![]() Then I prostrated myself on the dewy turf. Finally, one night, I got down on my knees at the edge of one of the greens. "The inner, irresistible urge would not subside. "Did I want to preach for a lifetime? I asked myself that question for the umpteenth time on one of my nighttime walks around the golf course," Graham wrote in his autobiography. The call, he said, came on the edge of the 18th green at the golf course next to the institute. Throughout his years at the Florida Bible Institute, he struggled with the idea that he might not be cut out for the ministry after all. On other matters, Graham was less decisive. That loud bang was followed almost immediately by the bang of the back door as the intruder left." "I eased out of bed, got the gun, put a cartridge in it and shot it through the door into the ceiling of the next room. 22 rifle, left over from my hunting days on the farm," he wrote in his autobiography. One night, he awoke to realize someone had broken into the house. In the summer of 1939, Graham was asked to replace the minister at the tabernacle and lived for six weeks in a parsonage next to the church. That site is long gone, paved over by Interstate 275's Malfunction Junction. Graham had better luck with his "practical" work, which sent him to Tampa Gospel Tabernacle on N Jefferson Street. "She went with me all over the world, and he found the girl who went with him all over the world." "They just felt that the Lord was calling them in two different directions," he said. Massey said he and his wife don't give interviews on such personal matters, but he dismissed past reports that she went with the man who seemed at the time to have the brighter career as a preacher ahead of him. That night, she said she wanted to marry his friend Charles Massey. He proposed by letter but was upset when she would not wear his corsage to a school party. Soon after arriving, Graham began courting the dark-haired Emily Cavanaugh. Lining the riverbank, fellow students teased, "How many converts did you get today, Billy?" Graham often paddled a canoe to a little island in the Hillsborough River, where he would preach to birds, alligators and cypress stumps. He had a charisma, you could sort of feel it when he walked in the room. "He had talent and grace and dignity that was really beyond his years. "Billy was, as he is now, really an unassuming fellow," Massey said. He also washed dishes and caddied for visiting ministers. Graham was not much of a scholar, but he was popular, serving as president of his 14-member class and editing the yearbook. Meanwhile, another private school, Florida College, took over the Temple Terrace campus in the mid-1940s. Years later, the institute changed its name to Trinity College of Florida and moved several times. "There was so much to do on campus - canoeing, volleyball, Ping-Pong, tennis - that we really never had to leave it for our social contacts," Graham wrote in Just As I Am: The Autobiography of Billy Graham. "We were unaware of that going on," recalls Charles Massey of Tampa, a retired Army chaplain who roomed next door to Graham at the institute. He apparently had little contact with the rough elements running Ybor City at the time, but they were there.īut Temple Terrace then was more rural than it is now, and little of Tampa's worldly problems reached the Florida Bible Institute's tree-covered campus. (W.T.) Watson (the college's founder) lost some potential givers to the school."ĭuring his 3½ years in Hillsborough County, Graham ministered to the down-and-out at gospel missions on Franklin and Jefferson streets downtown, in West Tampa, at mobile home parks and in the city stockade. After his tour, "those people never came back to Florida Bible Institute again. "Well, I had never heard of the Gasparilla and I'd never been to Tampa," Graham said in 1976. In January 1937, he transferred to the Florida Bible Institute, which occupied a Spanish-style former country club on the banks of the Hillsborough River in Temple Terrace.Ī day after arriving, Graham was pressed to take a group of visitors on a driving tour of Tampa during the height of Gasparilla, the city's raucous pirate invasion and parade. Though Graham was interested in Bible study, he also liked sports, girls and sunshine. He had spent an unhappy semester at Bob Jones College in Tennessee, which was more boot camp than seminary. ![]() Graham came not as an established preacher but as a skinny, 18-year-old student. And, of course, nothing ever really changed." Most, like Billy Sunday, tended to end their sermons "with a summons to make Tampa more moral. "Tampa attracted, beginning in the early 20th century, a remarkable number of crusaders and evangelists," said University of South Florida historian Gary Mormino. RELATED COVERAGE: Preacher to presidents dead at 99
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