Billy Graham: Looking Homeward
(Our State, Down Home Living In North Carolina, December 1997)

In trying to track down Billy Graham for an interview for this story, we learned that despite his 79 years and his suffering from Parkinson's Disease, he is still very much a man on the go. Even his publicist was having a hard time getting in touch with the roving evangelist. Graham was on the West Coast, kicking off a crusade in the San Francisco Bay Area, and the best we could do was fax a few questions to the publicist, who would try to get Graham to respond.

That didn't work out. The indefatigable Graham was feverishly at work on his mission to save souls in San Francisco. As his close friend, Asheville businessman Glenn Wilcox, says: "He feels such a burden for the San Francisco Bay Area. He feels the burden to win them over to Christ."

For six decades now, the burden to win souls has caused Graham to leave his Montreat home to crusade around the world. Leaving the mountains of Western North Carolina-and his wife and five kids-hasn't always been easy, a fact that he writes about in his autobiography, Just As I Am. "Whenever I had to leave," Graham writes, "we gathered to say good-bye. We held hands and prayed. As I boarded the train, or later the plane, my heart would be heavy, and more than once I drove down the mountain with tears in my eyes."

The final pages of his book, which lists the Billy Graham Crusades from 1947 to 1996, provide some insight as to just how much he traveled down that mountain road. In 1960, for example, he crusaded in Liberia, Ghana, Nigeria, Rhodesia, Tanganyika, Kenya, Rwanda-Urundi, Ethiopia, Egypt, Washington, D.C., Brazil, Switzerland, West Germany and New York.

Though he missed his family while crusading, Graham wasn't the only one who suffered the misery of separation. "Four full-blooded little Grahams," wrote his wife, Ruth, on Valentine's Day 1957, when her husband was preaching in Madison Square Garden. "I feel this a.m. it's gotten quite beyond me."

"What I missed!" Graham laments. "And what Ruth missed by not having me to help her." He writes later in the book: "Every day I was absent from my family is gone forever."

On The Mountaintop
For most of those 60 years of crusading, Graham traveled with lifelong friend and associate evangelist T.W. Wilson. We caught up with Wilson by phone during the Bay Area Crusades. He told us, among other things, that the travel is hard on both of them. They were both eager to get the job done and head home.

Wilson told us too that both are proud of the state from which they hail: Graham and Wilson were born in Charlotte. "When Billy goes to a place that he likes, he says to people, 'This is a wonderful place, next to North Carolina,' " Wilson says with a laugh. As a further tribute to the state, Graham dons a Charlotte Panthers' cap when he seeks to go incognito.

In previous interviews, Graham has said that North Carolina's people, its culture and its religious faith help mold his character. "They helped give me the values and the spiritual depth that I believe is required for the work God called me to do," he says.

Graham chose to settle in the Montreat area because Ruth's parents lived there. Wilson says that otherwise, he might have chosen the Carolina Coast. "He loves the sun," Wilson says. "The doctors have told us to stay out of it, but if we're in a park, I'm usually sitting in the shade and Billy's over there in the sun. I told him that if I didn't know that he worshipped the son of God that I'd think he worshipped the sunshine."

Graham's home is an Appalachian log-and-frame house high up in the mountains. The family moved there when it became evident that they needed more privacy than their Montreat home would allow. "Several denominational conference centers were located in our area, and from time to time the attendees (and other tourists) would seek out our home," Graham says. "Occasionally, buses would even stop on the roadway, and curious people would pour into our yard  Often they called out our names, asking us to come out and pose for photographs, and so on. Some pressed their faces against the windows to see inside. A few even took chips of wood from the rail fence or picked up pebbles as souvenirs."

The house on the hill has become a refuge for Graham, a place he can truly relax. "But whenever I leave Montreat, privacy once again becomes a problem," he says. "I am recognized almost everywhere, and I am approached constantly. By nature I am a shy person, and I don't enjoy going out very much."

When they do go out, the Grahams have to deal with intrusions. "I remember being on vacation with our children once in Vero Beach, Florida," he says. "After we had been seated in the motel restaurant, a long line of people gathered to greet us, making it impossible for us to finish our meal."

And more than once, he relates, he has been on a plane or in a restaurant, returning from exhausting trip or just wanting to relax, when someone approaches him to share a personal problem or heartache. "I always have tried to be gracious and to see it as another opportunity God was giving to help in whatever ways I could," he says.

And yet he continues to go, even at an age when most people are slowing down. The burden of spreading God's word drives him. It has driven him to travel the world, seeing all that it had to offer, ministering to millions along the way. But when it's all said and done, says his buddy Wilcox, "He loves coming back to his log cabin on the mountaintop." Look homeward Billy Graham to the state and people who admire you.

Sidebar: Belief In Billy

The cold January sun had just broken over the mountaintops. It sent forth a fringe of red and orange rays. Below, the dark mountain forests, still in shadows-above, a clear blue sky. It seemed like the beginning of the world.

As I peer out the window from the third floor of Memorial Mission Hospital in Asheville, our infant son lay with tubes attached to his body. Days before we had brought him here. He had been listless, indifferent and unresponsive. A spinal tap taken yesterday revealed that he suffered only from a virus and that he would soon recover. We are fortunate, and looking out on the day, admiring its cold, stark beauty, I am grateful.

Outside the room, Billy and Ruth Graham's picture adorns the hallway. They have lent their names to this facility. On a plaque below the picture, the Grahams note that they "share the vision for this center-to help children of this region, of the nation, and quite possibly the world, to receive the miracle of today's pediatric care."

Look around the state of North Carolina, and you will find two roads dedicated to Billy Graham and one facility that carries his name. But not much more than that.

Though hundreds of organizations request the honor of using his name for buildings, roads or facilities, Billy Graham politely resists. "Several years ago, he tried to change the name of the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association," says longtime friend and associate evangelist T.W. Wilson. "He said, 'Oh, just take my name off.' But the board said that would ruin us, so they insisted that we keep his name on. But he doesn't want any recognition. He is so humble."

The Grahams granted their names to Memorial Mission Hospital because of their close personal ties to the area. The name has opened doors for the facility that may not have otherwise been opened. "It has given us national visibility that a children's hospital in Asheville never would have gotten," says Bruce Thorsen, vice president of development for Memorial Mission Healthcare Foundation.

To parents like us, the Grahams' picture, him in his denim jacket seated in a rocker, her standing, hand on his shoulder, represents goodness and caring. They look like dear old grandparents, assuring us that all will be OK. They tell us that God will look after us, that he will bless us and keep us. We believe. Billy Graham has told us so.

For almost 60 years, Billy Graham has been speaking to us. And we have been listening (more than 210 million people in 185 countries have attended his crusades). Millions have read his best-selling books; presidents and heads of state have sought his counsel. He has touched our lives, and, perhaps, opened our hearts as well as our minds. He is genuine. He is believable. Readers of this magazine voted him North Carolina's most-admired man. The Gallup Poll has cited him as one of the Ten Most Admired Men In The World 37 times (a record) since 1955. He was awarded the North Carolina Pubic Service Award in 1986 and the Congressional Gold Medal just last year.

Moreover, he has won the trust and admiration of his friends and associates. "So many of our people have been with BGEA (Billy Graham Evangelistic Association) for a long time," Wilson says. "The reason is that we believe in him. We believe in what he's doing."