AMERICANA: Ferdinand the Bull Thrower

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Never before had the 400-odd island villagers of North Haven seen such a fine schoolteacher and all-round nice fellow as lovable, affable Martin Godgart. A happy, hulking (6 ft., 250 lb.), multichinned chap with a Harvard accent, Godgart turned up last September on the tiny Penobscot Bay island off the coast of Maine, flashed a schoolteacher's certificate, got himself a job teaching high-school English, Latin and French. He quickly made friends with the normally reserved down-East folk; they liked his jolly ways, his eagerness to participate in North Haven affairs. He formed a Sea Scout troop, ran Sunday school at the local Baptist church with a gentle, knowing hand. At Christmastime, he rented a post-office box in the name of Santa Claus, gathered up letters from the children, wrote genial replies to each one. bought and distributed gifts for the poor. And then, one day last week, the state police came and quietly led him away.

The Good Doctor. The astonished villagers soon learned why: Martin Godgart was an impostor. His real name is Ferdinand W. Demara Jr., and he is not just any everyday kind of impostor. At 35, he is a kid-gloved Walter Mitty, an audacious, unschooled but amazingly intelligent pretender who always wanted to be a Somebody, and succeeded in being a whole raft of Somebody Elses. Yet he apparently never bilked a penny from a soul.

When he was 16, Ferdinand Demara ran away from his home in Lawrence, Mass. to join the Cistercian monks in Rhode Island, stayed several years under monastic rule. In 1941 he enlisted in the Army, soon went over the hill, joined the Navy, became a medical corpsman. His first big bull-throwing exhibition came after he went over the hill again and turned up at the Trappist monastery near Louisville, Ky. claiming to be one Robert L. French, Ph.D. As in his later exploits, Demara had picked his identity from a university catalogue, had in some mysterious way assembled all the necessary proofs and college transcripts to support the pretense. But he disappeared after a while, later, under a variety of names, taught psychology in a Pennsylvania college, served as an orderly in a Los Angeles sanitarium, as an instructor in Washington State's St. Martin's College. At length the FBI caught him, and he served 18 months in prison for desertion.

No sooner was he freed than he resumed his career, took the name of one Dr. Cecil Hamann, studied law at night at Northeastern University in Boston for a year, then joined another Roman Catholic order, the Brothers of Christian Instruction, in Maine. The brothers warmly welcomed such an esteemed professional as "Dr. Hamann." dubbed him Brother John. As Brother John, he met a young doctor named Joseph C. Cyr, helped Cyr treat a member of the brotherhood for rheumatoid arthritis (bee venom, suggested Ferdinand with professional aplomb).

Demara so admired young Dr. Cyr that he borrowed Cyr's name and credentials, was commissioned in the Canadian navy as a surgeon. He performed unnumbered minor operations—and once, with Mitty-like sureness, he presided over a complicated operation on a soldier who had been wounded near the heart. The operation was a huge success—and so was "Dr. Cyr." The publicity that followed this achievement flushed out the real Cyr, and Ferdinand was quietly sacked by the navy.