Ruth, a Portrait: The Story of Ruth Bell Graham Read online

  “Make sure you’re being led by God,” he told her, “and use your own head.”

  Despite her doctors’ emphatic warnings that Rosa would hemorrhage to death, Dr. Bell instructed them to comply with his daughter’s wishes. All treatments were stopped. Struggling out of bed each day, Rosa began visiting and helping other patients until her strength was spent. With each attempt, her determination and energy increased. Eventually she was walking a mile into town daily, where she would force down an ice cream soda at the drugstore before returning to the sanatorium. By the fall of 1942, her lungs had expanded, and X-rays confirmed that she had been completely cured.

  “Only God could have done this,” one of her physicians marveled to Dr. Bell.

  Ruth returned to Wheaton in January of 1942, and Billy asked if she wished to give him back the ring. She hesitated, depressed by the finality of the gesture and unsettled by the image of him vanishing from her life. No, she answered, her words edged in frustration. The problem, she explained, was that she still believed she was meant to be a missionary.

  “Listen,” he said, “do you or do you not think the Lord brought us together?”

  “Yes,” she had to confess.

  “Then,” he said firmly, “I’ll do the leading and you’ll do the following.”

  As Ruth would later remark, with mischief in her eyes, “I’ve been following him ever since.”

  Ruth could live with this condition as long as she wasn’t tethered like a nanny goat, which was sometimes how she felt. She almost slapped his ring back into his palm one afternoon during a disagreement over church affiliations. Already an ordained Baptist minister, Billy had no interest in returning to the Presbyterian Church, a change that would involve three years of seminary after college if he wished to become a Presbyterian minister. Since he had left the Presbyterian Church, he assumed that Ruth should do the same, and as they were riding in the car one afternoon, he commented that “Dr. Bell couldn’t possibly be a man of God and remain in the Southern Presbyterian Church.”

  Ruth and Billy disagreed about other matters, too, such as her health habits, which had never been good and now were worse. By March, she had lost ten pounds and was suffering from insomnia. Having never felt the slightest impulse to do anything more rigorous than walking, she marveled at Billy’s daily regimen of wrestling, jogging, and calisthenics. Billy did his best to help her mend her ways.

  “Saturday night,” Ruth wrote at the time, “he presented me with a bag of grapefruit and oranges and a box of [vitamin] pills … and the order to go upstairs and clothe myself warmly. Then he marched me up to the end of Howard St. where houses are nil and he started in. And I mean he started in. Sixty times he made me jump, feet apart & clap my hands over my head & sixty times he made me hold my arms out and touch first right hand to left foot, then left hand to right foot. Plus other of his pet calisthenics. There was no pleading for mercy and no teasing him out of the notion.”

  In the main, Billy’s lectures on the merits of good diet, sufficient sleep, and exercise went in one ear and out the other, as Ruth described it.

  Billy worried about her because it was his nature to worry about most things, a trait indigenous to Graham blood and one that would always amuse his family. His pessimism would prompt his own children to nickname him “Puddleglum,” after the valorous though pessimistic Marsh-wiggle in C. S. Lewis’s fairy tale The Silver Chair.

  The Monday after Ruth’s strenuous and unprecedented exercise session, she felt ninety years old and crippled.

  “It’s good for you!” Billy said cheerfully when she complained.

  “Well, you needn’t have started the exercising off with such ferocity,” she retorted.

  “If you’d been exercising all along like you were supposed to,” he said, “you wouldn’t have gotten sore.”

  In the fall of their senior year Billy opened a savings account and began tucking away dollars for their future. They would be married, Ruth decided, on Friday, August 13, 1943,2 and Billy didn’t yet know how he would support a wife. He had applied for an army chaplaincy after the Japanese had bombed Pearl Harbor but had been told to wait until he graduated from college. Then he would need either a seminary degree or one year as a pastor followed by a preparation course for the chaplaincy offered at Harvard University. He had also considered enrolling at the University of Chicago to earn his master’s degree in anthropology, his college major. Meanwhile, numerous churches were offering him jobs.

  One morning in chapel in the fall of 1942, Providence intervened. A Christian businessman named Robert Van Kampen gave his testimony and afterward noticed the lank blond who happened to be sitting in the front row. On a whim Van Kampen wandered over to chat.

  “What do you want to be when you finish school?” Van Kampen asked.

  “A preacher of the Gospel,” Billy replied.

  Van Kampen booked him for the following Sunday at the small Western Springs Baptist Church, located in a middle-class suburb fifteen miles from Wheaton. It had one hundred members and no minister. Each Sunday a different layman would meet with the congregation in the basement of the unfinished building. Pews were rows of flap-bottomed seats purchased from a defunct movie theater. Walls were brick, the floor cement, and a coal furnace grumbled from a corner. Billy accepted the invitation, began preaching there regularly, and was offered the job of pastor.

  If he accepted, he would begin after graduation and his salary would be forty-five dollars a week, one-third of which would pay the rent of a small, furnished apartment in nearby Hinsdale. In early January 1943, he decided that this was what he would do, stipulating that if the army accepted him he would be released from the church immediately. He sealed the deal with a handshake without ever having consulted Ruth. She was incredulous that he had not even asked her opinion. She was also very concerned, for she believed his call was to evangelism, not to the parish.

  The spring of their senior year Ruth saw previews of what was to come. President of the Student Christian Council and a respected speaker, Billy was chosen by Dr. V. Raymond Edman to replace him as the preacher at the Wheaton Tabernacle, which was attended by both faculty and students. Billy was also in demand at churches throughout the state, while Ruth spent most of her weekends, even the senior grand finales, alone.

  “I’m a rotten sport about his leaving,” she wrote home. “It’s no fun. I never thought about this side of it. What is it going to be like after we’re married? I probably won’t see as much of him then as I do now.”

  1. Several days later, Ruth’s ten-year-old brother Clayton eyed the ring and innocently asked, “Is it a diamond or a grindstone?”

  2. Coincidentally, on Friday, August 13, 1937, Shanghai had fallen to the Japanese, thus delaying Ruth’s departure for college; and on August 13, 1910, Nelson Bell had asked Virginia Leftwich to marry him.

  9

  CHAPTER

  Wartime Wedding

  WEDDING PORTRAIT, 1943

  Now that I love you

  and see with eyes

  by love enlightened

  and made wise,

  I wonder how

  men look at you

  who do not see you

  as I do?

  They see (they must)

  the fire and steel,

  the driving force

  I also feel

  But

  do they ever,

  ever see

  that gentler side

  revealed to me?

  —Ruth Bell Graham

  Shortly before 8:00 P.M. on Friday, August 13, 1943, the setting sun was a dying ember and long shadows crossed the stone walkway leading to the arched door of the Montreat Presbyterian Church. Inside, clematis draped from windowsills and the altar, mountain laurel banked the stone platform, and white candles sputtered quietly. Two hundred and fifty guests, mainly missionary friends, sat in hard wooden pews.

  Ruth waited just outside the sanctuary, elegant in a homemade gown of white satin and a lo
ng veil of point d’esprit. Her white satin cap was shaped like a dogwood blossom and quilted in pearls. She carried a bouquet of painted daisies and tuberoses, and moved slowly down the aisle toward the tall young man in white jacket and black trousers who was to be her husband.

  Repeating the vows they had written themselves and memorized, they were married by the Reverend John Minder, a friend from Billy’s Florida Bible Institute days, and the Reverend Kerr Taylor, a former missionary in China. Sophie Graham’s daughter played the organ and Chinese friend Andrew Yang sang a solo. Rosa was the maid of honor. Ruth’s sister Virginia and childhood friend Sandy Yates were bridesmaids. Billy’s sister Jeannie, who would later marry Billy’s future associate evangelist Leighton Ford, was the junior bridesmaid.

  This was a wartime wedding, and those in it made up in imagination what they lacked in funds. Ruth’s childhood missionary friend Gay Currie had decorated the sanctuary, scouring the coves for foliage. The bridesmaids’ dresses were secondhand, and Mrs. Bell had made the bouquets.

  Billy and his brother, Melvin, had always been close, and Billy had asked him to be the best man. The groomsmen were Wheaton classmate Jimmy Johnson, and Grady Wilson and Roy Gustafson, who would one day be important members of the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association. Ruth’s brother, Clayton, was the junior groomsman; he would one day be a prominent Presbyterian minister. This was more than a marriage of two people. It was the union of two entirely different backgrounds, as symbolized by the men who performed the ceremony and the people who participated in it. It was a partnership of permanence, its vows so sacred that Ruth would never remove, for even a moment, the thin gold band that Billy slipped on her finger.

  After the ceremony and a late reception, the Grahams drove northeast toward Blowing Rock for the honeymoon. As is often the case with a honeymoon and the beginning of a marriage, not all was perfect. By Thursday, the seventy-five dollars Billy had saved for the trip was gone. The couple returned to Charlotte and Montreat to visit their parents before starting on the seven-hundred-fifty-mile drive to Hinsdale, Illinois. A cold front rushed in and Ruth caught a chill. By the time they parked in front of their apartment at 214 South Clay Street, she had a high fever.

  Billy was scheduled to preach in Elmira, Ohio, that weekend and did not think he should cancel. Uneasy about leaving a sick wife, he checked her into the best local hospital he could find before he left. His telegram and box of candy did not mollify her. He was aptly though inadvertently punished when the collection was taken and he pulled out one of the two bills in his wallet. To his dismay, he realized he had dropped the twenty instead of the five into the plate. Since his intention had been to tithe the smaller amount, Ruth let him know when he returned home, “that’s all God gave you credit for.”

  This slot of second priority would take some getting used to, and Ruth soon enough learned that Billy would rarely cancel a preaching engagement regardless of how ill either one of them might be. Years later, he slipped in the bathtub and cracked three ribs hours before he was to address students at Oxford University, but he mounted the podium as usual, without benefit of pain medication.

  Frequently victimized by pneumonia, he would spend much of his life standing bareheaded in rain-swept stadiums. In the fall of 1995, with Parkinson’s disease, more fractured ribs, and a broken back, he would show up to say a few kind words at a friend’s retirement dinner. He would do interviews, submit to photo shoots, make television appearances, and preach at two major crusades. Ruth would not have changed him. “I’d rather have a little of Bill,” she was known to say throughout it all, “than a lot of any other man.”

  As a young minister, Billy received numerous invitations to preach throughout the Midwest. Rarely was it financially possible for Ruth to go with him, and the separations were wretched.

  “Before I was married,” she wrote her mother in March of 1944, “I worried because I didn’t miss him more. Now I worry because I can’t miss him less.”

  Unknown to him, many times after he had walked out the door, she would crawl into bed with a severe headache or an upset stomach. When the pain had passed, she would tend again to household chores, cleaning the white wicker furniture, the small kitchen, and throw rugs. She spent hours studying her Bible and thumbing through magazines and newspapers in search of sermon ideas, an avocation she would enjoy from then on. Many of Billy’s better book and sermon illustrations can be attributed to her perusals. It was at this time that she discovered the authors who were to become her favorites, such as George MacDonald, G. K. Chesterton, Alexander Whyte, and Frank W. Boreham.

  It became habit for Ruth to scour secondhand bookstores, and tucked in her billfold was a list of coveted out-of-print books. In later years her bookshelves would be full of her finds, including numerous first editions signed by the authors. Reluctant to let her husband outgrow her intellectually, she developed the habit of reading biographies, histories, novels, and books about art and foreign countries. Billy’s appreciation of her intelligence and learning was something he often proudly mentioned to friends and family.

  It was during times of aloneness in a small house in a strange town that she began to gather her energies and talents into a core of independence. The result was not a reclusiveness insensitive to others, but a strengthening by degrees. Her own profound faith and relationship with God carried her through the most trying times, and from them she derived her ability to survive and rescue. But in some subtle ways, the old injuries never stopped smarting.

  Her avoidance of them simply became a matter of routine. This was observed in the spring of 1996 when she was due to see an out-of-town friend, and then was not to be found. Ruth had gone out to run errands. As the truth unraveled, Billy had just left for Minneapolis. Typically, Ruth could not sit alone in the house after the door shut, but diverted herself. The never-ending separations were and would always be, perhaps, her greatest sacrifice to him and the world.

  The first phase of their marriage was peppered with the usual adjustments and oversights. He draped his wet towels over the top of the bathroom door. She depended on serendipity instead of recipes for cooking, and the results, like a yellowish batch of pickled peach Jell-O, were not always palatable. Nor did he appreciate her quick tongue.

  “I have never taken your advice,” he told her bluntly one day, “and I don’t intend to begin now.”

  “I’d be ashamed to admit,” she replied, “that I had married a woman whose advice I couldn’t take.”

  Billy wasn’t always a paragon of sensitivity. One day several of his bachelor friends visited unannounced and suggested that they all go into Chicago.

  “That would be fine,” said Ruth, who was eager to escape the monotony of the apartment. “I have some shopping I can do. I’ll go get my coat.”

  “No,” Billy said. “We guys just want to be alone. No women today.”

  No amount of begging would change his mind. Through tears she watched the car drive away, and she prayed, “God, if You’ll forgive me for marrying him, I’ll never do it again.”

  Billy did not intend to be unkind. He was simply inexperienced in making a new partner happy and secure. When he realized how much he had hurt Ruth, he was full of tender apologies. She did not like to nag, but quietly let him know her feelings. Indeed, from the beginning, she understood him better than his deacons did.

  Billy’s travels irritated certain pillars of the church who wanted the minister at their beck and call around the clock. At first, no one dared utter a syllable against him, for he was doing the church far too much good. By early 1944, attendance had doubled and tithing had increased so dramatically that the church leaders had redeemed their mortgaged sanctuary and ceremoniously burned the contract in a pie pan.

  Then a well-known radio broadcaster named Torrey Johnson invited Billy to take over “Songs in the Night,” a forty-five-minute program of preaching and singing. It was broadcast live from the church each Sunday night at 10:15. Billy persuaded gospel singer Geo
rge Beverly Shea to assist, and immediately the show was a hit. Ruth’s job was to sit near her husband during the broadcasts, beyond the eerie glow of the colored lightbulbs around his table, and pass him notes during the hymns, offering suggestions for his next remark.

  “All she’d have to do,” Shea recalled, “was write a sentence down and he could keep on going.”

  Soon the show was being broadcast twice each Sunday. Billy became a celebrity, and the town of Western Springs dubbed him “That Hustling Baptist Preacher.” The speaking invitations multiplied and some of the deacons began to grumble. One finally suggested that if Billy did not discontinue his travels, the church should cut his salary.

  He had received numerous job offers from churches and radio stations, and though he did not intend to accept any of them, “he enjoys hanging that over the deacons’ heads once in a while when they get out of hand,” Ruth wrote her parents. “If they think they can run Bill, they’ve got another think coming.” He was also plagued by several parishioners who were the resident troublemakers. Like magpies, they formed a black knot in the congregation, generating a cackle of criticism about the minister and his non-Baptist wife. The nuisances swooped in to snatch up the slightest glitter of gossip, and in keeping with good Calvinist tradition, Billy offended them mightily.

  “Some of you need to confess the sin of troublemaking,” he announced during an evening service as he stared unabashedly at the guilty flock. “A person tries to build a testimony for God in this town and all you do is tear it down. You had better confess before God has to remove some people. As for me, I’m here to [do] this job for God and with His help, I’ll get it done regardless.”