Actor Alan Alda exhibits what he calls his “very strange form” in a Central Park touch-football game that won him the Plimpton part in Paper Lion.

In 1963, Sports Illustrated journalist George Plimpton wanted to write a piece on what it was like to be an NFL quarterback. He convinced the Detroit Lions management to let him attend training camp undercover, pretending to try out for a spot as a third-string quarterback.

In 1968, future M*A*S*H star Alan Alda played George Plimpton in the Stuart Millar film Paper Lion chronicling Plimpton’s experience as he learned the sport, bonded with the players, and experienced the roughness of the game firsthand. Alda wrote about his own experience during the filmmaking for the Post‘s November 16, 1968, issue. Read the full story here.

Famous Contributors: Alan Alda The Saturday Evening Post

Lucian Cary looked through the spotting scope to discover his first shot was a bull's-eye.

Writer Lucian Cary didn’t think he was a “gun crank.” He simply had an enthusiasm for rifle shooting, like other people had for golf, fly fishing, or antique collecting. The difference, Cary assured Post readers in 1935, was that his was “a reasonable enthusiasm. …  I do not go in for collecting guns. I never buy a gun unless I really need it. As a matter of fact, I really need a dozen, or say 14, more guns than I have now.”

If he were writing today, Cary might be denying he was a “gun nut”—a term that has gathered some ugly connotations that crank never had. But if you step back from all the political and psychological analyses about gun collectors, you might see there’s little difference between gun nuts and enthusiasts in other fields: all the geeks, devotees, fanciers, wonks, and nerds of our population. There is small difference between the people who fuss over different grades of gunpowder and those who fuss over different database software.

American enthusiasts—whether car restorers, bird watchers, or quilters—are fascinated by details, technique, and different styles. They endlessly tinker with equipment and methods, always trying to make some improvement. They are the tinkerers who gave us radio and TV technology; the inexpensive family sedan and high-performance sports car; the Internet, microbrewed beers, and fantasy baseball.

And, in the 18th century, they were the people who developed the American longrifle, also known as the Kentucky rifle. It was an improvement on the musket and greatly improved the survival odds of the early country and its pioneers.

A traditional rifle of that time required its shooter to literally hammer his bullet into the breech before firing. The Yankee innovation was a greased patch of cloth or buckskin, which was pushed in front of the bullet and into the barrel. In a 1955 article, “All American Weapon,” Ashley Halsey Jr. explained that the greased patch filled the grooves, eased the bullet down, and partly cleaned the barrel when fired out of it.

This innovation made it possible to build rifles with long, slender barrels that didn’t have to endure hammering. “The longer barrel helped the bullet to pick up more speed before leaving the gun. Hence a smaller bullet delivered about the same wallop as the slower, bigger ones then in use. … The smaller bullet required only about a fourth as much lead to make, and half as much powder to shoot, both precious savings in the backwoods,” Halsey wrote.

During the Revolution, General Washington was delighted to find recruits with long rifles who could hit an 8-by-10-inch sheet of paper at 1,300 feet. But they were scarce. Most soldiers of the time used smooth-bore muskets, which were easier to load, though not nearly as accurate. Occasionally a long-barrel marksman might decide a battle by picking off a British general who thought he was safely out of range. The accuracy of the long rifle soon became legendary and proved to have a psychological power as great as its hitting power, as Halsey wrote.

“[A British general was outraged] that certain uncouth American frontiersmen, who wore their shirttails hanging out down to their knees, picked off his sentries and officers at outlandishly long ranges. Forthwith, the general ordered the capture of one specimen, each of the marksmen, and his gun. A raiding party dragged back Cpl. Walter Crouse, of York County, Pennsylvania, with his long rifle. At that point, the British … made a psychological blunder. They shipped their specimen rifleman to London. … Crouse, commanded to demonstrate his remarkable gun in public, daily hit targets at 200 yards—four times the practical range of the smoothbore military flintlock of the day. Enlistments faded away, so the story goes, and King George III hurriedly hired Hessian rifle companies to fight marksmanship with marksmanship.”

In the War of 1812, the Kentucky rifle had a chance to prove what it could do in battle when used in significant numbers. On January 8, 1915, outside New Orleans, Andrew Jackson threw together an army of soldiers, militiamen, pirates, and about 2,000 Kentucky and Tennessee woodsmen to meet men a British force twice its size. When the assault began, the American artillery opened fire but was unable to break the charge. Then, Halsey wrote, “the 2000 Kentuckians and Tennesseans, standing four deep, began taking turns with their long rifles. … At less than 200 yards, the advancing redcoat ranks melted away. … The British lost more than 2,000 killed and wounded; the Americans, eight killed and thirteen wounded. Scarcely ever have battle losses been more lopsided.”

Long after the war, the Kentucky rifle continued to prove its worth. Its incredible accuracy let pioneers and farmers hit predators and game at the very edge of visibility. As Lucian Cary explained, the long rifle meant survival in the wilderness to men like Daniel Boone and the settlers who followed him. “How could Boone have done what he did if he had carried an English Brown Bess, with its smoothbore, its heavy bullets, and its inability to hit what it was aimed at, instead of the instrument of precision he had? He lived by the rifle. He couldn’t have lived by a blunderbuss.”

In 1941, Cary’s fascination with rifles brought him to Friendship, Indiana, to the national shooting championship of the National Muzzle Loading Rifle Association. Here, he was surrounded by gun cranks even more fanatic than himself. And he marveled at the techniques of the champion marksmen.

“Rifle matches are as hotly fought as any other kind of contest. But rifle shooters make every effort to remain calm. They don’t want to talk when they are in a match. They don’t want to laugh or hear anybody else laugh. If they have any walking to do, they walk slowly. They don’t want to raise their heartbeats. They know that one mistake, one bad shot, will make all the difference between a good score and a poor one.

“Their sport requires its own special kind of nerve, the nerve to wait under pressure, to resist the natural human impulse to snatch at the trigger as the sights swing fast across the bull, to hold until the gun steadies, slows down, edges toward the center, and then, promptly but without haste, to put the last necessary quarter-ounce pressure on that trigger.”

Great marksmanship, as Cary described it, sounded like Zen mastery. “When everything is going well, the gun seems to fire itself. But it won’t do that for a man who is excited, or even for one who is trying too hard.”

This week, the National Muzzle Loading Rifle Association will again hold its annual championship in Friendship, Indiana, as it has since 1933. Perhaps the event hasn’t changed much in the 71 years since Cary described it “as American as a church sociable, or the Fourth of July, or a horseshoe-pitching contest, and reminded me of all three.” But it will probably still give enthusiasts the opportunity to debate powder, shot, barrel riflings, and shooting technique; in other words, that American mixture of innovation built on tradition.

Gun Cranks and the Spirit of Innovation The Saturday Evening Post

Thank you for a balanced, thoughtful and insightful piece. I believe that, even with Normandy, Iwo and the Bulge, the Canal was the seminal moment, the tipping point, for our victory in the Pacific, a war we (the United States) won alone. As a combat veteran and the son of a WW2 veteran I sincerely thank you.

Respectfully,

– CWO2 Stephen A. (USAFA, Ret.)

Paul A. Nilsson, Col., US Army, as a Captain in Guadalcanal.

I wrote this piece in memory of one of those Army engineers who endured the Japanese suicide attacks, and the bombings every night, huddled in a watery trench in the jungle, waiting for dawn and another day of fixing the holes in Henderson Field.

He was one of the fortunate ones who survived, though he was eventually shipped stateside after contracting malaria and dengue fever and losing over a third of his weight. I know almost nothing of what he experienced. Like many World War II veterans, he would never speak of what he saw or endured to his sons.

Regarding “A Turning Point in the Solomons” The Saturday Evening Post

This August marks the 70th anniversary of the assault on Guadalcanal.

But in early August, the U.S. began its offensive in the Solomon Islands, northeast of Australia. On the morning of August 7, 1942, the U.S. Marines made their first amphibious landing in 44 years at Guadalcanal.

The Japanese had landed on the island in June and started building an airfield.

Before the Japanese were finally forced to evacuate the island in early 1943, a total of 48 warships had been sunk. Ashore the Japanese lost 24,000 men; the U.S., 1,752.

When completed, it would enable their bombers to push the U.S. and Australia out of the Solomons and even strike the Australian mainland.

Samuel Eliot Morison was the official naval historian at the time, and had already begun writing the complete naval history of World War II. By the time he finished his 15-volume account, he had studied every naval engagement of the war. This is what he said about Guadalcanal in an article written on July 28, 1962, in the Post:

“You may search the seven seas in vain for an ocean graveyard with the wrecks of so many ships and the bones of so many sailors as that body of water between Guadalcanal, Savo and Florida islands which our bluejackets called Ironbottom Sound.

“There is something sinister and depressing about that Sound. [The marines] who rounded Cape Esperance in the darkness before dawn on 7 August remembered, ‘it gave you the creeps.’ Even the land smell failed to cheer sailors who had been long at sea; Guadalcanal gave out a rank, heavy stench of mud, slime, and jungle. And the serrated cone of Savo Island looked as sinister as the crest of a giant dinosaur emerging from the ocean depths.”

Marine LTVs approached neighboring island Tulagi.

The U.S. forces were understandably intimidated.  “The Japanese army in Malaya, the Philippines, and Java had acquired a reputation of invincibility, especially in jungle fighting, and its losses so far were minute. Their navy, despite its defeat at Midway, still had plenty of ships and planes to throw into the Solomons.” Fortunately, the Marine landing at Guadalcanal and neighboring Tulagi went well. By 4:00 PM, they had seized the unfinished airfield.

“Things looked very bright for the Expeditionary Force. Then, shortly after midnight, [began] the worst defeat in a fair fight ever inflicted on the United States Navy.” A Japanese task force of seven cruisers and one destroyer descended upon the Expeditionary Force, shot up the landing craft, and left the Marines without their naval supply line. Proceeding on to Savo island, they attacked first the Australian, then the American ships. Miscommunication, bad luck, poor judgment, and the element of surprise combined to give the Japanese a sizeable victory.

Japanese bombers attacked the American squadron off Guadalcanal.

“It was not a decisive battle and not an unprofitable defeat,” wrote Morison, “although the cost was heavy—four heavy cruisers and one destroyer a total loss; 1270 officers and men killed and 709 wounded. … The Navy held an investigation, which found the blame so evenly distributed that nobody was punished.  And it is well that Admiral Turner, primarily to blame, was not put ‘on the beach,’ because he became the leading practitioner of amphibious warfare in the Pacific. Many lessons were learned from this disastrous battle.”

As so often before, America’s entry into the war was marked by costly mistakes. Not being a warrior nation, we start each conflict with a civilian attitude and a reliance on what worked in the last war, and we are handed defeats. Fortunately, the American military always learns from these mistakes.

Smoke rose from a burning American ship in Savo Bay.

At night, the Marines threw back repeated suicide attacks by the Japanese garrison. In the morning, Army engineers began to repair the bombing damage to Henderson airfield so vital supplies could be flown in.

Marines operated a howitzer near Mount Austen on Guadalcanal, sketched by Sgt. Howard Brodie.

“Ship losses were fairly balanced; two American light cruisers and four destroyers against two Japanese destroyers and a battleship. … But the enemy bombardment mission was completely frustrated.”

The Grumman F4 at Henderson Field.

America didn’t know it was a turning point in the war. Military planners worried that every island battle across the Pacific would be just as long and bloody. But in 1962, Morison could point to Guadalcanal as “a definite shift of America from defensive to offensive, and of Japan in the opposite direction. Fortune now, for the first time, smiled on the Allies everywhere: not only here but in North Africa, at Stalingrad, and in Papua.”

Marines at rest in a Guadalcanal field, November 1942.

Credit for victory in the Solomons should be given to over 80,000 Allied soldiers who fought there, and especially the 10,000 who died. But just as valuable as their fierce devotion and sacrifice was America’s readiness to learn from mistakes, to bring in better commanders, and to continue fighting when the grim price seemed too high. It was this spirit that prompted Winston Churchill to say, in 1942, “Now this is not the end. It is not even the beginning of the end. But it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning.”

A Turning Point in the Solomons The Saturday Evening Post

Classic Olympic Images from the Post The Saturday Evening Post

In celebration of this versatile actor’s life, below is an abridged version of writer Dean Jennings’ 1955 article, which was published in the Post just eight months before Borgnine won the Oscar for his performance in Marty. To read or download the entire article, click here.

August 27, 1955—In a rented bungalow on a side street in North Hollywood there lives a 215-pound, bearish man who started life with the improbable name of Ermes Effron Borgnine.

Variously called “Ernie,” “Duke” or even “Bugs,” he is a shaggy-haired, paunchy man of thirty-eight with a relief-map face that is not apt to raise the blood pressure of young, lovelorn maidens. He drives an old car, and wears ready-made suits. His conception of pleasure and comfort is to sprawl on the floor every night with a can of cold beer, and gape at his television set. His wife picks out his neckties, and his closest friends are a plumber and an insurance salesman.

He has a tendency to doze off in soft chairs after a heavy meal. When his wife is out, he doggedly mops the floors, cooks up a batch of spaghetti or yaks over the back fence with the neighbors. He doesn’t know any movie stars, and when he sees one he is likely to feel self-conscious. Thus, except for his size, he is more or less the average man.

It is surprising and perhaps a little aggravating to some that plain and homely Ernest Borgnine is already being mentioned for an Academy Award as the result of a classic performance he gave as a kind but bumbling butcher in “Marty,” a picture which won the Cannes Film Festival award last spring.

No one in Hollywood can put a definitive finger on the elusive quality that makes Borgnine’s villains so remarkably real. When he impales a man on a pitchfork in “Violent Saturday” the fury shows in his eyes, and the customers gasp and recoil in their seats. In “Bad Day at Black Rock” he forces Spencer Tracy’s jeep over a cliff, and his face has the chilly blankness of every murderer since Cain.

Actually Borgnine is an intensely shy, sensitive, and often lonely man who is never satisfied with his work, and who is not convinced that he has great talent.” Ernie’s just a big St. Bernard who wants to be patted,” one acquaintance says. But among his nonprofessional friends the feeling persists that his screen violence is really a safety valve for a rebellious nature.

[However] Borgnine is not entirely subdued and permits himself an occasional outburst. Some time ago, while he was pacing the floor in his New York apartment and trying to memorize a role, a pianist began pounding the keys in an adjoining flat. The walls were thin, and with each fortissimo Borgnine stepped up his furious pacing. His patience finally ran out and with a mighty swing he drove his fist through the apartment wall. The startled pianist fled to the safety of the street. Borgnine later fibbed to his wife, Rhoda, that he had fallen off a ladder, and it was more than a year before he sheepishly told her the truth.

“Ernie has always learned the hard way,” says [his agent] Paul Wilkins, “but he doesn’t make the same mistake twice. When he first came to Hollywood, my secretary called him one morning and told him he had fifteen minutes to be at Columbia on a rush call. ‘Well,’ Ernie told her, ‘you advise Mr. Wilkins for me that I have no car, and if he wants me at the studio he’d better come and get me.’ I called him right back. ‘Look, boy,’ I said, ‘ I’m not a cab company. It’s tough enough for an agent to get jobs for actors without having to carry them there too. Let’s get that straight right now.’ Ernie was silent for a moment and finally said, ‘Oh, I guess you’re right.’ He was at Columbia in fifteen minutes and he got the part.”

Borgnine himself can laugh at these once-thorny episodes now and credits an old friend, a New Haven plumber named Joe Simone, with providing the Philosophical clincher. Not long ago he and Joe were driving along a country road in the latter’s car, which, as Borgnine puts it, was “rattling and shaking like a bucket of bolts.” “Joey, Joey!” Borgnine protested. ”How can you stand all that terrible noise? Aren’t you afraid the heap will fall apart?”

“No,” said Joe. “I just turn up the radio louder.”

[His career began when his mother] said casually one day, “you always liked making a darn fool out of yourself. Why don’t you take up acting?”

Borgnine still considers her proposal a provocative non sequitur. He went along with her quaint reasoning, took his GI benefits and enrolled in the Randall School of Drama at Hartford. On his first day in class, he was asked to read aloud a passage containing the word “diamonds.”

“Mr. Borgnine,” the teacher scowled, “how did you pronounce that word?”

“Dimonds,” he grinned.

“The word, Mr. Borgnine, is d-i-a-m-o-n-d-s. Pronounced dye-a-monds.”

Borgnine’s blurting reaction to that was a common cuss word frequently heard aboard cruisers and destroyers.

The classroom rocked, but the teacher didn’t blink. ” Mr. Borgnine,” she said, “if you apply such strong feeling and pronunciation to all your reading, you will have no trouble as an actor.”

To download the full version click here.

“From Here To Eternity” The Saturday Evening Post

Photo by The Obama-Biden Transition Project, via Wikimedia Commons

We’ll try not to make too much about it, but the basic fact is undeniable:

A 1958 article from The Saturday Evening Post is responsible for President Barack Obama’s father coming to the United States. If it hadn’t been for this article, Obama’s father might never have come to this country; he certainly wouldn’t have met his American wife; and his son—our president—would never have been born.

What was so special about this magazine article?

Not so much on the face of it. It was a travel story about Hawaii. It began as just another assignment for Frank J. Taylor—one of 82 articles he wrote for the Post. His idea was to cover the 50th anniversary of the University of Hawaii, and get some vacation time in his beloved Hawaii.

As David Maraniss points out in his book Barack Obama: The Story (Simon and Schuster, 2012), Editor Ben Hibbs approved the story. “I think it will make a rather unusual education piece for us,” he told Taylor.

These coeds represented only a few of the Islands

Betty Mooney, who ran the library, read the article and passed it along to a Kenyan student, Barack Obama, the father of the man who would become the future president. She knew Obama was interested in studying in America, but was worried about racial unrest in the states. The University of Hawaii, as described by Taylor, seemed an ideal alternative.

From his first paragraph, Taylor emphasized the multicultural atmosphere the University nurtured. Following is an excerpt:

The physical setting itself is picturesque enough, but what really sets the University of Hawaii apart is the multi-racial make-up of its student body.

Physicist Walter Steiger lectures in an aloha shirt.

Because the undergraduates come from so many different racial strains, new students were for some years asked on the entrance blank to indicate their ethnic background—Polynesian (Hawaiian or otherwise), Caucasian, Chinese, Japanese, Korean or Filipino.

Every so often, however, a card would turn up on which a student had checked not one, but perhaps four or five of the races named. At first the registrar suspected undergraduate levity, but upon making cautious inquiry, he discovered it was nothing of the kind. Some students were indeed a blend of several races.

The university rose to the occasion. It added a new race, Cosmopolitan, and stopped keeping records of racial background.

Beach party at Waikiki. The hula is basic training for island-raised girls, and many of the coeds are experts.

The students, however, found the idea of a seventh race much too good to pass up, and the Cosmopolitan category is perpetuated in an annual … beauty contest staged by the editors of the student yearbook.

As the happy Hawaiians see it, only a campus insensible to the finer things of life would settle for a single beauty queen when there’s a perfectly good excuse to have seven of them in a row.

Accordingly, the … contest elects a separate queen for each of the seven different racial groups.

These campus-queen contests … on what is known locally as the Rainbow Campus, help point up the fact that the university’s 6,700 day students, plus 7,000 adults in night classes, in effect, bridge the Pacific racially.

The University had also been successful in building a diverse faculty.

Caption from 1958: "Few other campuses offer such exotic extracurricular activities as sailing off Diamond Head in February."

These latter students proved to be intent on their studies.

Students in the Sinclair library.

Indeed, the university’s students are such dedicated scholars that the faculty worries about them and conspires to divert them from book learning now and then.”In mainland colleges, you’re always putting the brakes on student exuberance,” explained Susan Daniels, the lively New Englander who supervises student activities. “Out here it’s just the opposite. It is such a cherished privilege to have an education that these young people have to be prodded into having fun.”

Obama, Sr., was duly impressed. A magazine article had pointed to a unique educational opportunity. He enrolled at the University of Hawaii in 1959. In 1960, he met Stanley Ann Dunham. They married in 1961. Their son, Barack Obama II, was born in Honolulu in 1961 and, 47 years later, was sworn in as the 44th president.

We’re all aware that the Post is an influential magazine. But sometimes the magnitude of its influence stuns even those of us who work here!

The Post Produces a President The Saturday Evening Post

“I Wish I Could Be Like Andy Taylor. He’s Nicer.” The Saturday Evening Post

This June 6, 1953, article tracks cooling technology from its public debut in movie palaces (not a resounding success: cold air piped through holes in the floor forced dust into the air, only to settle on moviegoers’ faces) to the new trend of room coolers (99 percent of homes at the time had none) to futuristic dreams of shopping centers with air-conditioned and roofed “streets” between rows of stores.

Here’s the whole story:

We Were There First: Air Conditioning The Saturday Evening Post

“The magazine came out every week, and I would pick up my bundle at the grocery store after school,” Gordon wrote of his newsboy days. “Some unknown, out-of-sight person had dropped these off earlier. I would guess I had 20 to 25 copies in the bundle. There was an equal number of customers waiting for me to hop on my bicycle and pedal perhaps three miles to cover the route. I liked that. Each copy sold for five cents. My profit came out of that.”

“The Nursemaid” by Norman Rockwell

"The Nursemaid"
from October 24, 1936

Growing up in Grand Rapids, Michigan, Gordon had early memories of the magazine. “I can remember my mother tearing off the covers of The Saturday Evening Post over the years — those illustrated by Norman Rockwell, and saving them. She told me, ‘Gordon, each one of these pictures has a complete story within them and you don’t need to read a single word.’”

Today, Mr. Thorpe resides in North Carolina where he loves to take his bike out on the American Tobacco Trail, so named as a tribute to the area’s agricultural and commercial heritage. Many of the cyclists have grown accustomed to seeing Gordon and enjoy stopping to chat with him. He used to ride the trail with his wife, but sadly, he lost her in September. Determined to stay active, Gordon says, “I get up and go by myself now.” The World War II veteran also swims a mile every morning.

Gordon’s bike is a Trek 4700 hybrid his family presented to him on his 80th birthday. An article on the Rails to Trials Conservancy website describes what his supportive family did for his 90th:

“I had no idea,” Gordon says. “We were out on the trail together, and I say, “Look, they’ve put a new bench in.” So my son says, ‘Why don’t we stop?’ I started reading the little bronze plaque, and that’s when I realized.” Reading the inscription aloud, Thorpe seems genuinely touched by the gesture to build the seat, which took months of careful planning between the family and county workers.

“That’s the part I like best: ‘keep on riding,’” Thorpe says.

“I still subscribe to The Saturday Evening Post,” he says, “and when I am through with each issue I send it to my daughter.”

His delivery days were over within two or three years. “When I reached 15, my interest changed from The Saturday Evening Post to girls.”

Keep on riding, Gordon!

Know a former Post newsboy? We would love to feature them on our website! Email Diana Denny.

Photos provided by Gordon’s son, Jim Thorpe.

Post Newsboys: Still Riding! The Saturday Evening Post

This week’s Cover–50, 75, and 100 Years Ago The Saturday Evening Post

In the 61 years since then, this remarkable man has inspired a growing number of admirers. After his death, the Army recognized his service with a Bronze Star and Distinguished Service Cross. Today, he is being considered for the Medal of Honor by the President and for canonization by the Vatican.

The Post acquainted its readers with him in 1954, when it carried Ray M. Dowe, Jr.’s account of “The Ordeal of Chaplain Kapaun.” Dowe had been in the same prison, and knew how the Captain’s self-sacrifice had helped save the lives of many GIs.

Even before his internment, Dowe said, Father Kapaun had become a legend. He visited front-line troops on an old bicycle after his jeep was destroyed.

Helmet jammed down over his ears, pockets stuffed with apples and peaches he had scrounged from Korean orchards, he’d ride this bone-shaker over the rocky roads and the paths through the paddy fields until he came to the forward outposts. There he’d drop in a shallow hole beside a nervous rifleman, crack a joke or two, hand him a peach, say a little prayer with him and move on to the next hole.

It was his devotion to the wounded that finally cost him his freedom, and his life.

On November 2, 1950, the 8^th Cavalry was encircled by Communist troops at Unsan. The soldiers were ordered to get past the enemy as best they could and regroup behind American lines.

Father Kapaun, who was unwounded, might have escaped with them. He refused to go. Of his own free will he stayed on, helping Captain Clarence L. Anderson, the regimental surgeon, take care of the wounded. And there, just at dark, the Chinese took him as he said the last prayers over a dying man.

Kapaun and Dowe were marched to a prison camp where they were barely kept alive on 500 grams of millet or cracked corn every day.

Korea 1950: An exhausted soldier is evacuated by Capt. Jerome Dolan and Chaplain Kaplaun.

Then they cut it down to 450 grams. It was obvious, Father said, that we must either steal food or slowly starve. And in that dangerous enterprise we must have the help of some power beyond ourselves. So, standing before us all, he said a prayer to St. Dismas, the Good Thief, who was crucified at the right hand of Jesus, asking for his aid. I’ll never doubt the power of prayer again. Father, it seemed, could not fail.

At the risk of being shot by the guards, he’d sneak at night into the little fields around the compound… and find hidden potatoes and grain.

When men were called out to [the supply shed] Father would slip in at the end of the line [then] slide off into the bushes… He’d come up behind the shed, and while the rest of us started a row with the guards doling out the rations, he’d sneak in, snatch up a sack of cracked corn and scurry off into the bushes with it.

Father Kapaun took his greatest risks, Dowe said, to slip away with food and supplies to the isolated house where the wounded were kept.

He scrounged cotton undershirts to make bandages. He took their old bandages, foul with corruption, and sneaked them out and washed them and sneaked them back again. He picked the lice from their bodies, an inestimable service, for a man so weak he cannot pick his own lice soon will die.

He joked with them, and said prayers for them, and held them in his arms like children as delirium came upon them. But the main thing he did for them was to put into their hearts the will to live. For when you are wounded and sick and starving, it’s easy to give up and quietly die.

He gathered and washed the foul undergarments of the dead and distributed them to men so weak from dysentery they could not move, and he washed and tended these men as if they were little babies.

He traded his watch for a blanket, and cut it up to make warm socks for helpless men whose feet were freezing.

He did a thousand little things to keep us going.

Inevitably, Kapaun fell victim to the starvation and harsh conditions that struck down so many of his comrades. Captain Anderson, the camp surgeon, nursed him through two serious illnesses. Kapaun had just recovered from them when he contracted pneumonia and fell into a delirious fever.

I believe that period of semiconsciousness was the only happy time he knew during his captivity. Around him there seemed to gather all the people he had known in his boyhood on the farm in Kansas and in his school days. Babbling happily, sometimes laughing, he spoke to his mother and his father, and to the priests he’d known in seminary.

Finally, he sank into a deep and quiet sleep, and when he awoke, he was completely rational. The crisis had passed. He was getting well.

He was sitting up, eating and cracking jokes, when the guards came with a litter to take him to the hospital [where] men in extremis were left to lie untended in filth and freezing cold, until merciful death took them.

The doctors protested violently, but the Chinese ordered Kapaun onto a stretcher and forbad anyone from going along to care for him.

Father himself made no protest. He looked around the room at all of us standing there, and smiled. He held in his hands the golden ciborium, the little covered cup in which, long ago, he had carried the blessed communion bread.

“Tell them back home that I died a happy death,” he said, and smiled again.

Then he turned to me. “Don’t take it hard, Mike,” he said. “I’m going where I’ve always wanted to go. And when I get up there, I’ll say a prayer for all of you.”

I stood there, crying unashamed, as they took him down the road, the little gold cup still shining in his hand. Beside me stood Fezi Gurgin, a Turkish lieutenant, a Mohammedan. “To Allah who is my God,” said Fezi Bey, “I will say a prayer for him.”

A few days later he was dead.

We hasten to add that Emil J. Kapaun, while a remarkable and inspiring individual, made no greater sacrifice than any of the 36,000 Americans who died in that war, or the hundreds of thousands who lost their lives defending this country.

All are heroes. All deserve to be remembered for the price they paid for our liberty.

Father Kapaun helping a wounded comrade. Statue located in Pilsen, Kansas. Image taken by Art Davis… Wikipedia

The Non-Combatant Hero: Emil Kapaun The Saturday Evening Post

From Our Archives: From Farm Boy to Financier The Saturday Evening Post

Continued from “The Familiar.”

At the same time, there’s a foreign ‘sense’ in the articles and illustrations a century ago.

It was an America where street corners were serenaded with hurdy-gurdy operators instead of saxophonists. An America that seemed to be continually shopping for socks (i.e., “hose”) and garters, straight-edged razors, long underwear, typewriters, and cigars.

It was an America with a sense of humor that included bit more of cruelty than we appreciate now. For example, this item—

When Fred Kelly first broke into Cleveland journalism he was put on police. One night he was sent to a big fire down on the flats. A reporter named Brown was sent with him. The fire was a ‘whale,’ and presently Brown disappeared. A wall had fallen and Kelly was sure Brown was under it. He rushed to the telephone and called up his city editor.

“Say!” he shouted into the telephone; “Brown is gone! He’s burned up!”

“What’s that?” asked the city editor.

“Brown is burned up, I tell you! He fell into the fire!”

“All right,” said the city editor, hanging up the telephone. “I’ll send down another man.”

There was a Fred C. Kelly who wrote for the Cleveland Plain Dealer in the 1900s. Perhaps it was considered funny because it actually happened.

Still.

May 25, 1912 — The Foreign The Saturday Evening Post

I looked at his hair. It was thick. It had a tendency to curl. It was exactly the right length — not too long, not too short. It wasn’t a butch through which his scalp showed pinkly. I envied him his hair and his even tan, every inch of which was exactly the same degree of darkness. There were no freckles, no peeling spots, I thought, figures that his hair should look right. He should know about such things. After all, fit’s the most famous barber since Delilah, although he abandoned his tonsorial trade about twenty-five years ago to sing for his living.

“I understand you’re a big man in the icechomping field,” I said to Perry Como. “I’m an ice eater myself, and it drives my wife to distraction. She says she can hear the echo of my molars all over the house. Does your dentist tell you it’s bad for your teeth when you crack a whole cube with one bite?”

Como looked cautiously around his office as if he were afraid it was bugged. “I’ve never told him,” he said in a low, conspiratorial voice.

“You mean he can’t tell by just looking into your mouth?” I asked.

“He’s preoccupied with some other dental problems of mine,” Como explained. “For eighteen years I’ve had a small space between my two front teeth. That was my Number One problem. It was a minor one. I acquired a major one many years ago when they drilled why you should know this, but once your teeth are ground and capped, they’re tender afterward. If you get a little cavity or decay on the uncapped part of the tooth, the dentist has to take the cap off, drill a little higher and put on another cap. Dentically speaking, I’ve been going through hell for eighteen years. In all honesty, I guess if I had laid off my ice-breaker bit, my teeth would be in pretty good shape.”

I said, “I’m curious about how you go about crunching ice with caps on.”

“Obviously my caps are made of concrete,” Como said, “I can polish off a whole bowl of ice in no time at all.” He thought for a moment, then added, “I’ll tell you why I think I’m an ice craver. When I play a lot of golf, as I frequently do, and it’s very hot, I perspire bucketfuls. I get dehydrated and I have to push that lost water back into my body, I’m not very big, but in one round of golf I can ooze between five and seven pounds.”

“On just an ordinary, peaceful, quiet day of golf?” I asked.

“It’s actually water. It’s bloat that vanishes.”

I said, “I understand that you play a very leisurely game of golf, a lazy game. So why all the perspiration?”

He smiled, confessing, “I can sweat like a herd of wild animals. My pores are wide open and ready to go any time. I’ll tell you a secret,” he went on, “I know your spies have told you that my rounds of golf aren’t strenuous, that I keep my eyes and ears open to the crunch of grass underfoot and the sound of birdsong as I journey around eighteen holes. They doubtless tell you also that I seem to relish these things so greatly that I play very slowly. Well, to use a sweet word instead of a crude one, that’s a lot of hooey. I may appear to loiter, but honestly I’m just as fast as anybody else on a golf course.” He thought of something and added, “With the exception of England. I really had a problem there. For some reason, British players hit the ball and run. Their wives may find them something less than volcanic at home, but put them down on a golf course, and it’s Balaklava and The Charge of the Light Brigade all over again. They charge at you like wild boars — polite wild boars, mind you, but if they want to play through you, if you’re smart, you let them play.”

I said, “The only English golf match I’ve ever seen was one played between Bob Hope and Bing Crosby for the Playing Fields of England Fund, They had to call it off on the fourth hole because they were driving their balls right down the spectators’ throats. Twelve or fifteen thousand people crowded onto the fairways until there weren’t any fairways; there were just masses of people.”

“I played in a few of those things myself,” Como said. “They’re fun until they start leaving you no room to play in. After that they’re murder.”

I said, “I helped Bob Hope write his story for The Saturday Evening Post. There are those who say he’s no good without his writers around him, but I can testify that there were many times when he said sidesplitting things to me on his own, without his writers thinking them up for him.”

“He’s a swifty with an ad lib,” Como agreed. “Hope’s played a lot of golf exhibitions for charity, and I’ve played with him on some of them. You gather together three or four characters like Hope, and ten or twenty thousand people are apt to turn out. When the galleries start lining up on the fairways until they leave only a long, narrow slit for you to drive through, it scares the hell out of you. You could kill a spectator if you hit him in the wrong spot.

“Most of the benefits I’ve played,” he went on, “have been for boys’ clubs or for such things as cerebral-palsy funds. I remember one day in Washington, D.C, when there were five of us—Hope and I, Ben Hogan, Ed Sullivan and Jimmy Demaret. Most of the people who’d come out to see us play weren’t golfers and knew no golf etiquette. They didn’t even have enough gumption to know they were in danger and get out of the way when Hope and Sullivan and I were shooting. Hogan and Demaret knew where their shots were going, but you can’t stand in front of Hope or me when we’re shooting without running a good chance of having a slice or a hook slam into you.

“That was the maddest day I can remember. Bob was flying in from somewhere with Jim Demaret. They were supposed to be there at one o’clock, but when they didn’t show up, Hogan gave the crowd a golf clinic.
He showed them how to hit some balls, then he explained his shots over a microphone to kill time. People were milling and trampling around out of hand, and I was hiding in the locker room. I wasn’t about to go out there and get flattened. Finally there was the sound of police-motorcycle sirens, and in came Hope.

“From the moment we teed off on the first hole, trying to play golf was ridiculous. By the time we got to where a ball had landed, it was gone, and we never saw it again. I didn’t see the same ball twice all day. There were supposed to be marshals to protect us — they were really to protect the crowd —but they didn’t. So the people gathered in the middle of the fairways and grabbed the balls as fast as we hit them. We kept trying anyhow and finally got to the fifth hole, which was a well-trapped par three. I’ll never forget what Bob did then. It showed a softer and kinder side of this man who seems so cocky on the outside. He told the rest of us, ‘I’m going to hit it in the trap,’ and sure enough, that’s where he hit it.

“I wish I had a movie of the action for the next fifteen minutes. Bob deliberately hit that ball from one trap to another, dealing out stale jokes for the crowd every second of the time. He was giving the crowd a show for their money, and it was hilariously funny. He’d hit under the ball so it would go straight up in the air, or he’d top it and bury it in the sand. You know, people consistently underestimate Bob. He’s much more than just a funny man; he’s a very kind man too.

“We played four more holes because we thought we ought to play at least nine, after which we dropped everything and ran for the clubhouse like rabbits. I simply couldn’t have stood another nine holes. We’d be there yet. It had taken us four and a half hours to play the holes we did play. When we saw a ball, we hit it. The rest of the time we were signing autographs and walking. A couple of times I even walked in the wrong direction because I couldn’t see the fairway.”

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