My parents met amid his throng of 50,000, so vale Billy Graham

Billy Graham makes his point during a crusade in Berlin in 1954, five years before his landmark Australian rallies. Picture: AP

I owe my existence to Billy Graham. The towering, leonine preacher, who finally went to his great reward one year short of a century, proving God cannot be a cricket fan, swung north to Brisbane’s “Ekka” on the last stop of his three-month antipodean crusade, thereby providing the setting for my mother and father’s first date.

America’s pastor was 1950s Tinder. Sparks flew. “We had just met at our church youth group the week before, and so Billy Graham’s Brisbane meeting was the first time we went out together,” my father, John, told me yesterday.

“We were both cool, collected Anglicans and so we were a bit ­bemused by the throng of people rushing to the front to give their lives to Christ. To be honest, I think we were far more interested in each other than what Billy ­Graham had to say.”

They were among 50,000 ­there to hear Graham on Friday, May 29, 1959. Brisbane’s Exhibition Ground was jam-packed from its oval to the stands, and special trains brought people from as far as 160km away to see the great man of God work his magic from a makeshift stage on Machinery Hill.

John and Kay Gagliardi on their wedding day in Brisbane 55 years ago. Their first date was the Billy Graham crusade at the Brisbane Exhibition Grounds.

Mum — Kay Crawford — was a station master’s daughter and a first-year teacher at 17. John was 16, still at high school, a year away from becoming a cadet journalist at Brisbane’s afternoon paper, The Telegraph, and clearly punching above his weight.

Their wedding anniversary was last Monday, and Mum posted a then-and-now photo montage to Facebook: “This is us ... still stuck together like glue after 55 years of marriage! What a ­wonderful way The Lord brought us together ... Thank you, John, for being such a wonderfully thoughtful, kind and overly generous (and fun) man and my best friend over all this time. And thank you for the early coffee in bed every day for over 30 years now.”

They were a beautiful couple then, as they are now. A few years on from their first date, they would be married. John, a young man in a hurry, would race through a ­career in print and television journalism, PR and high-stakes political lobbying, before hurtling into the oblivion of an ­alcohol and stress-induced breakdown. He didn’t hear much of Billy Graham’s message in 1959 but he made his own trek to Machinery Hill after a dark night of the soul contemplating suicide, career in tatters, in a mental hospital.

“Billy Graham didn’t get me but I guess eventually God did,” John says. He straightened out his life, foreswore the demon drink and never looked back. Many years later, he would co-found the Australian Christian Lobby.

John and Kay Gagliardi celebrate their 55th wedding anniversary earlier this week.

John remembers an encounter with the preacher’s son and heir apparent, Franklin Graham, while helping promote a Christian-themed pavilion at Brisbane’s World Expo 88. Graham the ­younger, back in the fold after rebelling as a young man, was in town to spread the good word from the back of a Harley-Davidson.

Time magazine contrasted the death of the father and the rise of the son: “Billy Graham rose to the heights of religious power in America by uniting evangelicalism after a fundamentalist crisis in the early 20th century. His son, Franklin Graham, the heir to his religious empire, has risen to prominence by embracing the ­divisions of our time. The difference between father and son says as much about America as it does about the two men.”

Mum and Dad never did see Billy Graham again. But I remain eternally grateful.