Billy Sunday

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William Ashley "Billy" Sunday (November 19, 1862 – November 6, 1935) was a popular professional baseball player during the 1880s and then the most celebrated and influential American evangelist during the first two decades of the twentieth century.

Contents 1 Early life 2 Professional baseball player 3 Conversion 4 Marriage 5 Appenticeship for evangelism 6 Popular evangelist 6.1 The Kerosene Circuit 6.2 Under the administration of Nell 6.3 The campaign platform 6.4 The wages of success 7 Decline 8 Notes 9 References 10 External links

[edit] Early life

Billy Sunday was born near Ames, Iowa. His father, William Sunday, was a Union soldier who had enlisted in the Iowa Twenty-Third Volunteer Infantry and died of disease at Patterson, Missouri, five weeks after the birth of his youngest son. When Sunday was ten years old, his impoverished mother was forced to send him and his older brother to the Soldiers' Orphans Home in Glenwood, Iowa.^[1] At the orphanage, Sunday gained orderly habits, a decent primary education, and the realization that he had exceptional athletic ability.^[2]

By fourteen, Sunday was shifting for himself. In Nevada, Iowa he worked for Colonel John Scott, a former lieutenant governor, tending Shetland ponies and doing other farm chores. The Scotts provided Sunday a loving home and the opportunity to attend Nevada High School, which had a fine local reputation.^[3] Although Sunday never received a high school diploma, by 1880 "he was much better educated than the typical American."^[4]

In 1880, Sunday moved to Marshalltown, Iowa, where he had been recruited for a fire brigade team because of his athleticism.^[5] In Marshalltown, Sunday worked at odd jobs, competed in fire brigade tournaments, and played for the town baseball team. In 1882, with Sunday in left field, the Marshalltown team defeated the state champion Des Moines team 15-6.^[6]

[edit] Professional baseball player

Sunday's professional baseball career was launched by Marshalltown native and future Hall-of-Famer Adrian "Cap" Anson, after Anson was given an enthusiastic account of Sunday's prowess by his aunt, Emily Haviland, an avid fan of the Marshalltown team.^[7] In 1883, on Anson's recommendation, A.G. Spalding, president of the the Chicago White Stockings, signed Sunday to the defending National League champions.

Sunday struck out four times in his first game, a major league record, and there were seven more strikeouts and three more games before he got a hit.^[8] During his first four seasons with Chicago, he was a part-time player, taking superstar Mike "King" Kelly's place in right field when Kelly served as catcher.

Sunday's speed was evident from the beginning of his career. In 1885 the White Stockings arranged a race between Sunday and Arlie Latham, the fastest runner in the American Association. Sunday won the hundred-yard dash by ten feet.^[9]

Sunday's personality, demeanor, and athleticism made him popular with the fans, as well as with his teammates and his manager. Manager Anson considered Sunday reliable enough to make him the team's business manager, with such routine duties as making travel arrangements and carrying thousands of dollars of team cash.^[10]

In 1887, when Kelly was sold to another team, Sunday became Chicago's regular right fielder, but an injury limited his playing time to fifty games.^[11] During the following winter Sunday was sold to the Pittsburgh Alleghanies for the 1888 season. He was their starting center fielder, playing a full season for the first time in his career. The crowds in Pittsburgh took to Sunday immediately; one reporter wrote that "the whole town is wild over Sunday." ^[12] One reason why Pittsburgh fans supported a losing team during the 1888 and 1889 seasons was that Sunday performed well in center field as well as being among the league leaders in stolen bases.^[13]

In 1890, a labor dispute led to the formation of a new league, composed of most of the better players from the National League. Although he was invited to join the competing league, Sunday's conscience would not allow him to break his contract with Pittsburgh.^[14] Sunday was named team captain, and he was their star player, but the team suffered one of the worst seasons in baseball history. By August the team had no money to meet its payroll, and Sunday was traded to the Philadelphia Phillies for two players and $1000 in cash.^[15]

The Philadelphia team had an oppportunity to win the National League pennant, and the owners hoped that adding Sunday to the roster would improve their chances. Although Sunday played brilliantly in his thirty-one games with Philadelphia, the team finished in third place.^[16]

In March of 1891 Sunday requested, and was granted, a release from his contract with the Philadelphia ball club.^[17] Over his career, Sunday was never a strong hitter: his average was .248 over 499 games, about the median for the 1880s.^[18] In his best season, in 1887, Sunday hit .291, ranking 17th in the league. He was an exciting but inconsistent fielder. In the days before outfielders wore gloves, Sunday was noted for brilliant catches featuring long sprints and athletic dives, but he also committed a great many errors. Sunday was best known as an exceptionally fast runner, regarded by his peers as one of the best in the game, even though he never placed better than third in the National League in stolen bases.^[19]

[edit] Conversion

On a Sunday afternoon during either the 1886 or 1887 baseball season, Sunday and his teammates had drunk a few beers and were wandering the streets of Chicago on their day off. At one corner they stopped to listen to a street preaching team from the Pacific Garden Mission. Sunday was attracted to the old gospel songs that he had heard his mother sing, and he began attending services at the mission. A former society matron who worked there finally convinced Sunday that he must accept Christ, that eternal life was "God's free gift, and being such, it must be received as a gift, through childlike faith in the finished work of Christ."^[20] Sunday immediately stopped drinking and began faithfully attending the fashionable Jefferson Park Presbyterian Church, a congregation handy to both the ball park and his rented room.^[21]

Even before his conversion, Sunday's lifestyle seems to have been less boisterous than that of the average contemporary baseball player. Nevertheless, after his conversion, Sunday's changed behavior was recognized by both teammates and fans. Sunday shortly began speaking in churches and at YMCAs (which, during this period, emphasized evangelism over athletics).^[22]

[edit] Marriage

In 1886 Sunday was introduced at Jefferson Park Presbyterian Church to Helen Amelia "Nell" Thompson, daughter of the owner of Chicago's largest dairy products business.^[23] Although Sunday was immediately smitten with Nell, both had serious on-going relationships, "bordering on engagements."^[24] Furthermore, Nell had grown to maturity in a much more privileged environment than had Billy, and her father strongly discouraged the courtship, viewing all professional baseball players as "transient ne'er-do-wells who were unstable and destined to be misfits once they were too old to play."^[25] Nevertheless, Billy pursued Nell with the same tenacity that he pursued baseball and the Gospel. On a number of occasions, Sunday said, "She was a Presbyterian, so I am a Presbyterian. Had she been a Catholic, I would have been a Catholic--because I was hot on the trail of Nell."^[26] Mrs. Thompson weighed in on Sunday's side, and William Thompson finally relented. The couple was married on September 5, 1888.

[edit] Appenticeship for evangelism

In the spring of 1891, Sunday turned down a $400 a month baseball contract in order to become an assistant secretary of the Chicago YMCA at $83 per month.^[27]. Sunday's job with the YMCA was extremely varied and good preparation for his later evangelistic career. For three years, Sunday visited the sick, prayed with the troubled, counseled the suicidal, and visited saloons to invite patrons to evangelistic meetings.^[28]

In 1893, Sunday became the full-tme assistant to J. Wilbur Chapman, perhaps the best known evangelist in the United States except for his mentor, the aging Dwight L. Moody. Chapman had far more education than either Moody or Sunday—he had an earned doctorate—and was a meticulous dresser, suave and urbane. Personally shy, like Sunday himself, Chapman commanded respect in the pulpit both because of his strong voice and his sophisticated demeanor. Sunday's job as Chapman's advance man was to precede the evangelist to cities in which he was scheduled to preach, organize prayer meetings and choirs, and in general take care of necessary details. When tents were used, Sunday would often help erect them with his own hands.

By listening to Chapman preach night after night, Sunday received a valuable course in homiletics. Chapman also critiqued Sunday's own attempts at evangelistic preaching and showed Sunday how to put a good sermon together. Further, Chapman encouraged Sunday's theological development, especially by promoting an interest in the deeper-life or Keswick movement and by helping to "reinforce Billy's commitment to conservative biblical Christianity."^[29]

[edit] Popular evangelist

[edit] The Kerosene Circuit

When Chapman unexpectedly returned to the pastorate in 1896, Sunday struck out on his own, beginning with meetings in tiny Garner, Iowa. For the next twelve years Sunday preached in approximately seventy communities, most of them in Iowa and Illinois. Sunday referred to these towns as the “Kerosene Circuit” because, unlike Chicago, most were not yet electrified. Towns often booked Sunday meetings informally, sometimes by sending a delegation to hear him preach and then telegraphing him while he was holding services somewhere else.

Sunday also took advantage of his reputation as a baseball player to generate advertising for his meetings. One newspaper reporting on the Garner revival "to be conducted by W.A. Sunday" noted that "this must be 'Billy' Sunday who used to play ball for Anson with the Chicago White Stockings. 'Billy' is as true a Christian gentleman as he was a rattling ball player, and that is saying a good deal." ^[30] In 1907 in Fairfield, Iowa, Sunday organized the local businesses into two baseball teams and scheduled a game between them. Sunday arrived for the game dressed in a uniform from his days as a professional, and he played on both teams. Although baseball was his primary means of publicity, for a revival in Knoxville, Iowa, he hired a giant from the Barnum & Bailey circus to act as an usher.^[31]

When Sunday began to attract crowds larger than could be accommodated in rural churches or town halls, he pitched rented canvas tents. Sunday did much of the physical work of putting up the tents, manipulating ropes during storms, and seeing to their security by sleeping in them at night. Not until 1905 was he well enough off to hire his own advance man.^[32]

In 1906, an October snowstorm in Salida, Colorado, destroyed Sunday’s tent—a special disaster because revivalists were typically paid with a freewill offering at the end of their meetings. Thereafter Sunday insisted that towns build him temporary wooden tabernacles at their expense. These tabernacles were comparatively costly to build (although most of the lumber could be salvaged and resold at the end of the meetings), and obviously, locals had to put up the money for them in advance. This change in Sunday's operation began to push the finances of the campaign to the fore. At least at first, raising tabernacles provided good public relations for the coming meetings as townspeople joined together in what was effectively a giant barnraising. Sunday built rapport by participating in the process, and the tabernacles were also a status symbol, because they had previously been built only for major evangelists like Moody and Chapman.^[33]

[edit] Under the administration of Nell

Eleven years into Sunday’s evangelistic career, both Billy and Nell had been pushed to their emotional limits. Long separations had exacerbated Sunday’s natural feelings of inadequacy and insecurity. As a product of a childhood that could well be described as a series of losses, Sunday was extremely dependent on his wife's love and encouragement. Nell, for her part, found it increasingly difficult to handle household responsibilities, the needs of four children (including a newborn), and the long-distance emotional welfare of her husband. Billy’s ministry was also expanding, and it desperately needed an administrator, a job for which Nell was ideally suited. In 1908, the Sundays decided to entrust their children to a nanny while Nell managed Billy's campaigns.^[34]

Nell Sunday transformed her husband’s out-of-the-back-pocket organization into a “nationally renowned phenomenon.”^[35] New personnel were hired, and by the New York campaign of 1917, the Sundays had a paid staff of 26.^[36] There were musicians, custodians, and advance men, of course; but the Sundays also hired Bible teachers of both sexes, who among other responsibilities, held daytime meetings at schools and shops and encouraged their audiences to attend the main tabernacle services in the evenings. The most significant of these new staff members were Homer Rodeheaver, an exceptional song leader and music director who worked with the Sundays for almost twenty years, and Virginia Heley Asher, who (besides regularly singing duets with Rodeheaver) directed the women’s ministries, especially the evangelization of young working women.^[37]

[edit] The campaign platform

With his wife administering the campaign organization, Sunday was free to do what he did best, compose and deliver colloquial sermons. Typically, Homer Rodeheaver would first warm up the crowd with congregational singing that alternated with numbers from gigantic choirs and music performed by the staff. When Sunday felt the moment right, he would launch into his message. Sunday gyrated, stood on the pulpit, ran from one end of the platform to the other, and dove along the stage, pretending to slide into home plate. Sometimes he even smashed chairs to emphasize his points. Sunday’s sermon notes had to be printed in large letters so that he could catch a glimpse of them as he raced by the pulpit.^[38] Fundamentalist leader Bob Jones, Jr., who knew Sunday as a teenager, admitted in his memoirs that he was "repelled by the roughness" of Sunday's performance and noted that Sunday’s messages seemed "studied and stage-managed"—which of course, they were.^[39] In Sunday’s defense, it was difficult to keep the attention of his extraordinary crowds without the use of exaggerated gestures.

Crowd noise, especially coughing and crying babies, were Sunday’s deadly enemies because the wooden tabernacles were acoustically so live. In his preliminaries, Rodeheaver often instructed audiences about how to muffle their coughs. Nurseries were always provided, infants forbidden, and Sunday sometimes appeared rude in his haste to rid the hall of noisy children who had slipped through the ushers. Tabernacle floors were covered with sawdust to dampen the noise of shuffling feet (as well as for its pleasant smell and its ability to hold down the dust of dirt floors), and coming forward during the invitation became known as “hitting the sawdust trail.”^[40]

By 1910, Sunday began to conduct meetings (usually longer than a month) in small cities like Youngstown, Wilkes-Barre, South Bend, and Denver, and then finally, between 1915 and 1917, the major cities of Philadelphia, Syracuse, Kansas City, Detroit, Boston, Buffalo, and New York City.^[41] Everywhere during the second decade of the twentieth century, Billy Sunday was front page news in the cities where he held campaigns. The newspapers often printed his sermons in full. Sunday was the subject of over sixty articles in major periodicals, and he was a staple of religious papers of every persuasion.^[42] Incredible as it may seem, Sunday probably preached to more than a hundred million people face-to-face over the course of his career—and to the vast majority of them, without electronic amplification. ^[43] The vast numbers who "hit the sawdust trail" are also remarkable. Although the usual total given for those who came forward at invitations is an even million, one modern historian estimates that the true figure is closer to 1,250,000.^[44] Nevertheless,"trail hitters" were not necessarily conversions (or even "rededications") to Christianity. Sometimes whole groups of club members came forward forward en masse at Sunday's prodding. Undoubtedly some audience members simply wanted to shake Sunday's hand. By 1927, Rodeheaver was complaining that Sunday's invitations had become so general that they were meaningless.^[45]

[edit] The wages of success

Large crowds and efficient organization meant that Sunday, the former resident of an orphan home, was soon netting hefty offerings. The first questions about Sunday's income were apparently raised during the Columbus, Ohio campaign at the turn of 1912-13. During the Pittsburgh campaign a year later, Sunday spoke four times a day and effectively made $217 per sermon or $870 a day at a time when the average gainfully employed worker made $836 per year. The major cities of Chicago, Philadelphia, Baltimore, Boston, and New York City gave Sunday even larger love offerings. Sunday donated Chicago's offering of $58,000 to Pacific Garden Mission and the $120,500 New York offering to war charities. Nevertheless, between 1908 and 1920, the Sundays earned over a million dollars during a period in which the average worker earned less than $14,000.^[46]

Sunday was now welcomed into the circle of the economic, political, and social elite. Sunday dined with numerous politicians, including Presidents Theodore Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson, and Herbert Hoover. John D. Rockefeller, Jr. became a special friend.^[47] During and after the 1917 Los Angeles campaign, the Sundays visited with Hollywood stars, and members of Sunday's organization played a charity baseball game against a team of show business personalities that included Douglas Fairbanks. ^[48]

He was a regular speaker on the Chautauqua circuit. The Winona Lake Bible Conference in Indiana hosted one of the larger Chautauqua programs in the Midwest, and Sunday began spending part of every summer there. In 1910 the Sundays moved from Chicago to Winona Lake, and their home there is now a museum.

Sunday was ordained in the Presbyterian church in 1903. Sunday preached temperance, personal salvation, and middle-class values, and he used his athleticism and energy to express a muscular version of Christianity. Sunday is noted for his "fire-and-brimstone" evangelism. Holding a fundamentalist view of the Bible, he often preached fiery sermons against religious liberalism, evolution, alcohol, dancing, card playing and other vices.

Sunday was a major influence in the temperance movement, which led to the adoption of national Prohibition in 1919. One of his most famous sermons was "Booze, Or, Get on the Water Wagon." When the tide of public opinion turned against Prohibition, he continued to support it, and after its repeal in 1933, Sunday called for its reintroduction. He said, "I am the sworn, eternal and uncompromising enemy of the liquor traffic. I have been, and will go on, fighting that damnable, dirty, rotten business with all the power at my command.” Sunday preached that “whiskey and beer are all right in their place, but their place is in hell.”

[edit] Decline

Sunday's popularity waned after World War I as radio and movie theaters became his competitors for the public's leisure time.^[49] Nevertheless, even as the crowds declined during the last fifteen years of his life, Sunday accepted preaching invitations and spoke with effect until his death in 1935.

Although Sunday's four children contracted nine marriages, Billy and Nell Sunday had only three grandchildren. The grandchildren, in turn, contracted five marriages that resulted in only one great-grandchild, who apparently died childless.^[50]

[edit] Notes

1. ^ Dorsett, 8-10.
2. ^ Dorsett, 13.
3. ^ Bruns, 29. The 4-H baseball field in Nevada, Iowa is named Billy Sunday Field.
4. ^ Dorsett, 14.
5. ^ Dorsett, 15.
6. ^ Knickerbocker, 26-7.
7. ^ Haviland attended Marshalltown games with her husband Marshall, who was the official team scorer in 1871. In 1916, Anson recalled that his aunt "finally induced me to give Billy a chance in Chicago. She was what you call a dyed-in-the-wool fan and never missed a game the Marshalltown club ever played." In 1921, Sunday told veteran writer William Phelon Jr., "It was owing to the fact that Capt. Anson of the Chicago team had an aunt in Marshalltown that I became a big leaguer." Cap "had Aunt Emma there and she was greatly interested in seeing me progress in baseball. She praised my playing to Anson, told him I was about the fastest fielder on earth and insisted that he give me a chance with Chicago and he agreed."
8. ^ Cap Anson, Sunday's manager, said in his 1900 autbiography that Sunday struck out his first thirteen times at bat. However, contemporary newspaper accounts report eleven strikeouts at most, with two of his other at-bats reported simply as outs, probably not made by striking out. Sunday's verifiable strikeouts-in-a-row are four. Knickerbocker, 31-32.
9. ^ Knickerbocker, 45-47. Interestingly, even before his conversion, Sunday was uncomfortable with this race and tried to withdraw because $75,000 had been bet on the outcome. Firstenberger, 18.
10. ^ Sunday later said, "That was my first experience at bookkeeping and I was never shy a dollar." Bruns, 39-40; Knickerbocker, 37.
11. ^ Knickerbocker, 73-5.
12. ^ Knickerbocker, 97; Bruns, 51; Dorsett, 36-39.
13. ^ Knckerbocker, 109, 120.
14. ^ Knickerbocker, 125-7.
15. ^ Knickerbocker, 129-31.
16. ^ Knickerbocker,131-3; Bruns, 51; Dorsett, 36-9.
17. ^ Knickerbocker, 135-6.
18. ^ Knickerbocker, 137. His fans reportedly said, "Billy is fast enough, but he can't steal first base."
19. ^ Knickerbocker, 2-3.
20. ^ Dorsett, 24-28; Knickerbocker, 80-89. Sunday could never remember the date of this experience, although he made repeated reference to it. The oft-told conversion story poses a number of chronological difficulties. The best explication of the problems and their partial solutions is Knickerbocker, 59-63, 79-89.
21. ^ Dorsett, 28.
22. ^ Dorsett, 29.
23. ^ Dorsett, 32.
24. ^ Firstenberger, 7.
25. ^ Dorsett, 34. Some of the difficulty about remembering the exact date of Sunday's conversion may have been the result of Nell and Billy having met and fallen in love before Billy had become a Christian, a circumstance that would have later been embarrassing because evangelicals would have condemned the relationship.
26. ^ Frankenberg, 62.
27. ^ Dorsett, 39-43. Sunday's father-in-law was now became unhappy that Sunday had exchanged the promise of $3,500 for seven weeks work for a six-day-a-week job at $1000 a year.
28. ^ Dorsett, 48.
29. ^ Dorsett, 49-57.
30. ^ McLaughlin, 11.
31. ^ Knickerbocker, 145-6.
32. ^ Dorsett, 61-64.
33. ^ Dorsett, 64-65; Firstenberger, 46.
34. ^ Dorsett, 81-84. In 1911, Nell Sunday met Nora Lynn at the Erie, Pennsylvania campaign and persuaded her to become the Sundays' live-in housekeeper. Lynn was employed by the Sundays for twenty years; she effectively became a member of the Sunday family and died in their house. Firstenberger, 45, 98-100.
35. ^ Dorsett, 86.
36. ^ Firstenberg has documented more than seventy individuals who were members of the Sunday evangelistic team through the years of Billy Sunday's ministry. Firstenberg, 124-26.
37. ^ Dorsett, 100-04. Virginia Asher and her husband William had known the Sundays since the 1890s and had previously worked for Moody and other evangelists. Both were friends of J. Wilbur Chapman, and both had cottages at Winona Lake, Indiana. Asher organized permanent, post-campaign "Virginia Asher Councils" to continue work among those who, during that period, were called "businesswomen."
38. ^ Firstenberger, 36-39.
39. ^ Bob Jones [Jr.], Cornbread and Caviar: Reminiscences and Reflections (Greenville, SC: Bob Jones University Press, 1985), 89.
40. ^ The term was first used in a Sunday campaign in Bellingham, Washington, in 1910. Apparently, "hitting the sawdust trail" had first been used by loggers in the Pacific Northwest to describe following home a trail of previously dropped sawdust through an uncut forest—a metaphor for coming from, in Nell Sunday's words, "a lost condition to a saved condition." Firstenberger, 37; McLoughlin, 97; Dorsett, 91-92.
41. ^ Dorsett, 92.
42. ^ Dorsett, 93.
43. ^ Dorsett, 93; Firstenberger, 39; Lyle W. Dorsett, "Billy Sunday," American National Biography, 21: 150-52. Of course Sunday did not preach to hundred million different individuals but to many of the same people repeatedly during the course of a campaign. Before his death, Sunday estimated that he had preached nearly 20,000 sermons, an average of 42 per month from 1896 to 1935. During his heyday, when he was preaching more than twenty times a week, his crowds were often huge. Even in 1923, well into the period of his decline, 479,300 people attended the 79 meetings of the six-week 1923 Columbia, South Carolina campaign. That number was 23 times the white population of Columbia--and nearly 1/200th of the 100 million life-time total estimate.
44. ^ Firstenberger, 120-23.
45. ^ Dorsett, 136.
46. ^ Dorsett, 90-91.
47. ^ Dorsett, 93. Sunday also knew Elbert H. Gary, Louis F. Swift, J. Ogden Armour, H. J. Heinz, S.S. Kresge, John M. Studebaker, Henry Leland, John Wanamaker, George Perkins, and A. J. Drexel-Biddle.
48. ^ The movie stars won, 1-0, and Sunday jokingly complained that his team couldn't get a break from the umpires, Mary Pickford and Charlie Chaplin. Knickerbocker, 156; Dorsett, 95.
49. ^ Dorsett, 148.Sunday even became the subject of derision. One of his revival songs, "Brighten the Corner Where You Are," became a drinking song in the blind pigs that appeared during Prohibition. The line "Someone far from harbor you may guide across the bar" called the waiter for another stein of beer. One line in the popular Frank Sinatra song "Chicago," written by Fred Fisher in the 1920s, refers to Chicago as "the town that Billy Sunday couldn't shut down."
50. ^ Firstenberger, 136-37. The great-grandchild, Marquis Ashley Sunday, was killed by his lover in San Francisco on March 22, 1982.

[edit] References

• Allen, Robert. Billy Sunday: Home Run to Heaven. Mott Media: Milford, MI. 1985
• Bruns, Roger. Preacher: Billy Sunday and Big-Time American Evangelism. New York: W.W. Norton, 1992.
• Dorsett, Lyle W. Billy Sunday and the Redemption of Urban America. Grand Rapids, MI: W.B. Eerdmans, 1991.
• Ellis, William T. Billy Sunday: His Life and Message. Philadelphia, PA: John C. Winston Co., 1914.
• Firstenberger, William A. In Rare Form: A Pictorial History of Baseball Evangelist Billy Sunday. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2005.
• Knickerbocker, Wendy. Sunday at the Ballpark: Billy Sunday's Professional Baseball Career 1883-1890. Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press, 2000.
• Martin, Robert F. Hero of the Heartland: Billy Sunday and the Transformation of American Society, 1862-1935. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2002.
• McLoughlin, William G. Billy Sunday Was His Real Name. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1955.
• Nevada Community Historical Society Inc. (2003). Voices from the Past: The Story of Nevada, Iowa, Its Community and Families. Unknown press (Nevada Community Historical Society, Inc., PO Box 213, Nevada, Iowa 50201-0213; 515-382-6684)
• Rosenberg, Howard W. Cap Anson 4: Bigger Than Babe Ruth: Captain Anson of Chicago. Arlington, Va.: Tile Books, 2006.
• Sunday, Billy. The Sawdust Trail: Billy Sunday in His Own Words. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2005.

[edit] External links

• BillySunday.org
• Selected sermons
• Archives of the Billy Graham Center--huge database of Sunday images and content
• Billy Sunday's grave and Find A Grave Entry
• Audio Sermons by Billy Sunday
• Billy Sunday's baseball career
• Billy Sunday Home Museum
• Billy Sunday at the Internet Movie Database
• Birthplace of Billy Sunday