For Altoona couple, 1949 crusade changed everything
Army veteran John E. Love returned home to his native Altoona right after serving in World War II, but the war hadn’t really left him.
He and his wife, Beatrice, met at the landmark Lakemont Park amusement park and soon eloped. By 1949, Mr. Love held a good job at the telephone company, and the couple had two daughters. But Mr. Love, most likely suffering from what we
now call post-traumatic stress, was regularly drinking, smoking and quarreling with his wife.
“My nerves were bad and I would be depressed for days,” Mr. Love wrote.
When a young evangelist named Billy Graham came to Altoona in June 1949, the Loves attended — and eagerly answered the evangelist’s appeal to make decisions to follow Jesus Christ.
They were among the earliest of more than 3 million people to make such decisions across the seven-decade, globe-trotting evangelistic career of Rev. Graham, who died Feb. 21 and was buried Friday in his native North Carolina.
The couple is now deceased, but their story lives on in Mr. Love’ s written words and in the memories of their children, who tell of how that 1949 decision has reverberated down through four generations.
The Loves went on to raise six children of their own. They regularly visited a home for at-risk children and ultimately took 17 foster children into their home.
Mr. Love retired early from the telephone company and launched a music and prison ministry in Blair County. When local ex-cons didn’t find a welcome in other churches, he started one for them.
A brother-in-law was inspired, partly by the Loves’ example, to start a children’s service organization of his own. Of their children, three became foster parents. And a foster grandson, wanting to reach at-risk children like he had been, founded a children’s agency in Texas.
If the Loves hadn’t gone “to one of the Billy Graham crusades, our lives would have been totally different,” said one of their daughters, Joan Mack of Texas.
The story came full circle this past week. One of Ms. Mack’s daughters, living in North Carolina, brought her own teenage sons to join the thousands paying respects to Rev. Graham during his viewing in his native Charlotte. There, they learned of the vast impact the evangelist had on their great-grandparents.
If it weren’t for the evangelist’s visit to Altoona in June 1949, “where would our family be?” said Scott Love of Florida, one of John and Beatrice’s children. “I keep getting the chills over it.”
Ironically, Rev. Graham always considered the Altoona crusade as a “flop.” In his memoir, he recalled it as being marred by dissension among local pastors and meager results.
Rev. Graham wasn’t yet the stadium-packing, newsmaking superstar he would become later in 1949 with his spectacularly successful crusade in Los Angeles. In fact, he was so discouraged by Altoona that he questioned his future in the pulpit.
Altoona locals who participated in that revival told the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette in 2014 that they remembered it more positively.
And the Loves certainly weren’t distracted by the behind-the-scenes struggles. John Love, writing decades later in Decision, the magazine of the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association, said his sister invited him to the revival, and he saw no reason to refuse.
Mr. Love said he had attended revival meetings as a boy, to little effect. This was different.
“When Billy began preaching, there the Holy Spirit was,” working on his heart, he wrote. “When the invitation came to receive Jesus Christ, I jumped up, and Bea followed me down the aisle. All the sins I had been carrying for years were suddenly taken away from me. … I was a new creature.”
The couple went home and immediately discarded the alcohol and cigarettes, his son said. After John Love retired early from Western Electric, the family founded the Hollidaysburg-based Maranatha Ministries, working with current and former inmates and others.
Joan Mack said her father never forced religion on anyone. “He wanted all of us to come to know the Lord, but we all have a free choice,” she said. But his example was a powerful one that she and other children followed.
“My dad was really into helping people who are hurting,” she said. “He felt there has to be someone out there ministering to people who are hurting, because if we don’t, it just goes on to generation after generation.”
Scott Love said when he was a young adult, his father gently challenged him: “What’s going to be your legacy?’”
Scott Love said for him, that has included volunteering every year for three decades at an orphanage in Mexico.
John Love died in 2001 at age 78 at the Hollidaysburg Veterans Home of Parkinson’s disease — the same disease that afflicted Rev. Graham in his last years.
“I’m praying that they’re celebrating together” in heaven now, Ms. Mack said. Mrs. Love died in 2016 at age 90. Late in life, John Love talked about some of what haunted him about his combat experience, Scott Love said. His battalion had served on Okinawa, where some Japanese soldiers fought to the bitter end even after Tokyo’s surrender.
With such memories, John Love struggled fully to receive for himself what he had preached about to others — God’s gift of forgiveness — and he ultimately found that assurance, his son said.
Scott Love, who directs clinical education at the doctoral program in physical therapy at Gannon University’s Florida campus, said he wonders “where my life would be and where my children’s lives would be if not for Reverend Graham. I believe he is my spiritual grandfather.”