to stand up in the bright yellow convertible, which I sometimes borrowed from one of our relatives, and vigorously clang a cowbell as I chugged merrily down some country lane.

What about girls? I especially liked Jeanne Elliott, whose mother prepared lunches in the school cafeteria for the few kids who could afford to eat there. She made a fruit punch that was delicious! I went with Jeanne off and on through my high school days, but we were only buddies and did not have dates together in a formal sense.

I dated several girls and enjoyed holding hands and kissing like the rest of the kids, but I never went further. At times I entertained the same thoughts and desires as other adolescents my age, but the Lord used my parents’ strong love, faith, and discipline—as well as their teaching and example—to keep me on the straight and narrow path. It never really seemed right to me to have sex with anybody but the woman I would marry.

Once in my senior year, when we were in a night rehearsal of a school play at Sharon High, one of the girls in the cast coaxed me aside into a dark classroom. She had a reputation for making out with the boys. Before I realized what was happening, she was begging me to make love to her.

My hormones were as active as any other healthy young male’s, and I had fantasized often enough about such a moment. But when it came, I silently cried to God for strength and darted from that classroom the way Joseph fled the bedroom of Potiphar’s philandering wife in ancient Egypt.

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 meant 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.

The tabernacle was well filled all the time. One reason for the good attendance was Dr. Ham’s choice of lively topics, like the Second Coming of Christ. Mother had read about the Second Coming in the Book of Revelation, of course, but I did not recall having heard of it. He also preached on subjects such as money, infidelity, the Sabbath, and drinking.

I had never heard a sermon on Hell, either, though I was familiar with some people’s use of that term as a swear word. Certainly our clergyman, Dr. Lindsay, never mentioned that it was a real place, even though I know he believed there was a Hell. But Dr. Ham left no doubt about it in anybody’s mind!

That was not to say Dr. Ham neglected or minimized the great love of God. He just put it against a background of sin and judgment and Hell in a novel way that fascinated me. His words, and his way with words, grabbed my mind, gripped my heart. What startled me was that the same preacher who warned us so dramatically about the horrible fate of the lost in the everlasting lake of fire and brimstone also had a tremendous sense of humor and could tell stories almost as good as my father’s.

I became deeply convicted about my sinfulness and rebellion. And confused. How could this evangelist be talking to me, of all people? I had been baptized as a baby, had learned the Shorter Catechism word perfect, and had been confirmed in the Associate Reformed Presbyterian Church with the full approval of the pastor and elders. I had gotten into mischief once in a while, but I could hardly be called wicked. I resisted temptations to break the moral code my parents had so strictly instilled in me. I was a good milker in the dairy barn and never complained about any of the nasty work, such as shoveling manure. I was even the vice president of my youth group in our church (although, granted, it wasn’t a particularly vital organization).

So why would the evangelist always be pointing his bony finger at me?

One thing that echoed in my mind was Dr. Ham’s singing, right in the middle of his sermon, The toils of the road will seem nothing, when I get to the end of the way.

He had an almost embarrassing way of describing sins and shortcomings, and of demanding, on pain of divine judgment, that we mend our ways. I was so sure he had singled me out one night that I actually ducked behind the wide-brimmed hat of the lady sitting in front of me. Yet, as uncomfortable as I was getting to be, I simply could not stay away.

At the meetings, I struck up an acquaintance with a likable student from the notorious Central High School, Grady Wilson. He was already a Christian, but he was having some problems of his own under Dr. Ham’s preaching. He had an older, unconverted brother, Thomas Walter, called T.W. by everybody, a big fellow who could be pretty rough. I would not call him a bully, at least not to his face, but I could safely describe him as burly. T.W. could certainly have had a job as a bouncer!

Grady and I had both decided on a strategy to avoid the frontal attack by Dr. Ham. We had signed up for the choir, which sat on the platform behind the preacher. Neither of us could sing, but we could move our mouths or hold a hymnbook in front of our faces for camouflage. As choir members, we were safe from Dr. Ham’s accusatory stare.

Another person who was very important to me at the time of the Ham meetings was my first cousin Crook Stafford. He lived in town and had a job as an accountant. Some years my senior, he always went out of his way to be kind and thoughtful to me as we were growing up. He not only encouraged me to go to the tabernacle in the evenings, but he would drive out and get me if I had no one to take me. He also was in the choir.

What was slowly dawning on me during those weeks was the miserable realization that I did not know Jesus Christ for myself. I could not depend on my parents’ faith. Christian influence in the home could have a lasting impact on a child’s life, but faith could not be passed on as an inheritance, like the family silver. It had to be exercised by each individual.

I could not depend on my church membership either. Saying I believe in the Apostles’ Creed every Sunday, or taking the bread and wine of Communion, could so easily become nothing but rote and ritual, without power in themselves to make me any different.

Nor could I depend on my own resolution to do better. I constantly failed in my efforts at self-improvement. Nobody needed to tell me that.

As a teenager, what I needed to know for certain was that I was right with God. I could not help but admit to myself that I was purposeless and empty-hearted. Our family Bible reading, praying, psalm-singing, and churchgoing—all these had left me restless and resentful. I had even tried, guiltily, to think up ways of getting out of all those activities as much as I could. In a word, I was spiritually dead.

And then it happened, sometime around my sixteenth birthday. On that night, Dr. Ham finished preaching and gave the Invitation to accept Christ. After all his tirades against sin, he gave us a gentle reminder: But God commendeth his love toward us, in that, while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us (Romans 5:8, KJV). His song leader, Mr. Ramsay, led us all in Just As I Am—four verses. Then we started another song: Almost Persuaded, Now to Believe.

On the last verse of that second song, I responded. I walked down to the front, feeling as if I had lead weights attached to my feet, and stood in the space before the platform. That same night, perhaps three or four hundred other people were there at the front making spiritual commitments. The next