1. Billy Graham’s first formal sermon lasted eight minutes and included four separate sermons, the only ones he knew.
2. As a senior in high school a young Billy Graham found himself in a dark classroom with a girl who begged Graham to have sex. Instead of rounding the bases, Graham made like Joseph and ran away.
3. In 1964 Billy Graham’s name came up as a potential presidential candidate. His wife, Ruth, put a stop to any consideration of forsaking his call to evangelism: “If you run, I don’t think the country will elect a divorced president.”
4. Though close with many U.S. presidents, Billy Graham actually went skinny-dipping with Lyndon Johnson.
5. In 1937 Billy Graham fell in love with Emily Cavanaugh and proposed to her in the summer. She had to think about it and eventually said yes in the fall. But by 1938 she was having second thoughts and in the spring she dumped Billy Graham for one of his classmates, Charles Massey.
6. Billy Graham spoke at the TED technology conference in 1998.
7. Billy Graham served as a pastor to Western Springs Baptist Church in Western Springs, Ill., for a year in the 1940s. It was the only time he would officially pastor a local congregation. During his time there he changed the name to the Village Church since there were few Baptists in the area.
8. In 1979 the Mexican Navy detained Billy Graham for trespassing. At the time he was wearing nothing but a borrowed swimsuit belonging to George H.W. Bush.
9. In 1948 Billy Graham became the youngest college president in history as president of Northwestern College in Minneapolis.
10. As early as the 1950s Billy Graham held integrated crusades, at one point tearing down ropes that separated white sections from black sections, causing the head usher to resign in protest.
11. Billy Graham was knighted in 2001.
12. Martin Luther King Jr. insisted Billy Graham call him “Mike.”
13. As a child, Billy Graham went to church only “grudgingly” and the minister at his family’s church reminded him of a mortician.
14. The first time Billy Graham shared his testimony was with a group of about ten prisoners. The experience “reinforced my conviction that I would never become a preacher.”
15. Billy Graham attended Bob Jones University for one semester and upon leaving Bob Jones Sr. predicted nothing but failure for Graham.
16. At Florida Bible Institute Billy Graham would paddle out to a small island in the Hillsborough River to practice his sermons and preach to the alligators and birds, like a St. Francis of Florida. If the animals wouldn’t stop to listen, he’d preach to a captive audience of cypress tree stumps.
17. Throughout his life Billy Graham participated in nine presidential inaugurations and in 2009 passed on the hat he often wore to those inaugurations to Rick Warren who offered a prayer at Barack Obama’s inauguration.
18. On his wedding night Billy Graham had trouble falling asleep in the bed, so he crawled out of bed and fell asleep on the floor. In the morning Ruth woke up to find her new husband gone—it took her a few minutes to find him curled up on the floor, sound asleep.
19. During World War II the U.S. Army rejected Billy Graham for the chaplaincy program because he was three pounds underweight.
20. In the 1970s Billy Graham attended various rock festivals, protests and love-ins in order to better understand and connect with young people. To maintain anonymity, he attended “incognito” (meaning he donned a hat, sun glasses, and a big sweater).
21. Billy Graham left on a trip the day his first child was born, dismissing Ruth’s insistence that the baby would come soon and he should stay home. Billy predicted it would take another two or three weeks. Virginia “Gigi” Graham was born that evening.
22. He has always tried to minimize his own prominence, to the point that he strongly resisted naming his organization after himself in 1950 and when the Billy Graham Library opened in 2007 he declared there was “too much Billy Graham.”
23. In 1993 Billy Graham participated in an AOL chat session, his first foray into the world of online evangelism.
24. Billy Graham once loaned money to then-president Richard Nixon. When the offering plate was passed at a 1970 crusade in Knoxville, Tenn., the president didn’t have any money on him, but Graham discreetly slipped the president a few bills. A few months later Nixon repaid the loan.
25. Billy Graham is one of the few Americans who can get mail that’s simply addressed, “Billy Graham, America.”

But instead of rounding the bases, Graham made like Joseph and ran away.

“It never really seemed right to me to have sex with anybody but the woman I would marry,” he explained, though he also admitted, “My hormones were as active as any other healthy young male’s, and I had fantasized often enough about such a moment.”

“What was slowly dawning on me during those weeks was the miserable realization that I did not know Jesus Christ for myself. I could not depend on my parents’ faith. Christian influence in the home could have a lasting impact on a child’s life, but faith could not be passed on as an inheritance, like the family silver. It had to be exercised by each individual.

“I could not depend on my church membership either. Saying ‘I believe’ in the Apostles’ Creed every Sunday, or taking the bread and wine of Communion, could so easily become nothing but rote and ritual, without power in themselves to make me any different.

“Nor could I depend on my own resolution to do better. I constantly failed in my efforts at self-improvement. Nobody needed to tell me that.

“As a teenager, what I needed to know for certain was that I was right with God. I could not help but admit to myself that I was purposeless and empty-hearted. … And then it happened.” (Just as I Am)

During the last verse of the last song, a 16-year-old Billy Graham came forward at the call of a finger-wagging evangelist to accept Jesus Christ.

“I didn’t have any tears, I didn’t have any emotion, I didn’t hear any thunder, there was no lightning,” Graham told TIME magazine. “But right there, I made my decision for Christ. It was as simple as that, and as conclusive.”

“I was almost in a state of shock,” Graham wrote in his autobiography. “Not only was I losing a friend through a vicious and senseless killing, but America was losing a social leader and a prophet, and I felt his death would be one of the greatest tragedies in our history.”

Graham prayed there on the golf course with the journalists for King’s family and the healing of racial divisions. He tried to cancel his schedule and return for the funeral, but it wasn’t possible.

Billy Graham with Martin Luther King Sr. at the grave of Martin Luther King Jr.

“Our concern since God laid the matter on our hearts some year ago has been not so much to talk as to act, to set an example which might open new paths and stir the consciences of many. There is no segregation in our Crusades, even in the South.”

At a conference in Rio de Janeiro in 1960, Martin Luther King Jr. commented:

“Had it not been for the ministry of my good friend, Dr. Billy Graham, my own work in the civil rights movement would not have been successful as it has been.”

“She was so cute, with her beautiful blond hair, that they stopped to pay attention,” Graham wrote in his autobiography. “I don’t know why Daddy put her up to it, but Jean was serious about her message and told the guests that they needed to come to Jesus. I guess you could say she was the first preacher in our family.”

Graham took an early and strong stand for civil rights, insisting on holding integrated crusades in Jackson, Miss., as early as 1952 (two years before the landmark Brown v. Board of Education case). During a 1953 crusade in Chatanooga, Tenn., Billy Graham himself tore down ropes diving white and black sections.

“My action caused the head usher to resign in anger on the spot,” Billy said in his 1997 autobiography Just As I Am, “But I did not back down.”

In 1950 he explained his integrated Washington, D.C., crusade to reporters by saying, “In church there is no color line,” (in seeming contradiction to his own ‘most segregated hour in American’ line, though it’s perhaps explained as the difference between the way things are and the way they should be).

Billy Graham and Martin Luther King Jr. were allies and good friends. King even asked Billy to call him “Mike.” King advised Graham and his team on racial issues and Graham’s team gave King’s team advice on organization and fund raising.

In a 1957 letter to Billy Graham, King thanked the evangelist for his stand against segregation and for the opportunity to pray at the New York Crusade and meet with Graham’s team:

“Although we have a long, long way to go in solving the internal problem of race facing our nation, I still have faith in the future. We are gradually emerging from the bleak and desolate midnight of injustice into the bright and glittering daybreak of freedom and justice. This remains true because God is forever at work in his universe. I am convinced now more than ever before that God lives. They that stand against him stand in a tragic and an already declared minority; they that stand with him stand in the glow of the world’s bright tomorrows.”

The two pillars of twentieth century Christianity had an understanding. Graham’s domain was the stadium, challenging people with the message of the gospel, and King’s was the streets, demanding the social justice the gospel exemplified. “You stay in the stadiums, Billy, because you will have far more impact on the white establishment there than you would if you marched in the streets,” wrote King.

But that understanding didn’t mean the two didn’t clash over methods:

“Graham had second thoughts about the very idea of civil disobedience: ‘No matter what the law may be—it may be an unjust law—I believe we have a Christian responsibility to obey it. Otherwise you have anarchy.’ To this, King cited Saint Augustine, that ‘an unjust law is no law at all.’” (Preacher and the Presidents: Billy Graham and the White House)

The divide would become even more pronounced as King began to speak out against the Vietnam war and make a case for poverty that many saw as leading to Communism. Some even suggest that Graham completely opposed King along with his methods, such as the book Billy Graham and the Beloved Community by Michael G. Long.

This apparent clash between Graham and King is easier to understand if King is seen in his proper historical context as a radical and not the whitewashed national hero we remember today. Much like Jesus, King is often remembered as kinder, gentler and less controversial than he really was.

Years later Billy Graham would confide in civil rights leaders that he wondered what would have happened if he took to the streets with Martin Luther King Jr. After the violence of Bloody Sunday in Selma, Ala., in 1965 Billy Graham seemed almost ready to do just that: “It’s true I haven’t been to jail yet. I underscore the word yet. Maybe I haven’t done all I could or should do.”

Graham didn’t end up taking to the streets, but he did cancel a planned European tour to hold crusades across Alabama in an attempt to heal the racial divide and quell the violence. The FBI warned him of at least one bomb threat (which was nothing compared to the constant threats to King).

Billy Graham and Martin Luther King Jr. were allies, if unsteady allies at times, but Graham constantly preached the eternal view on the civil rights issue:

“Jesus was not a white man; he was not a black man. He came from that part of the world that touches Africa and Asia and Europe. Christianity is not a white man’s religion and don’t let anybody ever tell you that it’s white or black. Christ belongs to all people; He belongs to the whole world!”

“My knees shook, my hands perspired,” Billy Graham wrote in his 1997 autobiography Just As I Am, “and I vowed to myself that I would never be a public speaker!”

His principal, Mrs. Boylston, thought otherwise and told Billy’s mother that he had a gift for public speaking.

So with shaky knees Billy Graham shared his testimony for the first time with a crowd of about ten bored prisoners.

“It was the first public utterance I had given of my faith,” Billy wrote in his autobiography, “But it reinforced my conviction that I would never become a preacher.”