In the autumn of 1949, a thirty year old evangelist named Billy Graham was pitching a tent in Los Angeles for what organizers expected to be an ordinary three week revival. It ran eight weeks instead, drew national press coverage after newspaper publisher William Randolph Hearst reportedly ordered his editors to promote it, and turned a relatively unknown Youth for Christ preacher into a household name almost overnight. Graham had no broadcasting operation, no radio program and no formal organization behind him. He had only a growing reputation and, increasingly, an audience larger than any tent could hold.
The turning point came the following summer at a crusade in Portland, Oregon. Graham had been approached about starting a national radio program to carry his preaching beyond whatever city he happened to be visiting, and by his own later account he set what he expected to be an impossible bar: he would commit to the project if listeners pledged twenty five thousand dollars in a single night. The money came in almost exactly as asked, roughly twenty four thousand dollars collected during the service itself and two more five hundred dollar gifts delivered to his hotel room before midnight.
There was, at that point, no legal entity to receive the money at all. Graham's business manager, George Wilson, filed incorporation papers within weeks, and the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association came into existence on September 15, 1950, built quite literally to hold funds that already existed for a radio program that had not yet gone on the air. Hour of Decision followed within two months, and the association Wilson incorporated to receive one night's pledges grew into the organizational backbone of six decades of crusades, publishing and broadcasting.