My Introduction to Billy Graham

  Billy Graham died the other day.  He was 99 years old.

  The thing that struck me about Graham was he didn’t seem to be mean-spirited like some preachers on the national stage (like the late Jerry Falwell) or huckster-ish like some preacher-dudes on the TV (like Jim whathisname with the crying wife and eye make-up streaming down her face).  Graham seemed to me to be a man of faith.

  But in the hours after his death, and I do mean hours not days, in the hours after his death news reports started coming out that he was an angry dude behind the scenes, that he didn’t like these people or that group or whatever.

  NBC news ran a story that alleged that Graham lead the pack back in the mid-20^th century allegedly when American Protestantism’s focus switched from the teachings of Jesus to the teachings of Jesus PLUS a heapin’ helpin’ of American nationalism and involvement in national politics.

  I’ll stick with my initial impression of Graham as a dude of faith.  My grandmother thought so anyway.   She’d watch him on the TV.  Graham’s trip seemed to be, “Get your act together, Jesus can help.  Let him be your Lord and savior.”  He’d do some preachin’, the big ol’ booming voiced singer George Beverly Shea would sing some hymns and then the whole shebang would wrap up with Graham’s choir singing “Just As I Am” as people who had been moved by the service-in-the-stadium would make their way up front.

  The Billy Graham Crusade would come on the tube and there’d be my grandmother, sitting, watching and listening in her easy chair, smoking her filterless Raleigh cigarette.

  But I never saw all of this stuff until years after I started hanging around my grandmother’s house a lot.

  My introduction to Billy Graham came from a preacher’s daughter who lived down the street from my grandmother’s house.  Her name was Audrey Adams*. 

  As a kid who had grown up living in hotels (because that’s where my father worked) I hadn’t really had neighbors before.

  When we moved from Hawai’i to my dad’s hometown in Virginia we lived at the hotel but we also spent a lot of time at my grandparents’ house.

  I spent so much time at my grandparent’s house I ended up going to the nearby school and getting to know kids like Audrey.

  “My daddy is a friend of Billy Graham’s,” Audrey announced one summer day from the front of her house, two houses down from mine.

  “Who’s Billy Graham?” I yelled back.

  “WHO’S BILLY GRAHAM???” Audrey practically screamed, “WHO’S BILLY GRAHAM???  YOU DON’T KNOW WHO BILLY GRAHAM IS?”

  “Nope,” I said in all my 7 year old nonchalance.

  “You’re going to go to hell!” said Audrey, walking closer.

  I was a kid and I had no idea who Billy Graham was or even what Hell was.  All I knew of Hell was it was a word my dad said a lot, along with “damn.”

  At that point in my life I was more afraid of sharks than Hell.  Sharks were out there, somewhere, ready to rip you to shreds with their sharp teeth.  I’d seen them in “National Geographic” magazine.  For a kid playing in the surf in Hawai’i, sharks were real.

  I knew more about Pele, the bare-breasted Hawai’ian goddess of volcanoes than Jesus.  I mean I KNEW who Jesus was, but our family really didn’t go to church much in my early years.  And Pele looked a LOT more interesting.  So you see I REALLY had no idea who Billy Graham was.

  “Who are you, eh?” I asked.

  “I’m Audrey Adams and my daddy is Ronald Adams, evangelist,” she said, raising her chin and puffing out her chest, “And we’re Baptists, we’re going to heaven.”

  Soon, Audrey Adams, daughter of Ronald Adams, Baptist evangelist who no doubt was on his way to heaven and taking his family with him, was standing in front of me and looking at me square in the eyes.

  “Who are you and why do you talk funny?” she asked.

  “I’m Grant McGee, yeah.” I said.  “My daddy is the new manager of the big hotel downtown.  We just moved here from Hawai’i.”

  I reckon she thought I talked funny because I must’ve picked up a bit of Pidgin English out there in the middle of the Pacific.  Her Southern drawl didn’t sound strange to me, it’s how my grandmother talked.

  Two years earlier I had spent the summer with my grandma.  When I got home my mom went to my Kindergarten and told the teacher she should not let me get by with saying “ain’t,” something I picked up while down south.

  “I ain’t never met anyone from ‘Huh-why-yuh’ before,” said Audrey.  “I’m six years old.”

  “I’m seven,” I said.

  And so my brief friendship with Audrey Adams began.

  We didn’t play much together.  Looking back that’s probably because we didn’t have much in common.  She mostly showed up in her front yard, overdressed in a dress and shiny black girls shoes that looked like nothing was supposed to get dirty.  She and her little brother Ronnie would be in the yard playing.

  I don’t even remember Audrey in school.

  What I do remember is that her daddy, Ronald Adams Baptist evangelist, would be seen outside his house every now and then.

  I never saw Ronald Adams dressed casually, he was always in suit and tie and always seemed to be getting into or out of his Cadillac car.  Us neighborhood kids would call out to him and he’d smile and wave.  He was a striking man with thick black wavy and seriously tall, I heard someone say he was 6 foot 10…a giant of a man.  He didn’t ever point a finger at us kids and tell us we were going to Hell like his little girl did.

  And then one day the Adams were gone. They moved away.  The neighbors said they moved to Texas...or was it North Carolina?

  After we moved to my father’s hometown we seemed to go to church more.  We went to the big Methodist church downtown.

  Well, mostly I went.

  My parents would pack me off to my grandparents’ house and I’d ride to Sunday school and church with my grandfather.  Sometime later my mom started teaching Sunday school to teenagers at the big church and my sister started going too.  My father never went, my grandmother didn’t go either.  My brother had graduated high school and was off to college.

  The lessons I learned with the Methodists were about God being a loving deity, Jesus’ big message was “Love one another” and there wasn’t much talk of Hell, if at all.

  As I grew up I began to notice the streetcorner preachers in my town, each one promising Hell and damnation for those who didn’t believe the things about God and Jesus that they did.

  One day when I was 17 and in a mood I stopped in front of one of those guys, crossed my arms and stared at him.

  In the middle of his rant he turned, his arm shot out and he used his Bible as a pointer, pointing at me right between the eyes.

  “SON, DO YOU KNOW JESUS CHRIST AS YOUR LORD AND SAVIOR????” he yelled.

  While the city swirled around us it was just the two of us in this encounter.

  “J.C. is a close personal friend of mine,” I said.

  “J.C.????” He yelled, “YOU BLASPHEME!  YOU MOCK THE LORD!  YOU’RE GOING TO HELL!”

  “There you go,” I said.  “Threatening people with something you have no power over.”

  “WHAT?” he said.

  “You don’t decide who goes to Hell and who doesn’t,” I said.  “The Lord does, that’s the way I heard it at my church.”

  “What denomination is that, son?”

  “The Methodists.”

  “METHODISTS ARE LOST SOULS,” shouted the streetcorner preacher.

  “You know chief,” I said.  “I wonder if you might win over a few more followers if you were nicer and spoke a message of love.  I can’t imagine J.C. standing on a corner in Jerusalem berating people passing by.”

  “YOU MOCK THE LORD AGAIN!  YOU’RE GOING TO HELL!”

  “Man,” I said, “You’re not even listening to me.”

  I turned and walked down the street.

  No, I don’t think Brother Jesus would’ve railed against people walking by, nor would Ronald Adams Baptist evangelist or Billy Graham.

  I think they just laid out the details for you and you needed to figure it out as they saw it.

E P I L O G U E

  I thought I’d look and see if I could find the Adams family on The Internet, Great and Powerful.

  I found an obituary for Ronald Adams, Baptist evangelist.  There he was in a picture with Audrey.  He looked old, he was 86 when he died last year.

  It gave me hope that tall guys can live to be old.  I’m 6 foot 3.  I heard-tell that the odds of a long life are stacked against us tall guys.

  Audrey had grown up, married a dude a lot older than her and had four kids.  Her little brother Ronnie ran his own church in a run-down section of Nashville, Tennessee.

  I found it interesting that it wasn’t a Baptist church.  It was non-denominational.

 

*Name changed along with those in her family…..