1968, Part I

The famous evangelist Billy Graham died today at age 99.

Even though our beliefs are quite different, I didn't have any particular problem with the Rev. Graham.  Even though he became quite a wealthy man, he generally avoided the pitfalls of financial or sexual impropriety that seems to have affected so many evangelical preachers, and while he's widely viewed as a conservative, he managed to become a spiritual advisor to many presidents, Democrat and Republican, including Bill Clinton and Barack Obama.  So RIP, Rev. Graham - you lived as you preached, and not many men or women can say that.

In 1968, I was in a private prep school.  Can you spot me in the yearbook picture?  The names are out of order - I'm the little guy squeezed in between larger upperclassmen, front row, third from the left (for some reason, the names for both rows are listed right-to-left, not left-to-right).  

My personal connection with Billy Graham, and the reason for this post and the seemingly non-sequitur paragraph above, is that Graham's son, the jack-assy Islamophobe Franklin Graham, was a year ahead of me in that private prep school.  He's not in this picture but he appears elsewhere in the same yearbook.  He was kind of a bully and kind of a jackass even back then, but we all knew who his father was and allowed him a lot of latitude - the young man had a lot to live down and rebel against, so a lot of his buffoonery was tolerated.  

We weren't friends - he was a year ahead of me, which means a lot in the eighth and ninth grades, and I wasn't cool enough to embellish his rep - I was a day student at a boarding school, a townie, and he was the resident son of a celebrity.  Now he's a jack-assy Islamophobe, recently denied entry into the UK for his "hate speech" remarks about Islam and gays (I forgot to mention, he's also a homophobe).

  

I don't blame Billy for Franklin's behavior, then or now, but I do blame the self-righteousness inherent in evangelical Christianity, especially among the Christian evangelists.  But that was back in 1968, apparently the year I acquired my musical tastes (to be continued).