Billy Graham Center
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Dr. Lois Roughan Ferm
1918-2009
Memorial Page


Biography

Full name Lois Roughan Ferm
Birth February 5, 1918, in New York
Death November 29, 2009, in North Carolina
Family
  Parents Laurence and Bertha Roughan
Marital Status Robert O. Ferm, married in 1941
  Children Lois Esther Mitchell, Rebecca Ann Dodson, Paul Robert, Stephen John
Education
... 1939 B.A. from Houghton College
... 1955 M.A. from University of Michigan
... 1973 Ph.D. from the University of Minnesota (Dissertation: "Student Characteristics and Environments for Learning in Wesleyan College")
Career
... 1952-1964 Taught at high school in New York and Minnesota; taught at John Brown University, Houghton College (where she became the chairman of the Department of Education), and the University of Minnesota; served as Director of Admissions at Brenau College
... 1964-2004 Bob Ferm had been an assistant to Billy Graham for several years when Lois also began assisting on various projects. She joined the staff full-time in 1970, working as Graham's Personal Assistant and Resource Coordinator; her duties included serving as the BGEA's liaison to the Billy Graham Center Archives. (Later, she served for some years as the librarian of the Billy Graham Training Center at The Cove, near Asheville, North Carolina.) She also served on the administrative committees of numerous individual BGEA evangelistic campaigns and traveled extensively in Europe, Australia, and Japan. She also attended the North American Congress on Evangelism, Minneapolis (1970); the European Congress on Evangelism, Amsterdam (1971); the International Congress on World Evangelism, Lausanne, Switzerland (1974); and the International Conferences for Itinerant Evangelists in 1983 and 1986 and Amsterdam 2000.

One of her most significant contributions was as an oral historian. Starting in 1970 and continuing until 2004, she recorded thousands of hours of interviews with people involved in the the work of the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association. Besides taping sessions with most longtime BGEA staff people and family and friends of Billy Graham, she also talked with people who had been involved in one or more of hundreds upon hundreds of individual rallies, campaigns, and congresses that Billy Graham and/or the BGEA have held around the world since 1946 . Her recordings of interviews captured and preserved for future generations many memories of Christian ministry and the blessings of God that would have otherwise been lost.

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Last Revised: 11/30/2009
Expiration: indefinite

© Wheaton College 2009