SUNDAY PREACHES TO THOUSANDS

The Roaring '20s were a time of flappers, bathtub gin and evangelist Billy Sunday.

Amid the free-wheeling lifestyle of that decade, many townspeople cried out for a religious reawakening.

The Cape Girardeau Ministerial Alliance, in league with the Southeast Missourian, invited Billy Sunday to the city to help set things straight.

The plain-speaking Sunday, the Billy Graham of his day, shared the bedrock beliefs of the people who flocked to his revival services.

He grew up poor in an Iowa log cabin. He never knew his father, a Union Army soldier who died of pneumonia in 1862, four months before Billy was born. Billy and his brother spent part of their youth in an orphanage.

A talent for baseball was his first salvation. He played for the Chicago White Stockings and other teams from 1883 to 1890. Converted to Christianity in 1888, Sunday began preaching at YMCA meetings while recovering from an injury that occurred on the baseball field.

He was against card-playing and movie-going, and not fond of the fashion of the day.

"It's a damnable insult some of the rigs a lot of fool women are wearing up and down our streets," he said. "No man with good, rich red blood in his veins can look at them with prayer meeting thoughts."

Sunday and his entourage arrived in Cape Girardeau by train on Feb. 27, 1926, and stayed for five weeks.

Because he insisted that tents were unsafe, city fathers raised $6,000 to erect a wooden tabernacle at the corner of Bellevue and Middle streets.

The rough-hewn structure, which could accommodate 5,000 worshipers, was heated by six furnaces. For fire protection, several hundred feet of hose were connected to a hydrant.

Besides the worship area, the building was equipped with a hospital room, a lost-and-found department, library and a nursery. The floor was covered with sawdust to minimize the noise.

Over the five-week period, the baseball evangelist preached to an estimated 250,000 people. By the end, 1,319 adults and a number of children had been converted. In addition, 1,482 church members were reconsecrated.

On Easter, his last day in the city, Sunday preached four sermons to a total of 20,000 people. Another 2,000 people stood outside the tabernacle while he preached, and thousands were turned away.

Sunday's preaching was credited with giving Cape Girardeau's churches a shot in the arm. The churches added more than 1,100 members that year.

Sunday returned to the city once more, for a two-week stay in December 1933. He died two years later.