by Billy Graham
Justice had its day, though. At one house where I stopped to sell, I rang and rang the bell. The lady did not come to the door, but she did go to the upstairs window. She saw me down there on the step, and next thing I knew, she had dumped a whole pail of water right on top of me!
In Monroe, North Carolina, one night, T.W. and I were sharing a room in a cheap little hotel; Grady and Albert were in another room. I woke up with the sensation of something crawling on me. “Turn on the light,” I called to T.W. “I got him!”
We thought at first it was a big mosquito, but it was a bedbug. Neither he nor I had ever seen one before. We went downstairs and reported it to the desk clerk before checking out with all our stuff, not caring to stay and get bedbug-eaten all night.
It happened that our friend Jimmie Johnson was holding a revival meeting in that same town in a specially built wooden tabernacle, sawdust shavings and all. Newly roomless, we headed for the revival. After the crowd left, T.W. and I lay down, piling some shavings under our soiled shirts to make a pillow. We did not sleep much, though—and not at all after the flies started buzzing around us about five in the morning.
The Fuller Brush Company’s sales strategy was sound, but sometimes it backfired. The trainers told us always to try to get our foot in the door and hold it there so that the customer couldn’t close it. It was a good theory, maybe, but I came the hard way to learn the meaning of “footsore.”
And then there was the matter of the giveaway item, usually a bottle brush or a utility brush. We salesmen had to pay 10¢ apiece for them, which was a lot of money in those Depression days. We would give the lady a choice. She could have whichever one she wanted, and it was absolutely free. What the trainers did not tell us, and what infuriated Grady especially, was that some women who answered the door grabbed the free brush and then slammed the door shut, foot or no foot!
T.W. gives me credit for being the best salesman of the four of us. Perhaps it was that he and Grady liked to play a lot on the side. They would make house calls for a while and then take off to fish or swim for the rest of the day. Still, we would get back to the boardinghouse about the same time in the afternoon and compare notes on what local girls we would try to get dates with that night. Albert did not date, however; he was a married man going on twenty-five.
While the Wilson boys indulged in their recreation, I kept plugging along with my sample case of Fuller brushes, knocking on doors from sunrise to sunset in the little towns and villages of eastern South Carolina. We would stay three or four days in each town if necessary, covering all the white homes and then all the black homes.
My approach was to say to the housewife, “Well, I haven’t come here to sell you anything. I’ve come to give you a brush.” She always wanted to see that. So I emptied my case and laid out all of the brushes—I always kept the free samples on the bottom. She saw that array, and maybe pointed to one or another and said, “You know, I’ve never seen a brush like that before. What is that one?” And a sale was in the making.
One day, though, T.W. overdid it. He had studied the sales manual backward and forward, and the idea got into his mind that a certain bristle comb was made of bear hair that had been bleached. At one house he launched into his usual talk: “Now if you’ll just look at this. No wonder so many movie stars use this particular bristle comb. Notice the alternate rows of bristles. This brush is made out of the best boar-bear bristles that money can buy.”
“Excuse me,” she interrupted. “Did you say ‘boar-bear’? I thought a boar was a hog.”
“Oh, yes, there’s a boar-hog, but these bristles are boar-bear, from Russia.”
To T.W.’s credit, he went to the local library later that afternoon to look up boar-bear. Of course, he couldn’t find it. When he went back to deliver the brush, he confessed to the woman. “I was wrong. You don’t even have to buy that brush you ordered. I don’t know what made me say what I did, but you’re right: a boar is a hog. It must have been the bleaching process that threw me off.”
Her reply taught him something that all of us tried to remember after that. “Young man,” she said, “because you’re honest, I want to buy a couple more of your bristle combs.”
Every day we had to send our orders in to the company. Then the brushes would come by mail, and we had to revisit each town to make deliveries—and collect the money. That was the catch! Some women ordered quite a lot of brushes and then forgot that they had done so (or failed to tell their husbands). I learned that the best time to make deliveries was at suppertime or a little after. The people were generally at home then, and the husband and wife could work it out together.
Boar or bear or whatever, I was convinced that Fuller brushes were the best product money could buy, and I was dedicated to the proposition that every family ought to have Fuller brushes as a matter of principle. But I was almost eighteen, and the question was, Should I plan to be doing this kind of thing for the rest of my life? I had gotten off the farm and was headed for college. But why? What lay down the road?
That summer’s experience selling Fuller brushes taught me a lot about myself, about human nature, and about communicating a message to people even if I had to talk my way in and out of all kinds of situations. I did not win any awards or honors from the company, but in the poorer areas that I was assigned to (the company seemed to reserve the best sections for their top people), I had done well enough to earn sometimes as much as $50 or $75 in a week, almost a fortune then for a teenager. And being away from my parents, learning to make my own way, gave me self-confidence.
I learned a lot about prayer too. I developed a practice of praying about every call as I walked up to the door, asking God to give me an opportunity to witness for Christ. At times I was somewhat headstrong about this, and not really sensitive to the leading of the Holy Spirit. Albert got complaints from some of our customers that I was trying to give them a hard sell about Christ as much as about Fuller brushes. He rightly cautioned me to be more discerning.
Under Albert’s mature spiritual influence, we four used to have prayer meetings in our shabby lodgings, reading the Bible together as well. I’m sure that fellowship built into us a kind of accountability to each other that helped us resist a lot of the temptations that traveling salesmen regularly face.
As summer faded into fall, I kept asking myself, What are you going to be when you grow up?
I was looking forward to registration day at Bob Jones College, but I still liked squatting on a milking stool in the cow barn.
The first evangelist I had ever heard, Billy Sunday, had been a ball player before he became a preacher. The second one, Mordecai Ham, had been a traveling salesman before he became a preacher. I had done both: played ball and sold stuff on the road.
I had been converted for two years now, but surely the Lord wouldn’t require me to follow in their steps and become a preacher too! Hadn’t I ruled out that profession, along with undertaker, a long time ago?
3
Called to Preach
Bob Jones College 1936, Florida Bible Institute 1937–1940
GRIPING NOT TOLERATED!
That was the sign on the wall of the dormitory room welcoming me to Bob Jones College. My father had driven the Wilson boys and me across the Appalachians to Cleveland in east Tennessee in September 1936. Every one of the three hundred students there faced the same stark warning on the wall of his or her room. Grady and I did not know whether to believe it or not.
Dr. Bob Jones, Sr., the school’s founder, who had won our hearts when he spoke at Sharon High School back home, believed in Authority (his) and Discipline (ours), with capital letters. A military academy could not have been more strict.
My father and mother had never been exactly lax in enforcing their rules on us children, as I could vouch for personally. But now I found myself in an environment so rigidly regimented that it shocked me. Our social life was restricted. Dating had to be scheduled and was governed by the dean’s code book. When you did date, you
could not sit on the same sofa or chair as the girl. You were chaperoned and watched like a hawk. Outside of approved dating times, you could not stop to talk to your girlfriend. On certain evenings, though, you were allowed to sit in the lobby and talk (but only for fifteen minutes), and you could always write notes.
Even our intellectual life was subject to regulation. Teaching in every subject was dogmatic, and there was little chance to raise questions. Dr. Bob’s interpretation of doctrine, ethics, and academics was the only one allowed. Very few students ever questioned his authority to his face. But sometimes, stretched out on the double-decker bunks in our tiny four-bedded rooms with the grim motto confronting us, we did discuss it—though always with fear in our voices.
To make matters worse, we also loved Dr. Bob (as we often called him). Sometimes as intimidating as a bull, he could also be as tender as a child. We could not help but sense that he had our best interests at heart in all the policies he imposed. His religious convictions and genuine devotion to the Lord kindled a deep respect in my heart.
“I’ve made all the mistakes in evangelism,” he often said. “There are no more to be made.” That was memorable, but he never elaborated on what they were. Almost every day he spoke to us in the compulsory chapel service, and we enjoyed his homespun philosophy tartly expressed.
“If the Devil is going your way, ride the Devil,” he would say.
“If a hound dog is barking for Jesus Christ, I’m for the hound dog.”
As I looked forward to a few days of Christmas vacation, I tried to sort things out in my mind. I am not sure I could have defined in detail just what was bothering me about Bob Jones College. After all, I had nothing to compare it with. But I disliked the overwhelming discipline, which often seemed to have little rationale behind it. And I disliked being told what to think without being given the opportunity to reason issues through on my own or to look at other viewpoints. Coming down with the flu did not help.
One of my roommates, Wendell Phillips, had become a good friend in those early months. Frustrated with the rules and faced with the possibility of being “shipped” (expelled) by the college, Wendell quit and drove to Florida where he had been reading about a school that was reported to have excellent Bible teachers—although he had also considered Moody Bible Institute in Chicago, where he had gone to school the previous year. Knowing how unhappy I was at Bob Jones, he now urged me, by letters and at least one phone call, to join him.
I surely knew I was not fitting in where I was. I asked for an interview with Dr. Bob in his office and told him about my discontent and my thoughts of leaving. His voice booming, he pronounced me a failure and predicted only more failure ahead. I left his office disillusioned and dejected.
Naturally, I assumed the problem was more with me than with the college. “I know I’ve been converted,” I wrote to Mother. “I know that I know Jesus Christ, but I’ve lost my feeling. I can’t seem to get anywhere in prayer. I don’t feel anything.”
“Son, God is testing you,” she wrote back. “He tells us to walk not by feeling but by faith, and when you don’t feel anything, God may be closer to you than ever before. Through the darkness and through the fog, put your hand up by faith. You’ll sense the touch of God.”
And I did. But the deep struggle was to continue for weeks.
The family’s Christmas plans all along had been to take Catherine, Melvin, little Jean, and me on a trip to Florida, where Mother’s older sister Sissy, along with Uncle Bo and my cousin Mildred, had bought a large rooming house in the heart of Orlando. They hoped I would get enough time off from school to make the trip.
Still sick from the flu and confused in my thinking, I headed south with them. By then my parents had heard about Florida Bible Institute from a small ad in Moody Monthly. I also talked with a Plymouth Brethren Bible teacher named Chambers who was staying at our house just then, and he counseled me to consider transferring there.
Once in Florida, I immediately acquired a taste for the warmer climate and the palm trees. Raising oranges and cattle appealed to a lifelong farmboy like myself. And Orlando’s many lakes attracted me too. I made up my mind to leave Bob Jones College when I returned there in January.
While we were in Orlando, Daddy did something unusual: he encouraged little Jean (who was four) to get up on the table in front of the guests and “preach” to them. She was so cute, with her beautiful blond hair, that they stopped to pay attention. I don’t know why Daddy put her up to it, but Jean was serious about her message and told the guests that they needed to come to Jesus. I guess you could say she was the first preacher in our family.
Back in Charlotte, Mother wrote to the president of Florida Bible Institute, asking him for information about the start of the second semester, courses offered, costs, and so on. She added a postscript asking him to send a copy to me at Bob Jones College. Dr. Watson, the president, replied by return mail: “In view of the fact that he is already in school at the Bob Jones College, we do not feel like writing him to explain our school to him as we do not wish to be misunderstood and have it appear in any way whatsoever that we are even suggesting that he make another change from another school to ours.”
Mother wrote back to him that our interest in the Florida school was prompted by friends of ours in Charlotte and by its advertisement in Moody Monthly magazine, along with the favorable impression Florida made on the family when we visited at Christmas.
She also sent a letter from our family physician, which had been copied to Dr. Jones, explaining my need for a less strenuous environment. In a veiled allusion to Wendell Phillips and myself, she told Dr. Watson that she would “leave it entirely with you as well as other faculty members, sincerely believing they will not be permitted to ‘run around’ except in the Lord’s work.”
Every day after lunch, I found out later, both Mother and Daddy went upstairs to their bedroom, got down on their knees, and prayed for me in line with Paul’s concern for his young associate Timothy, using the beloved cadences of the King James Version of the Bible: “Study to shew thyself approved unto God, a workman that needeth not to be ashamed, rightly dividing the word of truth” (2 Timothy 2:15). When I received the news from Florida that I had been admitted, I was overjoyed.
Riding in my father’s 1937 green Plymouth, we arrived at the campus of Florida Bible Institute one morning late in January. It was located in Temple Terrace, fifteen miles east of Tampa. After the damp and dismal autumn in the mountains of east Tennessee, western Florida seemed like Paradise to me. The Institute itself was housed in a Spanish-style country-club hotel with several outbuildings. All had creamy pink stucco and tiled roofs, with wrought-iron railings along red-brick steps. Surrounded by a horseshoe-shaped eighteen-hole golf course on the banks of the Hillsborough River, the buildings were part of an exclusive residential subdivision that went broke in 1929. The family stayed for lunch before driving back to Charlotte.
The next day the lady who supervised the dining room (“Gibby,” the students called her) hailed me from across the room.
“Say, can you drive a car?” she asked hopefully.
“Yes, ma’am.”
“Well, I have a station wagon full of tourists who are supposed to be taken on a tour of Tampa, and I’ve nobody to drive them. Will you do it?”
“But I’ve never been to Tampa,” I protested. “How can I take them on a tour of the city?”
It was the height of the annual Gasparilla celebration—Gaspar was a pirate who had once captured Tampa—and there would be extra traffic and lots of crowds.
“Well, tell them something,” she said in desperation.
When I brought them back to the campus late in the afternoon, they all seemed happy. I did not know whether they had seen the main attractions, but I had done my best to explain the virtues of Tampa (as I was seeing them myself for the first time). After all, anybody could point out a post office when there was a big sign on the building. And I did remember a few things from a Chamber
of Commerce brochure I had read before arriving in Tampa.
Only a few houses had been built in Temple Terrace by the time of the stock market crash, and some of them had been left deserted ever since. One of the men who lived there was J. W. Van DeVenter, who wrote “I Surrender All” and a number of other familiar Gospel songs. In another house lived a doctor who came to see the students when they were sick. Mainly, though, the broad, paved streets ran mile after mile through barren blocks.
A former Christian and Missionary Alliance (CMA) minister from North Carolina, Dr. W. T. Watson, had taken over the bankrupt property and started Florida Bible Institute as a nondenominational institution. It had forty women and thirty men students when I arrived. We all lived and ate and had our classes in the hotel complex. There was still plenty of room left over for “paying customers”—ministers and Christian laypeople (well-to-do Yankees, as I saw them) who took advantage of the Institute’s comfortable quarters and reasonable rates in winter months. It cost a lot less than hotels and was far superior to tourist camps and trailer parks. Perhaps as many as fifty people from the North would spend the entire winter there; others came and went. Every room had twin beds and a private bath, and some included sitting areas—suites, really.
We students were the workforce that ran the place, waiting on tables, cooking, washing dishes in the kitchen, doing the housekeeping, and handling grounds maintenance—all for 20¢ an hour. But those were good wages, because Dr. Watson, who had come from a poor home, managed to keep school fees down to $1 a day, all-inclusive. My father was paying my expenses and providing my pocket money, so I was affluent compared to some of the other students. I worked like everybody else, though, mainly to be part of the action and to expend some of my surplus nervous energy. I became the school’s first “automatic dishwasher,” or so they told me. My pace in the soapsuds races kept four girls busy with their dish towels.