BY KAREN BOSSICK

I was just about to sink my teeth into my Bonsai Burger when Billy Graham noticed a woman walking by our table on the patio at the Red Robin.

“Look at that poor woman,” he said, eyeing the woman who was crippled with arthritis. “She can hardly walk.”

He excused himself and went over to the woman, sharing a few gentle words with her.

I recalled that moment with Graham this week after learning of his death at the age of 99.

A couple weeks before he had sat down with me, he had had tea with the queen of England. Now he was out in public as dozens of Boise diners stole furtive glances.

It wasn’t supposed to be that way.

Three days before the 63-year-old evangelist was to arrive in Boise for his 1982 crusade, his press secretary cancelled a press conference and other interviews on doctors’ orders.

Doctors were insisting for the umpteenth time that Graham pare his busy schedule, one that might have worn out men a third his age.

But, when one of Graham’s team members introduced me to the evangelist at a Greater Boise Chamber of Commerce luncheon before the crusade, Billy quickly popped the question:

“Would you like to interview me?”

“You said it!” I replied, trying to hush his objecting press secretary while scheduling an interview before Graham could change his mind.

Finally, the press secretary conceded,” Well, maybe we could let you talk with Mr. Graham a few minutes before one of the meetings this week.”

That went out the window first thing next morning.

“Karen,” the press secretary dropped by The Idaho Statesman, Mr. Graham asked me to tell you that he would like to do an interview with you if you can fit it into your schedule.”

“Forget schedules!” I told him immediately. “I’m there!”

We talked of many things. Graham talked of his wife Ruth, the daughter of Presbyterian medical missionaries, and how she had given up her dream of evangelizing Tibet to marry him. He talked of how she often said that she modeled her child rearing practices after those in a dog-training manual, keeping the commands simple and minimal, rewarding obedience with praise.

He talked about how he preferred drag racing his father’s Plymouth with the town moonshiner as a teenager before God yanked him by the collar to embark on what then was 42 years of preaching.

And he told how his doctors advised him that so many years of craning his neck over a speaker’s podium could cause neck strain, back problems and arthritis.

He talked of how he turned down frequent requests for him to wear bulletproof vests, despite hundreds of threats against his life.

Then he proceeded to talk about how even psychiatrists were beginning to recognize there’s a phenomenon of evil they can’t explain.

He talked about how he’d put himself on a salary commensurate with that of a big-city minister in 1952 to keep from financial controversies. And how he’d received no honorarium or love gift from a crusade, how he’d given away the royalties from his many books.

Troubled by the contrast between his standard of living and that of people in countries like Bangladesh, he and his wife had cut back, eating soup and crackers at night. 

When singer June Carter Cash gave his wife a fur coat, he noted, Ruth wrote her and asked if she might sell it and give the money to her son who was working with orphans in Thailand at the time.

“I have to live in keeping with the society in which I live, but I don’t have to live in affluence. There’s a happy medium,” said Graham, who even eschewed private planes, preferring to fly commercially.

It was more than 30 years before the #MeToo movement. But Graham had long had a policy of transparency. He left the door of his hotel room open when I showed up, one of his aides stationed close by. And, as our conversation wore on, we retreated to the hotel coffee shop.

He asked nearly as many questions of me, as I did of him, wondering how to pronounce the new Idaho Episcopal bishop-elect. He said he regretted not being able to accept an invitation to the man’s consecration because of a pre-crusade meeting.

A couple days later, I got another invite. Billy was going to tube the Boise River that afternoon. Would you like to join him?

It was a startling fulfillment of a comment I’d made earlier when my editor asked me if I had tried getting permission to accompany the evangelist on one of his daily three-mile fast-walk jogs.

“Oh, I’d rather go tubing down the river with him,” I replied.

I quickly arranged for two Statesman photographers to accompany me. One positioned himself on the banks of the river and the other took out a rowboat.  Trying to be discreet, the one in the rowboat didn’t realize until his boat backed into Graham’s tube that he had been shooting pictures of the wrong person.

Graham showed up dressed in navy blue trunks, house slippers and a T-shirt given to him by the Boise Christian Peace Officers that had his name and the words “Commodore Boise, Idaho, River Patrol” on it. Then the 6-foot-2, 175-pound man who had led thousands of people to Christ led a party of six tubing down the river.

Graham relaxed in a canvas-lined tube, dogpaddling to keep in the center of the flow, as his associate evangelists T.W. Wilson and Cliff Barrows, Crusade Chairman Carl R. Johnson, Boise Police Officer Dick Baranco and I tried to keep up.

When Billy asked my photographer how to traverse the rapids, the photographer replied, “Just pray,” momentarily forgetting he was talking to one of America’s foremost pray-ers.

“I got way ahead of the Christian Peace Officers and I didn’t know which way to go,” Graham would tell the crowd at the crusade later that night.

Graham confessed that he decided the moment he saw tubers on the river that he wanted to try it.

 “I wish Ruth could be here,” he added, of his wife who was recovering from a wrist injury she incurred while testing a tree swing for her grandchildren.

Graham and his wife had rafted the Snake River in eastern Idaho 30 years earlier. But this was the first time he had he’d ever gone down a river in an innertube. And sitting in water that was, quite frankly, butt cold was not lost on him.

“It reminds me of a spring that runs past our home in the Blue Ridge Mountains. It’s just as cold,” he said. “But this is very relaxing. I’d recommend it to anyone.”

Graham drew overflow crowds of 14,000 to the Boise State University Pavilion each of the eight nights,  sharing his platform one night with his son Franklin who had just returned from Beirut where he had narrowly missed being injured by shrapnel while with a minister who was worried about his church being bombed.

“You’ve come tonight to Jesus Christ, not me,” Graham said. “I’m no savior. I have no magic. I believe every one of you are here tonight because God wanted you here to accept him as Lord.”

Not everyone was able to get into the Pavilion. Many listened via speakers outside. A Sacramento, Calif., woman sat on the sidewalk outside and cried after learning she could not get in. Several busloads of people were turned away.

“We thought we’d be very fortunate if the building was two-thirds full,” Graham said, humbly. “If we had this kind of turnout in New York, we’d be drawing a million people. I think we could have gone outside in the stadium and filled it.”

In between nightly crusades, Graham placed telephone calls to an ill woman, a mother whose children had been killed in an automobile accident and others he had been told about or read about in the newspaper.

It wasn’t a front. He genuinely cared.

A few weeks after the crusade, I got a two-page typewritten single-spaced letter from Graham. It included an invitation: Would I consider being part of his press team?

As much as I loved life in Idaho and my job at The Statesman, it was tempting.

A couple months later, on a crisp bluebird day in Boise, my husband and I boarded a plane bounded for Minneapolis where Graham’s headquarters was located.

Stepping off the plane, my husband was confronted with the reason so many Minnesotans have relocated to Sun Valley. The wind was howling. The cold was damp and penetrating. Already, big snow piles dotted the city, and we were told they would still be there come July.

“I’m not about to move to Minneapolis!” my husband summarily declared.

So we didn’t. But I’ve never forgotten Graham and the example he set with the woman plagued with crippling arthritis. Every once in awhile--but not nearly enough--I try to follow his example, reaching out to someone I see who’s having a tough go of it.

Graham told his audience at the crusade on the final night that he would never forget Idaho and the Treasure Valley.

“I’ve never been any place where they’ve even applauded the man who was going to take the offering,” he said. “When I refer to Boise from now on, I’m going to refer to it as the applauding capital of the world.”