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William Ashley Sunday, Sr. was born November 19, 1862, to William and Mary Jane (Corey) Sunday. His father was in the Union Army on the day of his son's birth and died, probably of measles, at Camp Patterson in Missouri without ever seeing his third and youngest child. Jane Sunday married again, to a man named Heizer in 1870 who left her after she bore him two children. Sometime around 1874, she left her first husband's farm in Ames, Iowa, and went to live with her parents in a nearby county. Shortly before, young William Ashley and his older brother, H. Edward, were sent to the Soldier's Orphans Home in Glenwood, Iowa. The two boys left again in 1876 and went to their grandfather's farm but only for a short time. William had an argument with grandfather Corey and went to Nevada, Iowa, to find work. He held a variety of jobs over the next few years including fireman, janitor, and undertaker's assistant. With some help of a prominent local politician named Scott, he managed to attend high school. In 1883, Sunday left the amateur baseball team in Marshalltown, Iowa of which he was the star, to join a professional one -- the Chicago White Stockings. He had been scouted by Manager Ada C. "Pop" Anson because of his running ability. Sunday stayed with the White Stockings until 1888, when he went on to Pittsburgh and later to Philadelphia (1891). He played outfield, usually center.
It was while he was playing for Chicago that he committed his life to Christ. In the autumn of 1886, he was walking in Chicago with some friends when he stopped to listen to a gospel band on a street corner playing and singing hymns. He left his friends to follow the band to the Pacific Garden Mission on Van Buren Street. As he later said, ". . . I turned and left that little group on the corner of State and Madison, walked to the little mission, went on my knees, and staggered out of sin and into the arms of the Savior." (T.T. Frankenberg, Billy Sunday, His Tabernacles and Sawdust Trails. Columbus, Ohio, 1917. p. 62.)
He was already or very soon afterwards began courting Helen Amelia Thompson. Helen, also known as Nell, had been born June 25, 1868. She was the daughter of William and Ellen (Binnie) Thompson. Her father was a farmer who later moved the family into Chicago when Helen was a baby. In the city he became a prosperous manufacturer and distributer of ice cream. She was the second of five children, her siblings including Jennie, Ada and William. Billy and Helen apparently met at a Christian Endeavor social sponsored by the Jefferson Park Presbyterian Church. After some initial objections from Helen's father, they were married September 5, 1888.
Sunday made it a practice to give talks for young men on Christian living in cities his team was visiting. He also worked in his spare time for the Chicago YMCA. He attended Evanston Academy of Northwestern University for a short time during the winter of 1887-1888, under an agreement by which he coached the school's baseball team in return for his tuition. Some of his classes were in rhetoric and this indicated the direction in which Sunday's mind was turning. In 1891, he quit baseball and entered full-time Christian service as a worker at Chicago's YMCA. Among other duties, he taught some classes in Bible reading and personal evangelism.
In 1893, Sunday began working as an advance representative and general helper for evangelist J. Wilbur chapman. He also occasionally worked with another evangelist, Milan B. Williams. After Chapman had accepted the pastorate of a church in Philadelphia, Sunday began holding his own evangelistic campaigns, starting with in Garner, Iowa, in January of 1896. He was licensed to preach by the Presbyterian Church in 1898 and ordained by the same in 1903.
After several years of holding meetings, mostly in small midwestern towns, Sunday's fame began to spread nationwide and he received invitations to the larger cities of the United States. The structure of his meetings gradually became highly organized and often involved hundreds of local workers as well as the dozen or more specialists whom Sunday brought with him and partially paid himself. From about 1908 on, Helen Sunday was in effect the general manager of the campaigns and had final control over almost all parts of the work, including finances and the hiring and firing of staff. Billy Sunday's style of preaching won him an enormous amount of newspaper exposure, as did the enthusiasm with which his campaigns were received. He used colorful, slangy language and entertained and instructed his audiences with mimicry, impersonations, as well as memorable epigrams and anecdotes. His messages laid great stress on every human being's need for personal salvation through Jesus Christ and on the authority and reliability of the Bible. He was also a strong critic of alcoholic beverages and favored their prohibition in his most famous sermon, Get on the Water Wagon. He was a popular speaker on the Chautauqua lecture circuit as well.
In 1911, when Sunday was entering into the period of his greatest fame, he and Helen had a home built in Winona Lake, Indiana. By that time, all four of their children had been born: Helen Edith (1890), George Marquis (1892), William Ashley, Jr. (1901) and Paul Thompson (1907). When Mrs. Sunday was away for an evangelistic campaign, the children were usually taken care of by the family housekeeper, Nora Lynn. Miss Lynn stayed with the Sunday household until her death in 1930. It was probably also during the 1910s that the Sundays bought their ranch on the Hood River in Oregon.
In 1917, Sunday held a lengthy evangelistic campaign in New York City which is generally considered the zenith of his career. He was also deeply involved in support of the American war effort: helping to sell war bonds, speaking on the need to save food and fuel, and vigorously encouraging young men to enlist. Sunday, throughout his career, was a critic of American moral laxity and an unabashed admirer of American civilization.
It was also during 1917 that Rev. Sunday's first book was published, Love Stories of the Bible, and the short lived Ma Sunday's Column apparently appeared in papers across the nation. The latter were short vignettes from everyday life used to point up moral lessons.
For most of his ministry, Sunday had vocal critics as well as defenders. Like famous evangelists who preceded him, he was taken to task by liberal church leaders for being too simplistic in his theology, while others insisted that he placed too much emphasis on individual piety and salvation at the expense of social reform. Some ministers who participated in his campaigns complained that they received little benefit from the meetings because those who came forward already belonged to churches or had only a vague idea of what Sunday was asking them to commit themselves. Secular journalists, such as John Reed and George Creel, accused Sunday of being a tool used by the ruling elite to defuse lower class discontent. The suspicion was often expressed or inferred in newspapers that Sunday was little more than a grafter getting wealthy from his temporary congregations. Supporters, however, disagreed that Sunday's meetings did not produce results, denied any personal dishonesty on his part, and dismissed criticisms of his theology since the criticisms were based on a world view and understanding of Christ's gospel very different than Sunday's.
Large scale evangelistic campaigns received much less national attention after the first world war. However they continued to be an important of the life of fundamentalist and pentecostal churches. Sunday was affected by a parallel decrease in his national exposure and influence, although until his death he never lacked invitations to speak and hold campaigns. Besides leading meetings, Sunday spent much of his time defending the constitutional amendment on the prohibition of alcoholic beverage and fighting its repeal. He was involved as well in the management of the Winona Bible Conference (later Winona Institutions and later the Winona Christian Assembly). Personal troubles such as the well publicized difficulties and divorces of his sons, George Marquis and William Ashley, added great sorrow and financial difficulties of his later years. He suffered greatly from major illnesses in 1918, 1933, and the early part of 1935. Other trials were the death of his daughter, Helen, in 1932, and his son, George Marquis, in 1933, an apparent suicide. Throughout most of 1935, he was in poor health and for this reason was unable to attend the ceremony at Bob Jones College at which a Doctor of Divinity degree was conferred upon him. (He had also received a Doctor of Laws degree from Westmont College in 1912.) He died November 5 of that year in Chicago from a heart attack. His memorial service was held at Moody Church in Chicago on November 9.
Mrs. Sunday began an active ministry shortly after her husband's death. She traveled extensively throughout the country helping to raise money for rescue missions and similar Christian institutions, addressing youth rallies, serving on the boards of the Winona Christian Assembly and Bob Jones University (from which she received an honorary LLD in 1938), and giving talks on her husband's career and influence. In the early fifties, she spoke at some of Billy Graham's crusades as well as those of other evangelists. She traveled out of the country on a pleasure trip to Europe in 1937 and again in 1952 on a trip to Quito, Ecuador, to attend the ceremonies celebrating the twenty-fifth anniversary of the Voice of the Andes radio station. As with her husband, family problems and sickness (she had a heart attack in 1948) added sorrow to the last decade of her life. She died February 20, 1957, on a visit to her grandson, Paul Haines, who was living in Arizona. Both William and Helen were buried near Helen's parents in the Forest Home Cemetery, just outside of Chicago.
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