by Billy Graham
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 embarrass
ment, 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.