THE GREAT IMPOSTER

A true Renaissance man of the 20th century was Ferdinand Waldo Demara (1921-1982). Demara achieved a wide variety of careers and accomplishments, including serving in the US Army during WWII and the Canadian Navy during the Korean War.  He also was a lawyer, a surgeon, a civil engineer, a deputy sheriff, an assistant prison warden, a doctor of applied psychology, a hospital orderly, a movie actor, a child-care expert, a Benedictine monk, a Trappist Monk, a founder of a college, an editor, a cancer researcher, and a college professor.

He had a very high IQ and an eidetic memory.  These assets served him well in his careers, since he was not actually qualified to take on any of these positions, except perhaps that of movie actor.  Demara was nothing but an imposter who obtained these jobs using fake names and credentials.  Once he was established in a new post, he would read the relevant textbooks or manuals and become an actual expert in the field.  His work itself was never questioned, but he did run into difficulties when fate or simply bad luck would expose him.

A typical example of the above was his role as the ship's surgeon on a destroyer in the Canadian Navy during the Korean War. During one of his stints as a monk, Demara met a Canadian physician named Joseph Cyr. Demara enlisted in the Canadian Navy using Cyr's name and became regarded as a highly competent medical practitioner. One night he had to perform major surgery on sixteen different Korean casualties (including one who needed a sophisticated operation in the thoracic cavity). During that evening, Demara, after directing the orderlies to prepare the patients for the operations, fled to his quarters to speed-read medical textbooks in order to know how to do the procedures. All of the operations were successful and the patients recovered nicely. The only maggot in the broth was the fact that his heroism was reported as a puff piece in the Canadian press. The real Dr. Cyr's mother read the newspaper article and made inquiries concerning how her son could be on a naval vessel near Korea at the same time he was practicing medicine in New Brunswick. The Canadian authorities, embarrassed by the whole situation and mollified by the fact that Demara never killed anyone through incompetence, sent him back to the USA without pressing charges.

Demara certainly had the intelligence to have pursued any of his careers legitimately; he just like the thrill of the game. His exploits were described in the excellent 1959 book The Great Imposter and in the movie of the same name (except for the British spelling of "Impostor") featuring Tony Curtis. The picture was intended as a comedy and did not ever let the facts stand in the way of the story line. The 2002 Leonardo DiCaprio and Tom Hanks film, Catch Me if You Can, was based on a totally different real life imposter altogether.

Copyright Universal International
 via Wikipedia