Image: SLADE Paul / Getty Images

By Tony Carnes

Billy Graham and Johnny Cash were the best of friends, mutual confessors, and fishing buddies. Their wives, Ruth Bell and June Carter, were prayer partners. The two men could sit for hours in the same room without saying a word—Billy working on a book and Johnny on his songs. Once in a while, Johnny would interrupt and try out a song on Billy or ask a question about the Bible. At mealtimes, the families would gather to pray, sing, and eat. Usually the subject moved quickly to family and friends, problems and challenges. Johnny always had a list of friends he wanted Billy to call, while Billy would ask Johnny for advice and prayer for his loved ones.
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Billy and Johnny had a superficial connection based on their roots in the hardscrabble rural South. They grew up around Baptist churches and barns. Barbecue, cornbread, and pork and beans would set their mouths watering.

On a deeper level, though, their backgrounds couldn’t have been more different. “Johnny came from the wild side, while Billy had never been through that phase. Billy walked the straight and narrow,” observes [Steve] Turner.

Even after his return to faith in 1967, Johnny’s life was pretty bumpy with what he called his “goof-ups.” And when he slipped back into amphetamine usage, he could get out of control. Johnny also felt let down by some of the ministries that he had latched on to for help. Turner says Johnny felt that “some failed him, some exploited him.” Continue reading →

By Steve Beard

With the passing of the Rev. Billy Graham, there have been innumerable mentions of his relationship with politicians – notably Richard Nixon, Bill Clinton, Ronald Reagan, George W. Bush – as well as other celebrities such as Muhammad Ali, Bono, Johnny Cash, Martin Luther King Jr., and Kathie Lee Gifford.

One of the more interesting pop culture connections was the effect that Graham’s ministry had upon the life of renowned pin-up model Bettie Page (1923-2008). Known for her jet black hair and iconic rockabilly bangs, The Los Angeles Times described her as a “taboo breaker who ushered in the sexual revolution of the 1960s.” At one point, she was arguably the most photographed female on the planet. After a religious conversation in 1959, she was never photographed again and disappeared from the public radar.

Ironically, in some ways Bettie Page is more popular today than she was in the Eisenhower-era. Her image can be found on playing cards, t-shirts, lunch boxes, beach towels, lighters, key chains, and fridge magnets. Of course, there is even a Bettie Page bobblehead.

For nearly forty years, no one knew what happened to her. Journalists Karen Essex and James L. Swanson were the first to track her down and publish her authorized biography, Bettie Page: The Life of a Pin-Up Legend in 1996.

After her notorious modelling career, Page’s disappearance and religious pilgrimage eventually landed her in Los Angeles where she worked at what would eventually become Biola University (known at the time as the Bible Institute of Los Angeles). She also attended the Multnomah School of the Bible in Portland and Moody Bible Institute in Chicago.

While she was living in Chicago in 1962, she was a counselor at a Billy Graham crusade. “I’m more proud of my work with the crusade than of anything else I’ve ever done,” she said. “I get emotional just thinking about it. If ever there was a man of God, it’s Billy Graham.”

Page wanted to be a missionary and applied to various mission boards but was rejected — not because she had been a fetish pin-up, but because she had been divorced. She spent the rest of her life living quietly and happily in obscurity, working as a secretary, a teacher, and then eventually living modestly off of Social Security. She had no idea that the world was intrigued by her whereabouts.

She never changed her name, or her famous hairstyle. When she was asked if she was Bettie Page, she would playfully reply, “Who’s that?”

“I was never trying to keep away from people, I was just through with modeling and went on to other things,” she told Essex and Swanson. “I went right on living my life in the open all the time.”

Bettie Page died on December 11, 2008, at the age of 85.

Steve Beard is the creator of Thunderstruck.

To read more about Bettie Page, click HERE.

Happy Birthday Johnny Cash (1932-2003). One can only imagine the homecoming hoopla when Johnny Cash and Billy Graham are reunited with their sweethearts, June and Ruth, in the everlasting presence of the God they loved. #JohnnyCash #BillyGraham

One of my fave stories from 2018 Olympics from South Korea was the fact that Mr. T called and gave the USA Mens Curling team a pep talk before their gold medal match-up! “USA! USA! We did it! We’re bringing home GOLD FOOLS. #Gold #curling #curlingiscoolfool #usacurling #TeamUSA“

(Photo: Lars Baron | Getty Images)

“Oh my gosh, did we just win the Olympics?” Jessie Diggins asked her teammate Kikkan Randall when they had just become the first Americans to win Olympic gold in cross-country skiing. I love their story! Fittingly, Diggins carried in the Stars and Stripes at the closing ceremony.

The pair are the first Americans to win any medal in cross-country skiing since 1976. Their victory did not sink in until the medal ceremony. “That was when I felt like, ‘OK. We really get to keep these medals. That really happened,’” Diggins said. “I wasn’t ready for how emotional it was going to be seeing our flag raised. It’s literally never happened before. That was pretty cool to think about.

In a video tribute to Graham in 2005, Bono said:
“At a time when religion seems so often to get in the way of God’s work
With its shopping mall sales pitch and its bumper sticker reductionism
I give thanks just for the sanity of Billy Graham
For that clear empathetic voice of his
In that southern accent, part poet, part preacher
A singer of the human spirit, I’d say
Ah, yeah I give thanks for Billy Graham.”

“Over the years,” Bono told journalist Cathleen Falsani (Sojourners), “I met some preachers who did connect with me, for sure, and whose words return to me. I remember hearing about this fellow called Billy Graham. Church people would push him on you like your friends at school would push Elvis Presley records. Actually, they looked kind of similar – both stars from the South who spoke with a twang and had giant crowds come to see them.”

He related to her the story of the getting a surprise phone call in 2002 from someone in Dr. Graham’s office saying that he wanted to give the band a blessing.

“I told them, I said, ‘This is a big deal. This is BILLY GRAHAM!’ And they all said, ‘That’s great. But we’re in the middle of a tour.’ So I rented a plane and flew there right away in case he might forget. I was picked up by his son, Franklin, and driven a couple of hours up to their house. I met briefly with himself and his wife, Ruth. I think I’ve mentioned to you before that the blessings of an older man mean a great deal to me. Particularly this man.

“I gave him a book of Seamus Heaney poetry, and I wrote a poem for him in it,” Bono said.

That poem – handwritten on a piece of 8 ½” x 11”  paper in black felt-tip pen – now resides in the Billy Graham Library’s permanent collection.

Transcript of Bono’s poem to the Grahams:

The journey from Father to friend
is all paternal loves end
It was sung in my teenage ears
In the voice of a preacher
loudly soft on my tears
I would never forget this
Melody line
Or its lyric voice that gave my life
A Rhyme
a meaning that wasn’t there before
a child born in dung and straw
wish the Father’s love and desire to explain
how we might get on with each other again…

To the Rev Billy Graham (that preacher)
Ruth and all the Graham family
From Bono (March 11 2002)
With much love and respect

Confession: I’ve got a bit of a twin obsession with both Greta Gerwig (Lady Bird) and Florence Welch (Florence and the Machine). Found this story and photoshoot in W Magazine to be very interesting.

Alix Browne, W Magazine: But last September, when Welch was working on the follow-up to her 2015 album, How Big, How Blue, How Beautiful, and dreaming about the people she’d most love to collaborate with, she reached out to Gerwig. “That songs can be triumphant and exciting but at the same time you just don’t have it figured out, that things can be joyful and you can be strong but there is an underlying sense that all the time you are questioning—I thought Greta would get it.”

The two reunited in New York, over waffles and pierogi at Veselka, a Ukrainian joint in the East Village, and talked about working on a project together. “One of my very favorite parts of making Lady Bird was working with Jon Brion on the music,” Gerwig says. “Getting to be in another person’s world is really exciting. When you love someone else’s art, and it’s not an art you can make, it’s like a contact high being around them. You have superpowers I can’t possibly understand, but I can also love your superpowers.”

Read full article HERE