In 1963, Billy Graham came to Los Angeles for a three-week “crusade” (preaching series) in the Memorial Coliseum. I was ten years old at the time, and was invited by my family to go with them to attend one of his sermons. I believe that it was on a Sunday afternoon.

I don’t remember who from our family went that day, but I do remember riding in the front seat of the car (I had a tendency to carsickness, and being in the front seat helped) and listening to the conversation of the family in the back seat. One of them mentioned that the idea of going to hear Billy Graham had been discussed with Ezra Ellis, who was our pastor at First Friends Church at that time. I can’t remember who, but someone said that it was a surprise to hear Ezra say that it was okay to go.

That intrigued me – why should they expect that our pastor wouldn’t want us to go hear another preacher? So I asked them “Why would he not want us to go hear Billy Graham?” And I didn’t get an answer.

We went into the Coliseum. It is a huge place. I remember that the seating capacity for Dodger baseball games there was 93,000. But the crowd we were part of that day was one of the largest ever assembled in the Coliseum. The LA Times reports that the attendance on the last day of the crusade was 135,254. I remember that while the people were pouring in, and there was no seating for them, Billy Graham came up to the microphone and said, “It’s not my time to preach yet, but they’ve asked me to speak now to ask you to scoot together closer on your benches, and make more room for people to sit.” Billy asked, and we scooted.

They had put thousands of chairs on the grass in the middle of the Coliseum to accommodate the crowds. We sat high up on what would have been the first-base side of the stadium if there had been a baseball diamond in place (there wasn’t). I sat next to Grandma, and I think that my parents were on the other side of her. I can’t remember if Granddaddy was there or not – he was pretty sick by that time, and probably would not have been able to come. (I’m talking about my grandfather, Harold Votaw, who passed away later that year.)

The preaching compelled me. I don’t remember anything else. I had never heard a message like this. I had never heard that I was a sinner, and that Jesus died for my sins. I had never heard that I needed to accept Jesus Christ as my personal Savior, so that I could have my sins forgiven and spend eternity with God. And I wanted that.

The normal process at Billy Graham’s crusades was that people who wanted to commit to Christ would walk up towards the pulpit to indicate their desire. There they would be met by a counselor (local volunteers who had been through training) and prayed with. But this crowd was so large that there was no space for people to gather – up front or anywhere else. So, at the end of the message, when he gave the invitation, Billy said that if we wanted to accept Christ, we should simply stand right where we were, and someone would come to us.

I felt that I had to stand. But I was nervous and afraid, so I grabbed Grandma’s hand, and asked her to stand with me. And she did! I don’t remember talking with a counselor. There were a lot of people standing, and it must have been difficult to deal with everyone. Some printed materials were handed to me, and I filled out a form with my name and address.

And that’s pretty much the end of the story. I remember that after a few days I received some more printed materials in the mail. But there was no one to talk to me about what had happened, because we didn’t talk about those things in our church. And so as time went on I think I just didn’t think about it much. But something had changed – now I knew where I stood with God. I knew I needed Him.

Looking back, I see this event as the beginning of my relationship with God. Before, God was a topic, something to learn about. We learned Bible stories as children, and from them the moral lessons that they taught, but we were never told that we could have a personal relationship with God.

And I see God’s hand in this. The same hand that moved my parents to invite a 10-year-old boy to hear Billy Graham moved them (two years later) to offer me a chance – which was highly unusual! – to go to Quaker Meadow camp. And there I formed a more lasting relationship with God. But that’s another story.