Ruth Graham: 1920 - 2007

'Called by God as a team'

Aspiring missionary met Billy Graham when they were students at Wheaton College; she shelved her dream to become the evangelist's helpmate and their family's ancho

By Jocelyn Y. Stewart | Tribune Newspapers: Los Angeles Times

June 15, 2007

Ruth Graham, the wife of evangelist Billy Graham, who supported her famous husband as he ministered to millions but whose approach to life dispelled the notion of the demure preacher's wife, died Thursday afternoon. She was 87.

Mrs. Graham died at her home in Montreat, N.C., surrounded by her husband and their five children, said a statement released by Larry Ross, Billy Graham's spokesman. She had been battling pneumonia and degenerative osteoarthritis.

"Ruth was my life partner, and we were called by God as a team," Billy Graham said in a statement. "No one else could have borne the load that she carried. She was a vital and integral part of our ministry, and my work through the years would have been impossible without her encouragement and support."

Or, as the couple's daughter Anne Graham Lotz said, "Without Ruth Graham, there wouldn't have been a Billy Graham."

It was Ruth Graham who dissuaded her husband from launching a campaign for president: She told him she would leave him if he quit his ministry. The American public would not accept a divorced man as president, she warned.

And it was she who took the lead in raising their children, supervised the construction of their mountain homestead -- Little Piney Cove in Montreat -- and otherwise anchored the family.

"I'm assuming home responsibilities," Graham explained to her husband early in their marriage, "to free you for your more important ones."

Long before Billy Graham's legendary 1957 crusade in New York -- the beginning of a journey that would take him to 185 countries and territories -- Mrs. Graham understood that his calling would eclipse her own. The woman who once had dreams of becoming a missionary in Tibet surrendered them for her husband.

"If I marry Bill, I marry him with my eyes open," she wrote in her journal. "He will be increasingly burdened for lost souls and increasingly active in the Lord's work. ... I will slip into the background. ... In short, be a lost life. Lost in Bill's."

The couple married on Aug. 13, 1943. In addition to her husband and Lotz, Mrs. Graham's survivors include her other children: Virginia Leftwich, Ruth Bell, William Franklin III and Nelson Edman.

For Mrs. Graham, life in the background did not mean a life of obscurity. When country music star June Carter Cash sent her a mink coat as a gift, she explained that as the wife of an evangelist, she could not wear a mink in public.

"She anguished over the importance of providing the children with a normal environment," according to "Ruth, A Portrait: The Story of Ruth Bell Graham" by Patricia Cornwell. "She fought the resentment that boiled to the surface when tourists invaded their property and their privacy, and she also knew that any unkindness on her part would not be forgiven."

Mrs. Graham called the fame an "odd kind of cross to bear."

She was born Ruth McCue Bell in Jiangsu province, China, on June 10, 1920. From the start, Ruth, the second of five children, seemed destined for a life of Christian service. Though she witnessed and shared the hardships of her missionary parents, Nelson and Virginia Bell, she concerned herself with spiritual matters and was drawn to the notion of helping others.

She spent three years of high school in Pyongyang, in what is now North Korea, then graduated from a school in Montreat while her parents were on a furlough from their mission work. When she was 17, she enrolled at Wheaton College in suburban Chicago, where Billy Graham was a student. She had vowed never to marry, but after one date with her future husband, she prayed and told God it would be an honor to serve him as Billy Graham's wife.

For months at a time, he was away from home preaching. His absence meant Mrs. Graham was mother and father to their children, a role that required much prayer.

When as a teenager her oldest son, Franklin, refused to stop smoking, Mrs. Graham made him chain-smoke a pack of cigarettes, according to a Washington Post story last year. When he wouldn't stop pinching his sisters in the car during a trip to a fast-food restaurant, she locked him in the trunk.

Mrs. Graham was a prolific writer, crafting poetry and writing in her journals. Over the years, she published at least 14 books and collections of poems. Later in life, she suffered from degenerative arthritis and was in constant pain. Poetry gave voice to her pain and prayers.