Just As I Am

Billy Graham

• Publisher: HarperOne
• Year: 2011
• ISBN:
  9780062119544
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: History of Christianity

Commemorative edition

Hailed as "the world's preacher, " Billy Graham enjoyed a career that spanned six decades and his ministry of faith touched the hearts and souls of millions.

In Just As I Am, a #1 New York Times Bestseller, Graham reveals his life story in what the Chicago Tribune calls "a disarmingly honest autobiography." With down-to-earth warmth and candor, Graham tells the stories of the events and encounters that helped shape his life. He recounts meetings with presidents, celebrities, and world leaders, including Harry S. Truman, Winston Churchill, Queen Elizabeth, and the Shah of Iran, and shares his own spiritual journey as he movingly reflects on his personal life and relationships. This is an inspirational and unforgettable portrait that will be treasured by readers everywhere.

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 breakfas...