Personal Life
Roberts was married to Evelyn Lutman Fahnestock (April 22, 1917 - May 4, 2005) for 66 years from December 25, 1938 until her death from a fall at the age of 88. Their daughter Rebecca Nash died in an airplane crash on February 11, 1977 with her husband, businessman Marshall Nash. Their elder son, Ronald Roberts, committed suicide by shooting himself in the heart on 10 June 1982, five months after receiving a court order to undergo counseling at a drug treatment center and six months after coming out as gay. The other two Roberts children are son Richard, an evangelist and former president of Oral Roberts University (ORU), and daughter Roberta Potts, an attorney. Roberts' gay grandson, Randy Roberts Potts, talked about his uncle Ronald Roberts, and wrote an article discussing growing up gay in the Oral Roberts family.
Oral Roberts died on December 15, 2009 at the age of 91. He had been "semi-retired" and living in Newport Beach, California.
According to a 1987 article in the New York Review of Books by Martin Gardner, the "most accurate and best documented biography is Oral Roberts: An American Life, an objective study by David Edwin Harrell Jr., a historian at Auburn University. Two out-of-print books take a more critical stance: James Morris' The Preachers (St. Martin's Press, 1973) and Jerry Sholes' Give Me That Prime-Time Religion (Hawthorn, 1979)."
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