Ruth Bell Graham visited the likes of the White House and Buckingham Palace on the arm of her famous husband, but spent most of her life tending the home fires in the North Carolina mountains while evangelist Billy Graham traveled the world.

"She ... would rather chat with ushers and housekeeping staff" than mingle with celebrities," wrote biographer and mystery writer Patricia Cornwell.

lyons/MBR (ENLARGE)

The Rev. Billy Graham gives his wife, Ruth, a hug at the podium in the Georgia Dome during the final night of the Billy Graham Crusade in Atlanta in 1994.

PETER A. HARRIS/AP (ENLARGE)

Ruth Graham holds hands with her husband, the Rev. Billy Graham, on the porch of their home in Montreat, N.C., in 1996.

Her five adult children — each in a type of ministry today — are as likely to credit their mother's steadfast faith as their father's dynamic preaching for their own strong Christian convictions.

The Rev. Billy Graham once wrote of his wife, "Through the years, Ruth has made my home a place of love, joy, and tranquility. Her deep faith in God, her constant study of the Scriptures, current events, and social problems have always been a source of inspiration. We have long talks on many subjects. Some of my best thoughts have actually come from her."

Today he is without his helpmate. Ruth Graham, 87, died Thursday surrounded by her husband and all five children at the family home in Montreat, N.C. Billy Graham has announced that both he and his wife would be buried at the new Billy Graham Library in Charlotte. Ruth Graham leavesbehind her husband, two sons and three daughters and 19 grandchildren.

Growing up in Asia

She was born Ruth McCue Bell on June 10, 1920, in China, delivered by her father, L. Nelson Bell, a physician and Presbyterian missionary. She spent the first 17 years of her life in Asia.

At a 1994 reunion of Presbyterian missionaries to China at Decatur's Columbia Theological Seminary, she said one of her earliest memories was of her aman, her Chinese nurse, sitting on a stool singing the Chinese words to the hymn "There Is a Fountain Filled with Blood."

As an adolescent, she planned to follow her parents' career path and become a missionary to Tibet. She was determined never to marry.

That changed at Wheaton College in Illinois when she met lanky Billy Frank Graham, who claimed to have been immediately smitten with both her prettiness and her piety. After their first date, she was willing to forgo her planned celibate existence on the mission field: "Oh, Lord, if you wish to give me the privilege of sharing my life with this man, I could have no greater joy," she prayed.

On Aug. 13, 1943, after both graduated from Wheaton, they married in a little chapel in the mountain town of Montreat, N.C., a Presbyterian enclave where Ruth's parents had settled after evacuating from China.

As both the Graham family and Billy Graham's evangelistic ministry grew, he and Ruth moved to Montreat near her parents. But as Graham's fame spread, his family's mountain home became a tourist attraction. To foil unscrupulous reporters and curiosity seekers who might go through her trash, Ruth Graham peeled labels off prescription bottles and burned personal bills, according to biographer Cornwell.

Eventually, to avoid tourists peering in their windows, the Grahams bought land outside town, and Ruth Graham supervised construction of a home made from aged lumber from log cabins and demolished homesteads, then filled it with antiques.

She was inevitably drawn into the spotlight with her husband, but she was more likely to sound a cautionary note than to assert herself when dealing with powerful people. She kicked her husband under the table when President Lyndon B. Johnson asked him who his running mate should be, wrote Cornwell, and she stewed over the encroachment of his friendship with President Richard Nixon into his ministry.

Despite her concern, Nixon's fall did not obliterate her personal affection for him. It was Ruth Graham who arranged for an airplane to pull a banner over California saying, "Nixon, we love you — so does God."

For the most part, however, while her husband spent an average of six months a year preaching to filled stadiums and consorting with kings and presidents, she stayed in Montreat raising five little Grahams, whose behavior was frequently less than godly.

Once, while running errands, she put oldest son Franklin, his father's designated successor at the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association, into the car trunk because of his misbehavior. Long before federal sentencing guidelines, she kept a list of punishments to suit any crime. The first fight, for instance, called for 10 minutes isolation. Sassing brought on switching with a fly-swatter.

She suggested in her book "It's My Turn" that every parent take dog-training classes. The principles, such as keeping commands simple and acknowledging good behavior with a pat on the head, are helpful in raising children, she wrote.

Ruth Graham was familiar with the problems of rearing both children and pets.

Daughter Ruth "Bunny" Graham Dienert recalled "the time mother took us all to the dog pound and came back with five dogs. Each one of us got a dog. We named them all after characters in 'Little Lord Fauntleroy.'"

Transferring her standards of behavior outside the family led Ruth Graham into a run-in with the law in 1975. Sitting on the front row at a celebration in Charlotte and listening to a speech by President Gerald Ford, she noticed a barefooted, shirtless protester in a restricted area. His placard said "Eat the Rich" on one side and "Don't Tread on Me" on the other.

In what she later described as a spontaneous and instinctive act, she rose, grabbed the sign, resumed her seat and continued to listen to Ford's speech. Later, when the protester realized the identity of his assailant, he swore out a warrant against her.

Told that if convicted she faced a $50 fine or 30 days in jail, she told her lawyer she would take the jail sentence: "I feel very strongly that what I did was right, and paying a fine would be to me an admission of guilt."

She treated the protester as she would have treated one of her sons, she said, except that had she been dealing with her son, "I'd have given him a resounding whack on the bottom."

After hearing testimony from the protester, a judge dismissed the case. President Ford called to congratulate her.

Unconditional love

Though she could be tough and feisty, Ruth had a soft heart for underdogs of all kinds — including her children when they strayed.

Both sons went through periods of youthful drinking and carousing. Even during the roughest years, the Grahams offered unconditional love, son Nelson "Ned" Graham recalled.

"Frequently I'd come home — sometimes at 2, 3, or 4 in the morning — inebriated, stoned, whatever," he said. "Mother inevitably would be sitting in her rocking chair in the kitchen. She would get up in her nightgown, with tired, red eyes. I knew she'd been crying for me or praying for me or both. Instead of flying into a rage, she'd putter over to me, kiss me on my forehead and say, 'Ned, I'm glad you're home. I'm going to bed now.'"

Her acceptance extended to all kinds of people, Cornwell wrote in her biography: "Had she ever kept a guest book, it would have held the names of drug addicts, thieves, the delusional and deranged and juvenile delinquents from the local detention center who had committed crimes of vandalism or murder."

It would also have included Patsy Daniels and her brother — children whose mother dumped them unceremoniously on the Grahams' doorstep as she headed out of town. When she married one of her college English professors, a marriage that failed, Patsy Daniels became Patricia Cornwell.

Ruth Graham found her strength in the scriptures, according to daughter Anne Lotz.

"When I was growing up, she had a big desk back in her bedroom and different Bible translations open on it... . In between her responsibilities, she would slip back to her desk and read," she said. "It's through the Bible that she knows Jesus. She has a real love relationship with Jesus Christ."

At home in Montreat, she followed the New Testament admonition to love her neighbors, said Ann McKay, for more than 35 years a fellow parishioner at Montreat Presbyterian Church.

On a Sunday not too long after McKay's husband died, she recalled, Ruth Graham called and asked McKay to leave her back door unlocked so that she could put a roast and some vegetables into the oven for her to have for lunch. McKay told her no, that her oven was dirty.

Graham insisted.

Later, after removing the food Ruth Graham had left, McKay noticed that her oven was completely clean.

"When she was well enough, she was always aware when there was a death or a sickness," McKay said. "She would take food, mostly food that she made."

Ruth Graham resisted the efforts of some of her husband's powerful friends to get her to join him as a Southern Baptist. She remained Presbyterian all her life.

"Ruth knew her theology," said McKay. "She was a good Presbyterian. Nobody could talk her out of being Presbyterian."

Though she never built a ministry that filled arenas as her husband, son Franklin and daughter Anne have done, Ruth Bell Graham reached thousands of people through her writing.

"I think I was born with a pen in my hand," she once said. She's written a stack of books, some by herself, some with oldest daughter Gigi Graham Tchividjian, mostly about mothering. Some include excerpts from her diaries or her prayers.

One, called "Mothers Together," closes with a poem/prayer she wrote about God's hand in a mother's life. It ends, "Pray the fragrance of His presence may through you grow doubly sweet, till your years on earth are ended and the portrait is complete."

Ruth Bell Graham's portrait is complete.