Early Years
The fourth of five children of evangelist Billy Graham and wife Ruth Bell Graham, Franklin Graham was born and raised in the Appalachian Mountains near Asheville, North Carolina.
As a teenager, Graham attended The Stony Brook School, a Christian private school on Long Island, New York, and finished high school in North Carolina.
In 1971, he attended LeTourneau College in Longview, Texas, and was expelled from the school for keeping a female classmate out past curfew. Also while at LeTourneau, Franklin was the mastermind of an elaborate shower flood. He and other students in the Tyler Hall West dorm took bookcase shelves and blocked off the opening to the community shower on the top floor. They then proceeded to plug the drains and fill the shower with water several feet deep. After a few days however, the shelves broke and flooded the entire building. To this day, the top floor of that dorm is known as "Flooders".
He graduated from Montreat-Anderson College (now Montreat College) with an A.S. and Appalachian State University with a B.A.
In 1974, 22-year-old Graham became a Christian in a hotel room while on a trip to Jerusalem. He married Jane Austin Cunningham, of Smithfield, North Carolina, later that year. They have four children: William Franklin Graham IV (Will), born in 1975, Roy Austin Graham (1977), Edward Bell Graham (1979) and Jane Austin Graham Lynch (Cissie) (1986). Lynch is now married to the NFL's Corey Lynch, safety for the Tampa Bay Buccaneers. Graham and his wife have five grandchildren.
As a young man, Graham was actively mentored by two senior members of the Billy Graham Team; Roy Gustafson and John Wesley White. These men worked alongside Billy Graham and had a desire to positively affect the life and ministry of the eldest son of their longtime friend and colleague. Franklin began conducting events for the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association in 1989 and became the CEO in 2000 and its president in 2002. Each year, he conducts at least five Graham Festivals around the world as an evangelist associated with the BGEA. Since 1989, he has preached to more than three million people in 126 evangelistic events.
He went to Hong Kong from November 29, 2007, to December 2, 2007, to host the Hong Kong Franklin Graham Festival, the first major evangelistic rally in Hong Kong since its 1997 transfer of sovereignty, which drew more than 420,000 attendees.
Graham spoke at the 1999 Columbine High School memorial, and he also gave the opening prayer at the 2001 inauguration of George W. Bush.
Read more about this topic: Franklin Graham
Famous quotes containing the words early and/or years:
“Names on a list, whose faces I do not recall
But they are gone to early death, who late in school
Distinguished the belt feed lever from the belt holding pawl.”
—Richard Eberhart (b. 1904)
“In 1845 he built himself a small framed house on the shores of Walden Pond, and lived there two years alone, a life of labor and study. This action was quite native and fit for him. No one who knew him would tax him with affectation. He was more unlike his neighbors in his thought than in his action. As soon as he had exhausted himself that advantages of his solitude, he abandoned it.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)