Just As I Am: The Autobiography of Billy Graham

by Billy Graham

  Three people from Boston brought a surge of gratitude to my heart during those days.

  The first was Harold Ockenga, who was, as I have said, the distinguished minister of Park Street Church in Boston. He intimidated me because of his intellectual caliber, with his Ph.D. from the University of Pittsburgh; but his intellectualism made him a perfect fit for ministry in that academic citadel. I felt that I was no match for him in any way; indeed, I worried that with my simple preaching I might be an embarrassment to his sophistication and scholarship. As we got to know each other, I came to realize that Harold was a rare blend of intellectual ability and deep personal piety.

  Harold was looked on as the evangelical intellectual leader, not only in New England but also in the United States. He had just been elected the first president of the new National Association of Evangelicals. One of his close friends and colleagues at Park Street Church was Allan Emery, Jr. (the wool merchant mentioned earlier); a generation earlier, Allan’s father had been chairman of the Billy Sunday meetings.

  Stopping by Park Street Church one day during our April meetings in 1950, I knocked on the door of Harold’s office. There was no response, although I thought I heard a faint sound inside. I opened the door and walked in. The sound I had heard came again; it was someone sobbing. At first I could not see anyone. Then, behind the desk, I found Harold prostrate on the floor, praying brokenly with tears. Though he was not an emotional type, the burden he had carried so long for the spiritual and moral needs of New England had wrung the weeping from him.

  I vividly remember another incident with Harold during those days. Rockwell Cage Gymnasium at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology was filled with students for our meeting. As the service began, some waved beer and whiskey bottles in the air and generally let it be known that they did not take kindly to an evangelist on the campus. A few, we even heard, were planning a prank. During the service, someone was going to hobble in on crutches, shouting, “I’m healed! I’m healed!” and then throw his crutches in the air.

  Harold was scheduled to introduce me.

  “Harold,” I hastily whispered to him, “give me the most intellectual introduction you’ve ever given anybody. Maybe that will calm them down.”

  He responded to my plea with an extended introduction that was nothing less than a masterpiece, not only drawing on his awesome command of the English language but touching on some of the major philosophical and intellectual trends of the day, and then setting my address within the context of MIT’s recent centennial and the school’s tradition of objective scientific inquiry.

  When I spoke, there were no disruptions, and I have seldom had a more attentive audience.

  “This has been an age in which we have humanized God and deified man, and we have worshiped at the throne of science. We thought that science could bring about Utopia,” I declared. “We must have a spiritual awakening similar to that which we had under Wesley and Whitefield,” I added, as I urged them to commit their lives to Christ.

  The second person God placed in my life in Boston was John Bolten. He was a German industrialist who had amassed his wealth after World War I. A cultured man and a fine musician, John would sit at the piano with tears flowing down his cheeks as he played Bach, Beethoven, and other German composers, some of whom his family had been personal friends with.

  Along with many other industrialists and businessmen in Ger-many during that period, John was acquainted with Adolf Hitler. When Hitler’s anti-Jewish policies became open and violent, however, a group of leading businessmen decided to withdraw their support. John felt forced to leave Germany in 1928, leaving behind his industrial empire.

  In 1929 John emigrated to Boston, where he slowly but steadily rebuilt his fortune. Harold Ockenga had a great influence on John during those years. At one of our 1950 meetings, John recommitted his life to Christ, and in the following years he became a firm friend and golfing partner to me, as well as a supporter who paid a lot of our bills. His knowledge of the Bible was encyclopedic, and we often spent hours praying or talking about the meaning of certain biblical passages. At my suggestion, he later became a member of the board of Christianity Today magazine in its early years, and I always valued his wise and thoughtful counsel.

  One day John said something that touched me where I was most vulnerable. Despite the Los Angeles boost and the current vigorous response to the Gospel in New England, I still thought the recent nationwide interest in our ministry was a meteoric flash across the religious sky that would fizzle as fast as it had flared.

  Indeed, secretly one side of me rather hoped it would. I loved evangelism, and I felt at home in the pulpit ministry. But the nationwide publicity was unnerving. I did not feel equal to the responsibilities it demanded. I almost wanted to escape to academe.

  “Billy,” John said to me one day as we walked across the Boston Common, “I can envision you preaching in the great stadiums of the capital cities of the world. I believe the world is ripe and ready to listen to a voice of authority like yours. They are in need of the Gospel. You are the man to give it to them.”

  Incredible! This intellectual and business tycoon was surely out of his element. But whether he was right about me or not, he opened a new dimension for me to think and pray about. And from that moment on, whenever John spoke, I listened.

  The third Bostonian who influenced me was Allan Emery, Jr. I had met him in our student days at Wheaton, and during the New England meetings I was able to pick up the friendship again. He was the son of one of the world’s largest wool merchants; his home in the heart of Boston was a replica of Mount Vernon. The thing that made Allan special to me was his deep love for Christ, his humility and sense of humor, his business ability, and his experience as a ship commander during World War II. Some years later, Allan became chairman of the executive committee of the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association. For many years now, he has given of himself unstintingly for this ministry.

  For many good reasons—some having to do with people such as these; others dealing more directly with issues—it was hard to leave New England the second time.

  The California and New England experiences had shocked us with undeniable proof that thousands of people in this country were spiritual seekers, ready to listen to the Gospel and willing to respond.

  But what were people looking for that they didn’t already have?

  The euphoria of military victories in Europe and the Far East should have left most of us feeling self-sufficient and optimistic—hardly the ideal climate for a religious revival. But instead, we were headed for anxiety and apathy. For one thing, we worried about a mushroom cloud drifting on the horizon of history over the ghost cities of Japan, and about a red star rising in eastern Europe. Under this double threat to our security and happiness, what purpose was left in life? We didn’t seem to have either an exhilarating sense of national destiny or a satisfying sense of personal identity. Even the Korean War, with the kind of negative invigoration of the spirit most international conflicts bring, let people down on that point. Our American men and women in the armed forces were losing their lives overseas again, and few seemed to know why.

  What we saw in 1950 were the early stirrings of a wide-reaching spiritual search—stirrings that helped to create an unaccustomed audience for the Gospel. Disillusioned and disconnected people seemed willing to try anything. It was a morally promising but exceedingly perilous time.

  It was a trying time for me personally because I was not a profound analyst by nature, nor could I claim a gift of prophecy. All I knew how to do was to preach the essential Gospel as revealed in the New Testament and experienced by millions across the centuries. It was the “old, old story of Jesus and His love,” as a hymn writer put it, but maybe it caught fresh attention because it was such an unfamiliar story to so many.

  All of these social and religious currents swirled around us as we headed from New England to Portland, Oregon.

  11

  Building for the
Future

  Portland, Films, Radio (The Hour of Decision), The Billy Graham Evangelistic Association, Atlanta 1950

  Almost half a century later it is impossible to re-create the nonstop activity and excitement that engulfed us during those months following our meetings in Los Angeles and Boston. At times I felt almost as if we were standing in the path of a roaring avalanche or a strong riptide, and all we could do was hold on and trust God to help us. Not only were we unaccustomed to the crowds and the publicity, but unexpectedly we found ourselves facing a new (and happy) problem: a flood of invitations urging us to hold Crusades in many of the larger cities of the United States.

  In response to these pleas, we committed ourselves to extended Crusades in two cities during the second half of 1950: Portland, Oregon, and Atlanta, Georgia. Little did we imagine the impact they would have on our future ministry.

  PORTLAND

  Three hundred churches and a number of Christian laypeople had invited us to the Northwest’s beautiful City of Roses, beginning in July 1950. Although the local council of churches stayed aloof toward this largely unknown evangelist from the South, the Lord greatly used Dr. Frank Phillips to prepare the way for us. A veterinarian whom I had spent a week with in 1948 and had talked into starting a Youth for Christ rally in Portland, Frank proved to be so effective for YFC that he was appointed executive vice president of YFC International at its Chicago headquarters. Health reasons sent him back to Portland to direct YFC there, and to put together our Crusade.

  A temporary wooden tabernacle seating 12,000 people, constructed for $40,000 with lots of volunteer labor from men, women, and children, turned out to be too small on several occasions: a total of more than 500,000 people attended the six-week Crusade. Some 9,000 inquirers signed decision cards when they talked with counselors.

  Frank saw to it that people with special needs were thoughtfully considered. He made arrangements for a local pastor, Willis Ethridge, to sign for the deaf; this was a first for us. And Crusade participants added their own contribution: newspaper reports said that three deaf and mute participants used their fingertips to pass the songs and sermon along to some blind folks by spelling out words on their palms and cheeks, much as Anne Sullivan had done for Helen Keller as a child.

  Another first in Portland: we tried separate meetings for men and women on the subject of problems in the American home. Some 11,000 showed up for the first one, which was for men; I told the audience not to tell the women what I had told them. Out of curiosity, I think, 30,000 packed the tabernacle and the surrounding circus lot for the women’s session, listening via an outdoor public address system. Such a massive turnout had some of the women sitting in trees and even on the tabernacle roof. Police had to detour traffic around the jammed streets.

  So many parents were attending the Crusade meetings that five satellite tents had to be set up. In those, volunteers could care for up to 300 crib babies and young children. Other volunteers helped 3,000 drivers find parking spaces for their cars each night.

  At noontime we held meetings in a small downtown park, where hundreds of people gathered, huddling under their umbrellas to listen when it poured rain.

  Once, on a Saturday afternoon, Cliff filled the tabernacle with 8,000 children, vividly dramatizing for them stories from the Old Testament—Naaman the leper among them.

  At the closing “Crusade for Freedom” rally in Multnomah Stadium on Labor Day, September 4, the governors of Washington and Oregon were present to bring greetings to a crowd estimated at 22,000. (Governor Arthur Langlie of Washington became one of my best political friends and one of the links between me and Eisenhower in the years to come.) At the Invitation, 1,200 came forward.

  Statistics are never the full story of any Crusade. I have mentioned these only because at that early stage in our ministry, they verified for me a groundswell of public responsiveness to the Gospel. With each new Crusade experience, I was increasingly driven to the conclusion that it was not a fluke. Instead, it was the Lord letting us in on a special moving of the Holy Spirit in America. With that conviction, I was open to three unforeseen developments.

  MAKING FILMS

  The first such development had to do with films in evangelism.

  While still a student at Wheaton College, I thought that someone ought to make evangelistic motion pictures. The one and only religious film I had seen was amateurish and unlikely to appeal to unchurched people.

  Our first effort in that direction came in connection with the Portland Crusade in 1950. Bob Pierce had told me about a filmmaker named Dick Ross, who had accompanied him on a trip to China and prepared a documentary that was well received in churches.

  “You ought to have one of your Crusades filmed,” Bob urged me.

  After some discussion, the local committee in Portland invited Dick to send a small crew to make a sixteen-millimeter color film about the Crusade, which could be shown in churches in the Northwest. Dick had a small production company called Great Commission Films.

  Eventually, his company merged with the company we ourselves had already set up, Billy Graham Films. (We later changed the name to World Wide Pictures. I felt that my name might discourage some people from attending.) We constructed a building in Burbank, just across from the Walt Disney Studios. The Portland Story was the first of about two hundred films we have done.

  Soon after the Portland Crusade, Dick and I got to talking about the use of films in evangelism. “Why,” I asked, “don’t we do a fictional story that would be a dramatic picture, totally Christian and evangelical and evangelistic, appealing to young people?”

  Our next Crusade was scheduled to be in Fort Worth in early 1951, and we decided to make the film there. We centered the film’s story around the conversion of a rodeo rider in that Crusade. Redd Harper and Cindy Walker agreed to star in Mr. Texas, which we made on a low budget. In a fit of brashness, we rented the Holly-wood Bowl for the world premiere. The outdoor arena seated 25,000 people; 5,000 more sat on the hillside. The audience included some of Hollywood’s best-known film executives, among them Cecil B. DeMille, Frank Freeman, and Walter Wanger.

  A few months earlier, I had been invited to Paramount Studios to have lunch with that company’s president, Frank Freeman, whose wife was a deeply spiritual person. There I met DeMille; he was in preproduction for the remake of his 1923 classic, The Ten Commandments. Also at the lunch were Anthony Quinn, Barbara Stanwyck, Betty Hutton, and Bob Hunter, a Paramount executive who was a committed Christian and treasurer of Hollywood’s First Presbyterian Church.

  During the lunch, Frank made me a proposition: “Billy, MGM has employed an evangelist by the name of Clifford to act in one of their films. But we at Paramount think that your name and ability would be far superior, and I’d like to ask you to consider doing a film with us.”

  I looked him straight in the eye, with the others listening, and told him that God had called me to preach the Gospel and that I would never do anything else as long as I lived. And then I related my own experience with Christ for the benefit of all those at the table.

  At Jerry Beavan’s suggestion, we hired twenty-five searchlights to crisscross the sky for the Mr. Texas premiere, outdoing anything the film capital had seen before. As I look back, I blush at our brazenness—not just in that lighting effort but in the whole project—and at the extent to which our youthful zeal sometimes outraced our knowledge. As soon as the showing started, we realized that the loudspeakers were too far away from some of the audience; and the sound was not synchronized exactly between the forty-foot screen and the top tier of seats a thousand feet away. Then the projector broke down.

  I wanted the earth to open up and swallow me, I was so embarrassed! I hastily called some of our Team to one side. We fervently prayed that God would help the technicians get the projector started. After five minutes, the movie came on again, and we were able to watch the remainder without incident. To my utter amazement, when I gave the Invitation at the end of the film, 500 peop
le responded. The whole incident impressed on us the risks of taking things for granted, particularly when dealing with something as complex as film.

  Nevertheless, I was so excited about this new step in our ministry that I took a copy of the film with me to London to show to the great British filmmaker J. Arthur Rank, whom I had met on a previous visit. He watched the screening patiently and then spoke diplomatically. “Well, you know, the thing you’re trying to get over comes across. It’s not technically a good film, but the message comes across.”

  He was right, of course—the movie left much to be desired—and it irked me that we had not done a professionally acceptable job. Arthur Rank’s comments made me determined to do our future films to the highest standard possible. And yet Mr. Texas is being shown in many parts of the world still, and I continually come across people who came to Christ as a result of seeing it.

  RADIO— The Hour of Decision

  The second development had much more immediate consequences for us.

  Some months before, in Boston, I heard over the radio that Dr. Walter A. Maier, the great Lutheran theologian and radio preacher from St. Louis, had died of a heart attack. I was so jolted that I knelt in my hotel room and prayed that God might raise up someone to take his place on the radio. In those days, radio was still king; television’s impact was just beginning to be felt. There were only a few evangelical programs on national radio, and none seemed to have a wide audience among nonbelievers. Dr. Maier and Charles Fuller were virtually the only preachers on national radio at the time.