Sunbonnet Soliloquy

By Jewell Ellen Smith

Be Yourself -- Your Best Self

The slogan on the Army’s recruiting poster BE ALL YOU CAN BE is a good slogan. It is good advice, too. For anyone.

Give the idea careful thought, and you will see that it carries a meaning as potent as Shakespeare’s famous “To be or not to be is the question.”

Of course there are different ways some not so good -- to go about this “being”.

Take the case of “The Great Impostor”, the late 6-foot, 350-pound Ferdinand Waldo Demara, Jr. He was so successful posing as everything from a monk to a wartime surgeon that his life’s story was made into a 1960 movie starring actor Tony Curtis.

When Demara died last year (1982) in unhappy obscurity at the age of 60, a friend said: “He had no great corporation to run, no prisons to direct, no operations to perform, so he invented it ... He was a talented man who could have attained high positions legitimately if he had gone through ordinary channels.”

During his teens Demara ran away from home in Lawrence, Mass., and for some 20 to 30 years he assumed many identities. He lived as a Trappist monk, a doctor of psychology, a dean of the school of philosophy at a small college in Pennsylvania, a law student, a zoology graduate, a career researcher, a teacher at a junior college in Maine, a surgeon in the Royal Canadian Navy, an assistant warden in a Texas prison, and a teacher in a Maine village.

After 1959 Demara settled into his own identity. But friends described him as “most miserable”. Let it be said to his credit that during his final eight years of living in obscurity -- in Orange County, California -- that he worked as an ordained minister and then as a visiting chaplain at Good Samaritan Hospital in Anaheim.

It is recorded that part of Demara’s last words were: “I wish I could die and go to heaven!”

A much older, but similar, impostor story is that of an elderly German cobbler, Wilhelm Voigt, who in October of 1906 was living in poverty in an attic in Berlin.

One day Voigt, an ex-convict who in his youth had learned to mimic the speech and mannerisms of the Prussian officers whose boots he had to mend, got his hands on a Prussian captain’s uniform, complete with cap and insignia.

The uniform was much too large for Voigt, but he slipped into it one morning and marched smartly up to a platoon of soldiers on a Berlin street and began to bark orders. He stopped a bus bound for the Kopenick area and hustled the men aboard.

In Kopenick he took his troops straight to the mayor’s office, arrested the mayor and ordered him and the city treasurer to hand over all the cash in the office.

While Voigt was signing an “official” receipt, the mayor, who was once a reserve officer, wondered why this captain was so old looking and why he wore his cap badge upside down. But before he could mention either matter the aged officer marched him, his wife, the treasurer, and the deputy mayor outside the town hall and ordered the soldiers to keep them under guard for half an hour.

The captain marched briskly away -- with the money.

Ten days later Voigt was found out, arrested, and sentenced to four years imprisonment. But his exploit had attracted much public sympathy and affection. The cartoonists had a heyday, presenting Voigt as a lovable, laughable character in baggy uniform, carrying a sword, smoking a cigar, and wearing his insignia upside down.

The sentence was reduced, and some rich Berlin dowager who had been impressed by Voigt’s audacity gave a life pension and he settled in comfort in Luxembourg.

Not long ago Fort Rucker Center Chaplain, Col. James E. Hansen, used in one of his sermons the true story of how a young American mother saw and took advantage of an opportunity to “be” somebody special. He had read of the incident in a Chicago newspaper.

The young mother was visiting in a large city hospital where her infant child was a very sick patient. We can call the baby Little Sally.

It was Sunday afternoon. The pediatric ward was crowded with children, all restless, some crying, some like Sally too ill to cry much. Other anxious mothers were there, and fathers. But, when visiting hours were over, all the parents were required to leave. Immediately. No exceptions -- not even when Sally’s mother asked if she might stay on just long enough to sing her baby to sleep.

Sally’s mother decided to go out the back door for her car was parked behind the building. And to get to the rear entrance she had to walk through the kitchen and utility area. By mistake, she opened a broom closet, and there right above a mop and bucket hung the cleaning woman’s uniform, apron and scarf.

Sally’s mother stuffed her purse in the corner, jerked off her dress, and put on the scrub woman’s clothes. Quickly she filled the mop bucket with water, found some soap, and casually sauntered back into the pediatric ward.

She sloshed a good bit of suds on the floor around Sally’s crib and sang softly as she swished the mop to and fro. When Sally closed her little eyes, she went on from one small bed to the next, mopping the floor and singing lullabies.

Soon, all was quiet, the floor was very clean, and Sally’s mother went home.

If you decided to BE ALL YOU CAN BE -- and have to take on some identity beside you own -- use Sally’s mother as your model, not the impostor Demara or the robber Voigt.

It will be better, though, if you just be yourself -- your best self.

Published February 1983. Click your browser’s “Back” button to return.