Word: planes
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...difference. In his office in Boone, North Carolina, are artifacts not associated with his father: the half-dozen military rifles mounted on the wall. A little way down the road stands his beloved Harley-Davidson Wide Glide. Hangared at a nearby airstrip is the six-seat twin-turboprop Mitsubishi plane in which he logged 450 hours last year as a pilot. "If there's a machine or device that makes noise, goes fast and blows smoke," he has written, "I want to have one." Or at least try one out. In 1987 neighbors called the local sheriff when he took...
...fighting, taunting the police of Montreat into high-speed car chases and cultivating a fascination for firearms and rock music and a taste for hard liquor. By the time he managed to get himself expelled from a tiny technical college in Texas for keeping a girl out overnight (their plane was socked in by fog), it had already become clear that an addiction to piloting small airplanes was overwhelming any commitment to real study. At 19 he persuaded his father to let him deliver a Land Rover from London to a religious hospital in Jordan. He made the trip steering...
...Graham's autobiography, Rebel with a Cause, recounts with obvious relish various acts of charitable and evangelical derring-do, from dodging P.L.O. cannon fire while aiding an evangelical church in Beirut to training chaplains for the right-wing contra insurrection during the Nicaraguan civil war to jockeying a disabled plane into a remote village in Turkey. "I got it both ways," he once told GQ magazine. "When I die I'll go immediately to the presence of God, and yet in life I had a blast." Samaritan's Purse, like a few similar organizations, has been criticized in the foreign...
...executive committee's reluctance to anoint Franklin may have been his run-in with the Evangelical Council for Financial Accountability, a self-policing organization his father helped found. In 1992 the council suspended Samaritan's Purse while it looked into Franklin's compensation and use of the company plane. Word leaked to the National Enquirer, which purported to quote Billy saying Franklin was "going to destroy what I've worked for years to build." Franklin pulled out of the council, calling its members "crummy little evangelical busybodies" who were "jealous of me." Two years later, he rejoined, more punctilious about...
...rarely missed a crusade. But on the day before he was scheduled to address 50,000 people in the Toronto SkyDome, he collapsed with a bleeding colon. From his hospital bed, Billy had an aide call Franklin with a plea to take over, and the son jumped on a plane, flew to Toronto and began frenzied preparation. Only the following morning did he learn that the crusade's local organizers, reportedly after consulting with Billy's staff, had decided to use another of the organization's preachers. Months later, still furious, Franklin explicitly connected the incident to the politics...