He was born in New Orleans in 1912, one of ten children in a house he described as shrouded in darkness. He quit school at thirteen to support the family, so he lacked even a grammar school education. He spoke with a stutter. He gambled, he drank, and he spent his Sundays playing semiprofessional baseball alongside men who went on to the Major League.
Then, on New Year’s Eve 1937, walking downtown to a celebration, he stopped halfway and could not take another step. He turned around and went home.
He taught himself to read and write well enough to enter seminary. He corrected the stutter through what he called vigorous training. He preached for the next sixty years, and in time led almost his entire family to Christ.
Read his account of it in his own words
What he left
Scanned from the typed originals, book by book and occasion by occasion.
29 documentsRecordingsSermons, readings, and the service his family held in 2000.
8 recordingsThoughts for wise livingEleven thousand short thoughts, typed in his later years.
5 volumesHis voice
There are three and a half hours of recordings here: sermons preached in Louisiana and Tennessee, Henry reading his own writing aloud, and the service his family held after his death in 2000.
That last recording holds things written down nowhere else. One of the men who speaks describes how Henry took in three children who had lost their father and raised them as his own.
The notes
He typed his sermons on whatever paper he could get, often salvaged letterhead, then folded and cut the pages with scissors so they would sit inside his Bible. More than a thousand of them survive, along with eleven thousand short thoughts he typed in his later years, some of them after a stroke.