When I was a kid, we saw a little of him on TV, with the hand-on-head routine, hollering "heal" as if assuming God was deaf. Don't know why we even saw that much of him; my folks were devout Christians, but they didn't buy that stuff. The last I really heard of him was sometime in the '80's, when he announced that God had told him that he (Oral, not God) would die if people didn't send in a certain number of millions to his "ministries". Somewhere along then he saw Jesus standing 900 feet tall over Tulsa. I'm not certain that he was the very first popular televangelist, but to the best of my knowledge he would have been. I have yet to see one who impressed me as anything close to a worthy representative of Christianity.