This first-ever photo of Billy Graham was taken when he was six months old. He is in the arms of his delighted mother, Morrow Graham.

Billy Graham holds his baby sister, Jean. He recalls that when Jean was four, she would get up on the table and “preach” to family guests.

As a teenager in the early 1930s, Billy Graham was a baseball fan, and his hero was Babe Ruth. But the Babe and baseball dropped to a distant second place when Graham attended a revival in 1934 and found a new hero in Jesus Christ.

Rev. Dr. John Minder (pictured left), Dean of Florida Bible Institute, and Pastor Cecil Underwood (pictured right), who baptized Billy Graham, were both influential in his calling to preach the Gospel.

In 1940, Billy Graham enrolled at Wheaton College, where he met Ruth McCue Bell, a fellow student and daughter of medical missionaries.

Ruth Bell admires her new engagement ring. Billy thought Ruth was the woman God had long been preparing to stand beside him. Her intelligence, practicality, wit, determination, and wholehearted love for Jesus Christ attracted him to her.

Ruth and Billy Graham, now husband and wife, are brimming with happiness on their wedding day, August 13, 1943.

Billy served as pastor of The Village Baptist Church in Western Springs, Illinois, 20 miles outside of Chicago. On his first Sunday, the entire congregation of 35 souls gathered in the church to welcome him.

At 27, Billy Graham resigned his pulpit to go on the road for Youth for Christ. Little did he know that he would soon be preaching in front of hundreds of thousands of people of all ages.

In 1945, the Grahams moved to Montreat, North Carolina, and started a family there. The secluded mountain home fulfilled a need for privacy as Billy Graham’s ministry expanded and became well-known. Here, Ruth and Billy Graham enjoy a picnic together in the Carolina Hills.

Billy and Ruth Graham spent six months preaching in war-torn England with Cliff and Billie Barrows.

At 29, Billy Graham became president of Northwestern Schools in Minneapolis, Minnesota. He and T.W. Wilson worked closely together as the school’s top administrators.

The 1949 Los Angeles Crusade was Billy Graham’s most ambitious effort to date. Advance press coverage was minimal, but that changed as the weeks passed and the extraordinary conversion stories captured the public’s attention.

After visiting President Harry Truman in 1950, Billy and his aides—Jerry Beavan, Cliff Barrows, and Grady Wilson—knelt on the White House lawn to pray.

Billy and Ruth Graham’s family grew with the arrival of Ruth in 1950, to the delight of Gigi, 5, and Anne, 2.

During the Korean War, Billy spoke to service members and visited wounded troops in military hospitals in addition to preaching in churches, towns, and villages across the country.

The 1953 Chattanooga Crusade was the first to be fully integrated from the planning stages.

Anne, Ruth, Bunny (Ruth), Gigi, Franklin, and Billy Graham enjoyed a fall day together.

The crowd listened raptly as Billy Graham preached in Trafalgar Square during the London Crusade.

Time magazine put Billy Graham on its October 25, 1954, cover.

Ruth, infant Ned, Franklin, Bunny (Ruth), Gigi, Anne, and Billy Graham in 1956.

In 1957, Billy Graham met with President Eisenhower about working to end segregation in the South.

On July 10, 1957, a lunch-hour meeting occurred amid the concrete canyons of lower Manhattan. Secretaries, clerks, and financiers stood shoulder to shoulder in front of New York’s Federal Hall to hear a Gospel message.

Billy Graham spoke with youth in Harlem during the 1957 New York City Crusade.

Billy Graham learned by instinct and experience that he needed the media to reach the people, so he regularly made time for interviews and guest appearances.

Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and Billy Graham are pictured in Chicago in 1962. They discussed racial equality at key moments in the civil rights struggle.

All seven members of the Graham family smile for this 1962 portrait.

After he prayed with Billy Graham at the 1963 National Prayer Breakfast, President John F. Kennedy listened attentively to his sermon.

Billy Graham paid a December 1966 Christmas visit to American troops in Vietnam.

President Lyndon Johnson often sought spiritual counseling from Billy Graham.

Ruth and Billy Graham relax at home in 1967. The German inscription on the fireplace mantel is the title of the famous hymn, “A Mighty Fortress is Our God.”

Billy Graham visited Yugoslavia in 1967—his first preaching venture in a communist country. The Crusade took place in pouring rain at a soccer field owned by Roman Catholics because the government had barred the meetings from the public stadium.

Billy Graham prayed at the Nixon Inauguration in 1969.

In 1972, while visiting a deli in Cleveland, Ohio, Billy Graham called the owner’s mother—an admirer of his—to say “hello.”

Billy Graham appeared on The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson in 1972.

In March 1973, Billy Graham preached to 60,000 people at Johannesburg’s Wanderers Stadium. It was the largest multiracial gathering ever held in South Africa at that time.

In June 1973, a record 1.1 million people made Yoido Plaza in Seoul, South Korea, Billy Graham’s largest meeting ever held anywhere in the world.

Billy Graham visited President Ford at the White House in the mid-1970s.

Billy Graham shared scriptural insights with a group of young people at the 1975 Eurofest in Brussels, Belgium.

Billy Graham visited Uhuru Park, in Nairobi, Kenya, in 1976.

Billy and Ruth Graham walked through the rubble in San Martin Jilotepeque, a Guatemalan village they aided with jet loads of food and medicine after a devastating 1976 earthquake.

When tidal wave survivors from various villages greeted Billy Graham in Andhra Pradesh, India, he was moved to tears—and to take action through the BGEA World Emergency Fund.

At the time of the 1978 Metro Toronto Crusade, only 7 percent of Toronto’s population attended church, but thousands packed into Toronto’s indoor arena at Maple Leaf Gardens. The meetings were larger than any previous events held there.

Billy Graham received a visit at his Montreat home from boxing great Muhammad Ali.

Following a 1979 White House visit with Jimmy and Rosalyn Carter, Billy and Ruth Graham received this memento.

Billy Graham spoke and answered questions from students at the John F. Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University, in 1982.

In a ceremony at Buckingham Palace, His Royal Highness The Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh presented Billy Graham with the Templeton Foundation Prize for Progress in Religion.

A baker’s dozen of grandchildren gathered in 1982 with Billy and Ruth Graham on one of their many family outings.

Billy and Ruth Graham at their Montreat home in 1982.

Billy Graham was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom by President Ronald Reagan in 1983.

Billy Graham chatted with young people in an Amsterdam park in 1983.

Johnny Cash wrote about his good friend Billy Graham, “I have never known a greater man among men. Yet his simplicity, his common touch, his childlike compassion for his fellow man is the source of his greatness.”

A crowd estimated at 150,000 greeted Billy Graham in the public square outside the Orthodox cathedral in Timisoara, Romania, in 1985.

During a visit to the Great Wall of China, a group of school children gathered and sang patriotic songs. In return, Billy Graham and others traveling with him sat down and sang Sunday school songs.

Billy Graham with Queen Elizabeth of Great Britain in 1989.

Billy Graham and President George H. W. Bush enjoyed fishing together off the coast of Maine.

In 1992, Billy Graham met with North Korean President Kim Il Sung and became the first foreign-born evangelist to preach in the communist nation of North Korea.

In 1993, the Grahams celebrated Billy and Ruth’s 50th wedding anniversary at home in Montreat.

Billy Graham met with Pope John Paul II in 1993.

On April 23, 1995 Billy Graham spoke at the Memorial Service for victims of the Oklahoma City bombing.

Billy and Ruth Graham were awarded the Congressional Gold Medal in the United States Capitol by Senator Strom Thurmond and Congressman Newt Gingrich.

Billy Graham gave the invocation at the second inauguration of President William Jefferson Clinton in 1997.

From the pulpit of Washington National Cathedral three days after the terrorist attacks of 9/11, Billy Graham spoke comforting words to a stunned nation.

Billy Graham and President George W. Bush join other clergy in prayer at the Washington National Cathedral for the 9/11 National Day of Prayer and Remembrance Service.

President and Mrs. Bush host the Graham family at the White House during
the evangelist’s 83rd birthday in 2001.

At an embassy ceremony in Washington, D.C., in December 2001, Christopher Meyer awarded Billy Graham honorary knighthood in the British Empire.

Almost a half-century after he first spoke in New York City, Billy Graham returned in June 2005 to preach the unchanging message of Jesus Christ.

Former Presidents Bush, Clinton and Carter joined Billy Graham to help dedicate the new Billy Graham Library on May 31, 2007.

On June 17, 2007, Billy Graham spoke at the funeral service for Ruth Bell Graham, his wife of nearly 64 years.

On April 25, 2010, President Barack Obama met with Billy Graham and Franklin Graham in Billy Graham’s Montreat, North Carolina, home.

On his 95th birthday, Billy Graham again presented the Gospel to millions of people across North America through My Hope With Billy Graham, involving more than 25,000 churches and thousands of homes and other venues.

Donald Trump met Billy Graham at his 95th birthday celebration on November 7, 2013.