The young aspirant observed that an evangelist could regard a comfortable lifestyle as his proper due; a big-name preacher whose bags he had carried gave him a dollar tip, five times what he could earn in an hour of dishwashing, and told him, “Young man, apply yourself to your work and study diligently, and some day you can tip also, for there is more where this came from.” He also learned that an evangelist could come to think of himself more highly than he ought. When Gipsy Smith refused his request for an autograph, on the grounds that too many other students would want one, Billy silently pledged that should anyone ever care to have his autograph, he would never refuse it. From Dr. Watson he learned more strongly than ever to rely on prayer to see an institution through crisis and help it accomplish its goals. In one memorable episode of the sort that becomes part of the mythology of such institutions, Watson summoned the students together after breakfast one morning and explained that the institute might have to close its doors if the Lord did not provide $10,000 immediately. As they were expected to do, Billy and his classmates dutifully fell to praying, beseeching God nonstop right through lunch and into the early afternoon. Then, as if by a miracle, Watson’s secretary handed the president a telegram from a northern businessman who reported that as he had been driving through Mount Vernon, Ohio, that very morning, he had suddenly “felt a burden” for Florida Bible Institute and was sending a check for $10,000. This experience moved Billy far more than the old evangelist’s generous tip, but the lesson was the same: “There is more where this came from.”
Billy’s most significant “father in the faith” during his Florida days was the Reverend John Minder. Academic dean of the college and pastor of the Tampa Gospel Tabernacle, “Minder couldn’t preach for sour apples,” but he was “an all-round wonderful man” who had what the Apostle Paul labeled “the gift of helps.” Minder himself liked to say, “I polish the apple for the other fellow to eat.” When he saw young men and women with promise, he did what he could to encourage them. Billy’s boundless energy and unquenchable ebullience, his willingness to work hard, his popularity, and, most of all, his obvious sincerity and dedication to God impressed the dean, who adopted him as a special project. During the Easter vacation that spring of 1937, Minder invited Billy to join him and his family at a conference center he owned up near the state’s northern border, west of Jacksonville. On Easter afternoon, they drove over to Palatka to visit Cecil Underwood, a bivocational Baptist preacher who supported himself by painting and sanding floors while pastoring a church in the little community of Bostwick. When Underwood invited Minder to preach that evening, the dean grinned and said, “Billy’s preaching tonight.” Billy gasped and protested that he had never preached before, but Minder had heard him give his testimony at a student-conducted meeting and ignored his protests. He told him, “You go ahead and preach. When you run out, I’ll take over. I never run out.” As a matter of fact, Billy was not wholly unprepared. He had known such a day was bound to come and had secretly cribbed, embellished, and practiced four sermons from a book published by the Moody Press. That Sunday evening, to no more than twenty-five or thirty deep-country Baptists whose dogs scratched around outside the little clapboard church while their masters belted out lively gospel songs and asked forgiveness for what they had done and left undone, Billy Graham preached his first real sermon. To be precise, he preached his first four real sermons. He had calculated that any one of them would run over half an hour, but anxiety had so accelerated his delivery and short-circuited his recall that he finished all four in less than eight minutes. He has said of this initial outing, “Nobody ever failed more ignominiously.” Dean Minder, a beneficent spirit, recalled it as “a very nice message.” This first sermon was a simple historical milestone, a formal beginning of no great immediate consequence either to Billy or his auditors, and he still felt no clear call to preach, though he obviously planned to be ready if it came. But if God was not yet ready to call him, John Minder was. A few weeks later, he invited Billy to join him at the Tampa Gospel Tabernacle as youth director, a post he held until he graduated three years later. A clipping from a Tampa newspaper’s church page gave an early progress report: “Three months ago when Mr. Graham took charge of this department the young people were a somewhat discouraged group. But now after much prayer and hard work it has become one of the most promising organizations of the Tabernacle. The present enrollment is 52.” Contrary to Wendell Phillips’s description, FBI did not lack for rules and regulations. Smoking and drinking were absolutely forbidden, and dating, while freely allowed, was still a noncontact sport and subject to strict curfews. But these were the same rules Billy and most of the other students had obeyed all their lives, so they posed no obstacle to any pleasure they considered legitimate. An incident early in Billy’s career at the school illustrates the importance the community placed on being “clean.” When two highly regarded individuals were discovered to be in at least the planning stages of adultery, a band of scandalized students tracked them to their trysting place and exposed their liaison to public inspection. To these sheltered, pietistic young people, for whom forbidden sexual activity essentially exhausted the category of immorality, the effect was electrifying. Because, like virtually everyone else in his circle of acquaintances (including, no doubt, the hapless culprits in this poignant episode), he subscribed unquestioningly to an ideal of sexual chastity, Billy was stunned to realize that anyone—anyone!—could succumb to the lures of this world, with devastating consequences. The only safe course, he resolved, would be to insulate himself against even the most tentative appearances of fleshly temptations.
This renewed pledge of purity did not involve a commitment to celibacy. On the contrary, as if to make up for time lost at Bob Jones, Billy quickly started prospecting among the school’s forty or so female students as soon as he hit the campus. His colorful clothes and friendly manner made him an immediate hit with the girls, but he soon narrowed the field to a bright, vivacious, dark-haired beauty named Emily Cavanaugh. He fell quickly and hard, and that summer, at age eighteen, he asked her to marry him. Emily found Billy admirable, fascinating, lovable; yet, she hesitated. Naturally, this troubled him. In January 1938, when she had still not given him an answer, he wrote to his parents, who had met her and agreed she was a true prize: “Emily thinks a great deal of me, and I believe she loves me, but she is not sure. She won’t give me a definite answer yet as to whether she loves me enough to settle it for life, . . . but it’s all in the hands of the Lord and I don’t worry about it. God is directing my life and He will do the very best for those who leave the choice to Him.” Emily confirmed his confident faith a few weeks later when she accepted his proposal, but she continued to seem unsure of her decision. One afternoon late in the spring, she broke their engagement and returned his high school ring.
Billy was staggered, unable to understand how Emily could fail to reciprocate his love. He sought comfort at Dean Minder’s house, where he wept disconsolately for the rest of the evening. A few days later, he wrote a dramatic letter to Wendell Phillips, who had moved to Pennsylvania to take a pastorate. “All the stars have fallen out of my sky,” he lamented. “There is nothing to live for. We have broken up.” Not long afterward, Emily began to date Charles Massey, an older student who seemed headed for a successful career in the ministry. In a search for solace after this rebuff, Billy turned to prayer and the Scriptures. He later attributed his decision to enter the ministry as stemming, at least in part, from a desire to share with others the comfort and assurance he had found during that period. His sister Catherine characterized the episode as “definitely traumatic” and conceded it probably pushed Billy toward greater seriousness. Melvin was a bit more blunt: “She wanted to marry a man that was going to amount to something, and didn’t think he was going to make it. I never will forget that. We figured she was right. It so broke him up. I think that was a big turning point. He just got down and asked the Lord to really give him something he could hold on to.”
Having set his hand to the plow, Billy Graham never looked back. Dean Minder let him fill in at the tabernacle from time to time and encouraged his minister friends to give the young man a chance, but Billy created most of his own opportunities. On weekends he and a soloist or a gospel quartet would drive John Minder’s wood-paneled station wagon into Tampa or out to the dog track at Sulphur Springs and hold seven or eight outdoor services a day. Street preachers were scarcely more welcome in those days than now, and Billy had to endure the embarrassed avoidance and derisive heckling Salvationist sorties can generate. Once, when he started damning sin at the doorway of a saloon on one of Tampa’s rawest streets, the angry bartender knocked him down and shoved him face-first into the mud. Such rebuffs only convinced him he was suffering for Christ’s sake and redoubled his determination to miss no opportunity to declare the wonders of God’s grace. On Sunday afternoons, he preached repentance to sinners who had spent the night in the “Stockade,” the jail at Sulphur Springs. To fill his Sunday evenings, he got himself appointed chaplain to the Tampa Trailer Park, a thousand-space facility advertised as “the tin-can tourist capital of the world.” During the peak of the winter vacation season, he often drew several hundred vacationers to services in its central pavilion, where they heard him preach the polished version of the sermon he had already delivered several times over the weekend. In addition to these regular rounds, he preached in a Spanish mission—his first experience with using a translator—and in converted meat markets and onion sheds and tents and anywhere else he could get someone to listen. When the opportunity came to speak on the Back Home Hour, a radio program produced by the institute, he readily accepted, launching his first-ever appearance in the electronic pulpit with the trembling entreaty, “Folks, pray for me, for I have never done this before.” As one of his contemporaries noted, “his gospel gun was always loaded.”
As Billy gained experience and skill, country churches that relied on young men from the institute as “supply preachers” began to invite him to speak. The honoraria were always modest, but he made enough to buy an old car, which enabled him to accept almost any invitation he received. From the outset, for reasons that defy facile explanation, Billy’s preaching demonstrated a phenomenal characteristic that it never lost: When he gave the invitation at the conclusion of his sermons, people responded, usually in numbers far exceeding what anyone would have predicted. The first time he offered a full-fledged invitation, to a gathering of no more than a hundred in a storefront church in the Gulf Coast town of Venice, thirty-two people came forward—more than many preachers would harvest in a year. The church’s Sunday-school superintendent observed, “There’s a young man who is going to be known around the world.” That summer of 1938, Billy held his first revival, at the East Palatka Baptist Church. The campaign was sponsored by the youth group from the nearby Peniel Baptist Church, where Cecil Underwood now served as pastor. Billy stayed with the Underwoods, downing a quarter pound of butter every day as part of his perpetual effort to gain weight, and helped the pastor paint and sand floors, but at night he became a preaching machine. The community’s weekly newspaper described the revival as “the greatest meeting in the history of the church” and noted that “young Graham does not mince words when he tells church members that they are headed for the same hell as the bootlegger and racketeer unless that they get right and live right.”
The East Palatka meeting, which Billy claimed gave him “the first little inkling I had that maybe the Lord could use me in evangelism,” also marked his formal switch from the Presbyterian to the Southern Baptist denomination. Baptists take their name from the importance they assign to the ordinance of baptism. Unlike some Fundamentalists, they do not regard it as essential to salvation, but they believe a saved person should be baptized, by immersion, soon after “accepting Jesus as their personal savior” (being born again) and they require it for church membership. Baptism is ostensibly offered only to adults, but the lower limit of this category extends to almost any child able to state with some conviction that he or she understands and affirms the essence of the gospel. It emphatically does not include infants sprinkled shortly after birth. When Brother Underwood and the deacons learned that their young soul winner was a Presbyterian who had never been immersed according to the biblical pattern, they persuaded him to join a clutch of his converts in being baptized in nearby Silver Lake. Billy would never completely shake his Presbyterian beliefs, but exposure to the parade of stalwarts who passed through the institute undercut any strong sense of brand loyalty he might have had. If folk believed the essentials—that they were sinners, that God loved them, and that Christ had died that they might have eternal life—that was good enough for him. Besides, a young man determined to be an evangelist would receive far more encouragement and support from Baptists than from Presbyterians. In any case, he found the transition to Baptist ways an easy one and, several months later, received ordination as an evangelist from the St. John’s Baptist Association of Northern Florida.
Like Billy, most of the several dozen young men at Florida Bible Institute intended to preach. Most undoubtedly loved God and felt genuine concern for lost souls. Some probably had comparable natural talent as preachers. What distinguished Billy from the rest was that he poured every possible ounce of his talent and commitment into his preaching. Using a technique common to young preachers, he raided books of printed sermons, gleaning illustrations, borrowing outlines, and, quite often, memorizing the entire text of sermons first preached in Chicago or Philadelphia or London, and now about to be reproduced in Sulphur Springs and East Palatka. Nearly every afternoon when classes ended, he took a book of sermons, went into an old shed next to his dormitory, and excoriated oil cans and lawnmowers for their hard-hearted faithlessness, or he paddled a canoe to a lonely spot on the Hillsborough River where he named the sins of snakes and alligators and called on stumps to repent or perish. He practiced not just the words but the precise gestures he would use to drive them home. One afternoon, Dr. Watson heard him holding forth in his dormitory room. When he peeked through the slightly opened door, he saw his four-year-old son Bobby perched on top of Billy’s dresser serving as the audience while the intense young preacher rehearsed his performance, aligning each gesture and expression with the words he was speaking. “Poor little Bobby had to take everything Billy could give him,” Watson recalled with amusement. “I looked through that cracked door and Billy was putting that finger right there, just letting him have it.” Another time, a student passing by the school auditorium heard someone p
reaching as if to a multitude. When she peeked inside, she found Billy at the podium addressing empty seats and working to dramatize the story of creation by raising his hands high over his head and flinging his fingers outward, as if he were God casting the planets and stars into space. His exuberant gestures and high-speed delivery won him the nickname, the Preaching Windmill, and nearly everyone who heard him mentioned the uncommon amount of noise he could generate in the pulpit. Even Morrow Graham, whose memory of her son’s career was unfailingly rosy, acknowledged that his preaching during the Florida days was “awfully loud,” though she quickly added, in the soft Carolina tones that smooth out even the gentlest criticism, “Billy’s fervor has always been of such intensity that he couldn’t restrain himself.”
A Prophet with Honor Page 10