On the 99. The Modesto Manifesto

The year was 1948.  The preacher was Billy Graham.  Already stirring up enthusiasm for his prayer meetings, this evangelist was on the verge of becoming an internationally known religious figure.  Something happened that year in Modesto, California that would set the foundation for his ministry

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Site of where the Billy Graham Crusade in Modesto, California was held in 1948.  Photo from The Newvine Personal Collection

Billy Graham had a connection to the Central Valley.  His right-hand man, Cliff Barrows was from Ceres, Stanislaus County.  With the Graham organization staging Crusades in several US cities, it made sense that a similar event take place Central California.  Thanks to the community ties of Cliff Barrows, a decision was made to run a Crusade event in Modesto.

I wrote about that 1948 Modesto Crusade in my book 9 from 99-Experiences in California’s Central Valley. 

For that book, I spoke with Cliff Barrows by phone from the Graham ministry offices in North Carolina.  He told me Modesto was more than just a tune-up for the upcoming Los Angeles Crusade.  It was a time when Billy Graham and his closest aides met to write what would become the guiding principles for the organization.

“The book Elmer Gantry was popular at the time, so there was a lot of skepticism over traveling preachers,” Cliff Barrows told me in 2010.  “Billy asked the three of us to think about the pitfalls that other evangelists had encountered.”  

Over several days at the Rock Motel on Highway 99 north of McHenry Avenue in Modesto, the four discussed barriers to the success of any ministry.  Their goal was to create a set of guidelines for the ministry to adopt in an effort to help them overcome the barriers.

While the Modesto Crusade was underway nightly, Graham and Barrows, along with associates George Beverly Shea and Grady Wilson met during the day to work out the ministry’s new rules of conduct.  

They produced a document that featured four points, and how the new organization would conduct itself in these four areas.  Billy Graham credits Cliff Barrows with naming the document the Modesto Manifesto.  

The Manifesto’s four pillars are as follows:

1. Integrity.  Honesty to one another and to the people served.
2. Accountability.  To each other, to themselves, to the organization, and to its’ finances.
3. Purity.  In life and in heart.  In relationships with members of the opposite sex.  This led to the promise that no member of the Graham organization would be in a room alone with a person of the opposite sex other than their spouse.
4. Humility.  A promise to honor each other, to engage the local faith community as the crusades moved throughout the nation and throughout the world.  This tenant also includes the promise that the organization would not seek excess publicity for what they were doing.

After the Modesto Crusade in 1948, the Graham team focused on Los Angeles where in 1949 where they would take the evangelist’s message to a bigger audience.

The Los Angeles Crusade is considered to be the turning point for the Billy Graham ministry as it became a nationwide, soon-to-be worldwide evangelical organization.  

An estimated 26,000 people attended the Modesto Crusade over ten nights in 1948.

The work by Billy and his three close associates helped create the guiding principles of Graham ministry.  You won’t find a historical sign in Modesto marking either the creation of the Manifesto or the location of the 1948 Central Valley Crusade. 

The Rock Motel where the Manifesto was drafted no longer exists.  You can drive to the intersection of Burney Avenue and La Loma Avenue and find the approximate location of the 1948 Modesto Crusade. 

But you can take some comfort in knowing that the Modesto Gospel Mission, started with a portion of the donations raised at the 1948 Crusade, continues to serve hundreds of families and others through a variety of programs that have developed over the years. 

The mission serves 150,000 meals every year, provides 4,600 overnight accommodations annually, and now operates with a yearly budget of over two-million dollars.  An investment of five-thousand dollars made nearly sixty years ago has paid dividends to thousands of people in need.

That’s a pretty respectable legacy from the Billy Graham Crusade of 1948.  And the Modesto Manifesto continues to guide the organization well into the new century.  Billy will turn 98 in November 2016.  

In 2018, the faith communities of Modesto will mark the seventieth anniversary of the Central Valley Billy Graham Crusade, and the seventieth anniversary of the Modesto Manifesto.

Steve Newvine lives in Merced.  He wrote about Modesto and several other Central Valley communities in the book 9 from 99-Experiences in California’s Central Valley

Energy and Enthusiasm, in the Early Years of Work

Learning about the untimely passing of a colleague from three decades ago brought back memories from working in local television news with some very special people.

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Covering the news in Huntsville, Alabama.  Photo from the Newvine Personal Collection

An email arrived recently informing me that a former colleague from my television reporting days had passed away.

After experiencing the shock from learning of Helen's death and having thoughts for her two grown children, I spent a few moments to grieve over the passing of my former co-worker.  All three emotions:  shock, concern, and grief were experienced in the course of an afternoon.

The first fifteen years of my professional life were spent as a television journalist working in a total of five local stations in different parts of the country.  I cherish the memories from those years, and consider myself fortunate that I have stayed in contact with at least a handful of colleagues.

But there is a special place in my heart for the two years I worked in Huntsville, Alabama.

This column is not about how those good old days were so much better than it must be for electronic journalists working in the media today.  It was a different time.  Electronic news gathering in the 1980s was the only true high tech medium for the time.  Journalists now have the internet, vest cameras, surveillance footage, cell phones, and webcams in their electronic toolboxes.  

The rules were much different three decades ago with editors reviewing news copy, ethics guiding most decisions about appropriateness, and gut instincts playing an important role over decisions about fairness.

This is not about the differences from my time in the media to now.  This is about the similarities; or at least what many of us hope endures over time:  good memories.  

Those years created many smiles.

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While live on-the-scene reports were common on local television stations in the early 1980s, moving the entire news anchor team on location was a relatively new trend.  Pictured are WAAY weather man Bob Baron, anchor Jim Marsh and the late Helen Howard in a newscast dedicated to summer recreation.  Photo from the Newvine Personal Collection.

In those formative early years in northern Alabama, my coworkers and I learned a lot about the exciting world of local television news.  The station had a remote van that allowed us to report from just about any place in northern Alabama and southern Tennessee.

I did my first live report from the local Republican Party celebration on election night when Ronald Reagan was elected President.

Our station experimented with lots of ideas that were new for the early eighties but seemingly normal in local news today. Some nights, we would take the whole anchor team including the weather and sports casters, on location and do the entire broadcast from the field.  

From time to time, we would interrupt network programming to broadcast bulletins to our audience.  This practice usually generated calls from viewers who missed something in the sitcom we were interrupting.  My news director would dismiss the complaints with explanations to the staff along the lines of “they may hate us for interrupting, but they’ll remember us.”

I remember getting home one afternoon after pulling an early morning shift when the phone rang.  The news department’s assignment editor dispatched me to the airport where a big fire had broken out.  I had already worked about ten hours and was looking forward to a relaxing evening.  But the story needed to be reported, and I got my instructions to meet the live truck at the airport.   I arrived on the scene moments before the six o’clock newscast began, reported what few details I knew at the beginning of the newscast, promised the viewers more later, and returned with another live report before the newscast ended.    

I’ll never forget the night before Thanksgiving in 1981 when I was sent to a remote part of the viewing area where a distraught man was holding his wife and young child hostage.  My photographer and I, along with our competitors from other news media, stayed with the story until it ended in the early hours of Thanksgiving morning.  Upon returning to the station, I worked on my script, recorded my narration, headed home, and took my wife out for Thanksgiving dinner at a restaurant.  It was the most sleep-deprived holiday I ever endured.

And there were little things about working with a group of good humored folks.  

I remember calling the general manager's secretary by her name "Mrs. Higgins" using my impression of Tim Conway's old man Tudball's character from the Carol Brunett Show.  I can only hope the real Mrs. Higgins appreciated the reference.

Even Helen, the person whose passing is now bringing up so many memories, got the best of me one night when I asked her to pick up a sandwich for me on the way back from a reporting assignment.  I asked for a Whopper with no onions.

She had the sandwich made with triple onions.  I was so hungry that I didn't notice the extra onions until about the third bite.

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A very young Steve Newvine (bottom left) with co-workers in Huntsville, Alabama.  Photo from the Newvine Personal Collection

The men in this photograph were the young Turks of the WAAY-TV newsroom in Huntsville, Alabama in the early 1980s.  Shown here at a colleague’s farewell party, we were full of energy, enthusiasm, and optimism.  

We would repeat a farewell party every few months as someone in the newsroom accepted a new job in another city. My colleagues were dispersed over the years to such places as Atlanta, New Orleans, Tampa, and in my case Rockford, Illinois where I became one of the youngest television news directors in the country in 1982.

None of us seemed interested in making Huntsville, Alabama our permanent home.  The so-called Southern hospitality was wonderful.  It was a beautiful city, but many of us were climbing up the career ladder.

My wife and I came to Huntsville as newlyweds.  If we were looking for an adventure to start our married life, we found it there.  We left about two years later shortly after the birth of our first child.  There were high and low points for me professionally during that time, but as with anything meaningful in life, the good times outweighed the bad.

We were ambitious and excited about the work we performed daily at WAAY-TV.  Most of us moved on, with only occasional phone calls and a Christmas card to keep us connected for a few years.  Eventually, new work brought about new acquaintances.  With time, only the memories survived.

So I remember the passing of our colleague Helen.  I smile as I recall the time when our hopeful dreams carried each day, and we had no idea how life would end up for all of us.

They were the good old days.

Steve Newvine lives in Merced.  He shared some memories of his work covering the US Space program while working in Huntsville in his book Microphones, Moon Rocks, and Memories.