Real Heroes

by Lawrence W. Reed

  But Clemente earned respect for more than just his play. He established himself as a person of character, pride, strength, and compassion. He also could be philosophical. Accepting an award in 1971, he offered these elegant remarks:

  If we have respect for our fathers and we have respect for our children, we will have a better life. I watched on TV when America sent men to the moon, and there were a lot of people whose names weren’t given who helped make it possible. You don’t have the names of those who run the computers and other things. But they worked together and this is what you have to have … Chinese, American, Jewish, black and white, people working side by side. This is what you have to do to make this a better life. When you can give opportunity to everybody, we won’t have to wait to die to get to heaven. We are going to have heaven on earth.

  During the same speech he offered another message about making the most of one’s life, in words that became his motto: “If you have an opportunity to accomplish something that will make things better for someone coming behind you, and you don’t do that, you are wasting your time on this earth.”

  Rushing to Help

  On September 30, 1972—a month and a half after his thirty-eighth birthday—Clemente collected the three thousandth hit of his major league career. He became only the eleventh player to reach that milestone in major league history, and the first Hispanic player to do so. The hit came in his last at-bat of the 1972 regular season.

  There would be no 1973 season for the superstar from Puerto Rico.

  Just two days before Christmas 1972, the capital of Nicaragua was struck by a massive earthquake. In a country where Clemente had close friends and that he had visited just three weeks before, the casualty figures were heart wrenching: six thousand killed, twenty thousand injured, and more than a quarter million homeless. In Puerto Rico, Clemente watched the early reports on television with his family, just long enough to know he had to act.

  Helping the needy came naturally to Clemente; he had done it personally, frequently, and often quietly for years. Within hours of the quake, he gathered medical and other relief supplies and organized flights to carry them to Managua.

  But after the first three flights, Clemente learned that corrupt officials of the Nicaraguan government had diverted the relief supplies, keeping them from the victims. Angry, and determined to personally see that the material went where it was intended, he boarded the fourth flight himself, on New Year’s Eve 1972.

  The plane never made it. Mechanical trouble forced it into the ocean immediately after takeoff. Clemente’s body was never found. He left behind his beloved wife, Vera, and three young boys.

  In a special election on March 30, 1973, the Baseball Writers’ Association of America voted to waive the stipulated five-year waiting period and posthumously elected Roberto Clemente into the Baseball Hall of Fame. Twenty-six years later, he was ranked number twenty on the Sporting News’s list of the hundred greatest baseball players of the twentieth century. He was the highest-ranking Latin American and Caribbean player on the list.

  For all his accomplishments on the field, however, Clemente earned the respect and admiration of so many for his actions off the field, the way he carried himself, and the message of hope he conveyed. Each year Major League Baseball gives the Roberto Clemente Award to the player who “best exemplifies the game of baseball, sportsmanship, community involvement, and the individual’s contribution to his team.” It’s a fitting tribute to a fine man.

  Roberto Clemente: all these years later, the thought of him still brings a smile, and some tears as well, to the faces of many people, including me.

  Lessons from Roberto Clemente

  Don’t “waste your time on this earth”: Roberto Clemente was not only an incredibly good baseball player but also a fine model of a man. A person of character and compassion, he made the most of personal opportunities and worked tirelessly to help others. He implored people to do the same; failing to do so, he said, would amount to “wasting your time on this earth.”

  “Believe in people”: Clemente fought prejudice all his life. But he also said: “I don’t believe in color. I believe in people.” One teammate, Al Oliver, recalled that his conversations with Clemente “always stemmed around people from all walks of life being able to get along well, or no excuse why that shouldn’t be.”

  36

  John Patric

  Hobo, Screwball, and Hero

  John Patric was a self-described “hobo” and “screwball” who lived out of a car for years at a time. He attended universities in seven states from California to Minnesota and was expelled from three (in Oregon, Michigan, and Texas). He ran for office at least fifteen times, as a Republican as often as a Democrat, and paid his campaign filing fees with loose change. To prove how gullible reporters could be, he often falsely claimed to be an FBI agent, the mayor, or deputy sheriff. He was, by all accounts, an odd duck.

  So what makes this guy a hero?

  Paeans to the “common man” abound in literature, magazines, and political speeches. I confess, however, to an attachment to the uncommon—an appreciation that goes back at least forty years, to the time I first read “My Creed” by a New Yorker named Dean Alfange, an immigrant from Turkey:

  I do not choose to be a common man. It is my right to be uncommon, if I can. I seek opportunity, not security. I do not wish to be a kept citizen, humbled and dulled by having the state look after me.

  I want to take the calculated risk; to dream and to build, to fail and to succeed. I refuse to barter incentive for a dole. I prefer the challenges of life to the guaranteed existence; the thrill of fulfillment to the stale calm of utopia.

  I will not trade freedom for beneficence nor my dignity for a handout. I will never cower before any master nor bend to any threat. It is my heritage to stand erect, proud and unafraid; to think and act for myself, enjoy the benefit of my creations and to face the world boldly and say, “This I have done.”

  Sometimes the uncommon man is offensive, intrusive, or even violent. But on most occasions he’s simply a little rebellious or peculiar—just different. How boring this world would be if everything and everybody were common and conventional!

  John Patric was unequivocally uncommon and unconventional. He puts me in mind of “Think Different,” a 1997 Apple ad campaign that paid tribute to the unusual among us.

  Featuring footage of famous personalities from Albert Einstein to Bob Dylan to Thomas Edison, the ad celebrated diversity in thought and behavior:

  Here’s to the crazy ones. The misfits. The rebels. The troublemakers. The round pegs in the square holes. The ones who see things differently. They’re not fond of rules and they have no respect for the status quo. You can quote them, disagree with them, glorify them, or vilify them. About the only thing you can’t do is ignore them—because they change things. They push the human race forward. And while some may see them as the crazy ones, we see genius. Because the people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world are the ones who do.

  Words of Wisdom from John Patric

  “Americans have the right to be different.”

  Free Spirit

  Patric was born in Snohomish, Washington, in 1902 and lived until his teen years in the family home on the floor above the town library. He was surrounded by books and read lots of them. His adventurism—some might call it rebellion—showed up well before he finished high school. He ran away from home and, as he explained it, “hoboed my way from Seattle to Mexico and back,” hopping trains with railway men many years his senior. When he finally made it back to Snohomish, he finished high school as the valedictorian and president of the senior class (it was the only election he ever won).

  Bitten by the travel bug, Patric began a peripatetic life. This free spirit never hung around long enough to earn a degree at any of the universities he attended. He earned some money selling rubber stamps and writing for publications like the American Insurance Digest. His first real “home” that he bough
t was a used 1927 Lincoln sedan, which he drove from coast to coast.

  For a stretch of several months, one of his traveling companions was the libertarian political theorist Rose Wilder Lane, the daughter of novelist Laura Ingalls Wilder. According to Lane biographer William Holtz, Patric “had sought her out because he shared her political views.”

  With a breezy, quirky writing style and endless travel adventures to chronicle, Patric established himself as a freelance writer. He became a regular contributor to National Geographic, where he developed loyal readers. His best-known article, the March 1937 piece “Imperial Rome Reborn,” described his travels in Italy near the peak of Benito Mussolini’s power. Some of the most prominent architects of Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal were enthralled by Il Duce’s central planning, but Patric’s article—its photographs in particular—raised the chilling specter of an egocentric dictatorship.

  A few years later, as Mussolini and his Axis allies waged war on the world, Patric stirred the ire of organized labor when, in Reader’s Digest, he exposed union corruption and featherbedding in the nation’s shipbuilding industry. Called to testify before Congress, he argued that the unions were crippling the nation’s productivity in wartime.

  Yankee Hobo

  Patric’s most widely read work was his 1943 book, Why Japan Was Strong, later retitled Yankee Hobo in the Orient. A repackaging of articles first published in National Geographic, the book was based on his two years of travel around Japan, China, and Korea from 1934 through 1936. True to his fiercely independent lifestyle and increasingly libertarian political views, Patric maintained that the book’s most important argument was that every individual should try to diminish, “by whatever peaceful means his ingenuity may devise, the power of government—any government—to tell him what to do.”

  The New York Times reviewed Hobo favorably, stating that the author exhibited “qualities of good sense and poise and instinct for honest reporting sufficiently to give his excellent account of Japan’s ‘common man’ the favorable reception it deserves.” In less than two months, Hobo reached number seven on the bestseller list. Reader’s Digest in the United States and World Digest in England produced abridged versions. All told, in both full and condensed versions, the book sold an astonishing twelve million copies worldwide.

  Patric’s style captivated readers. For many, it was their first encounter with daily life among a people who seemed inscrutable. One couldn’t help but feel sympathetic to the ordinary citizen up against the mandarins of arbitrary rule. Of Koreans, he wrote:

  After centuries of servitude, taxes, and oppression, Koreans looked to me to be terribly beaten down.

  Why try to build a better farm? Why try to get ahead? If you succeeded, your farm might become the farm of a Japanese. So why not just produce the barest needs of your traditional life—food to eat and white clothes to be gentlemen in—and possess nothing your conquerors might covet?…

  In America as we have known it, there has always been something to strive for—always a goal ahead. Here there was nothing. Little matter how hard a Korean worked; if he acquired what passes in the Orient for a fine farm, and what is comparatively a degree of prosperity, a way would surely be found by the Government to relieve him of both. It usually would be by some new tax.

  One of my favorite passages comes early in the book, when Patric explains the difficulties he had with American police as he made his way west to Seattle for passage to Japan:

  To save hotel bills, I took to sleeping curled up in the front seat of my car. The worst problem was where to park to avoid the police—for there seem to be laws about sleeping in cars. The more quiet the spot I found, the more likely it seemed that the police would pick me up, take me to the police station, fingerprint me, talk to me as they talked to thugs, and finally let me go without any breakfast. If I resented the cruelty and arrogance of some policemen, and showed it, I was jailed. As I learned to be meek, to act stupid, to say “sir,” to pretend a respect and an awe I did not feel, I got along better.

  Why is it that when otherwise decent men come to represent the majesty of law and government, they can become so discourteous, so arrogant, so cruel? It is no wonder to me that petty offenders, and even those who have committed no real offense whatever, sometimes become antisocial after a few experiences with “the law.”

  Could it be that if police had less power, and if there were fewer laws and regulations, people and police would both become more decent, so that still less law and fewer police would be needed, and honest men could spend on themselves some of the price they pay for government and for crime?

  By 1945, Hobo was in its seventh edition. At that point Patric was his own publisher. He also owned a 160-acre backwoods ranch near Florence, Oregon, where he settled for about twelve years. Settled is too strong a word, though, as he still found plenty of time to “hobo” his way around the country, peddling thousands of copies of his book. He signed so many that you can buy an autographed copy online today for under fifty dollars. I possess a copy in which Patric wrote, “To Jack Slinn, and may this book be lent to many an honest borrower—8/9/52.”

  Gadfly

  In 1957, Patric returned to his hometown of Snohomish, Washington, but didn’t like what he saw. “When I came back I found the most rotten, corrupt political situation I’ve seen anywhere in the world,” he wrote. “It was like a big stinking thunderjug with the lid clamped down.”

  To needle the local politicians and their ill-considered schemes for more government, he started a newsletter he dubbed the Snohomish Free Press, later renamed the Saturday Evening Free Press, and wrote under the puckish pseudonym Hugo N. Frye.

  Over the next quarter century, Patric ran for public office almost annually. Washington state authorities jailed him once for using his pseudonym rather than his real name. When the charges were dismissed, the Spokesman-Review of Spokane editorialized, “Hugo N. Frye may be a fictitious character. But in this case he symbolizes a spirit of individual freedom and independence that must always remain alive in a free America.”

  Local authorities didn’t always agree. Incensed by Patric’s rabble-rousing newsletter, they exploited his personal eccentricities to concoct charges of mental incompetence. They managed to have him remanded to a mental hospital for months until, acting as his own attorney and arguing that he had “always been a screwball,” he won his release.

  “What happened to me could happen to any of you,” he told the jury. “Americans have the right to be different.” He never transgressed against any man’s life or property; the only “crime” of which he was ever guilty was being odd.

  Later, after one of his many tongue-in-cheek political campaigns, Patric declared, “I was the only candidate who could prove he was sane; the others could only claim it.”

  “Reporters loved John Patric and the colorful copy he provided,” recalled a fellow Washington resident. “Clayton Fox of the Daily Olympian enjoyed describing Patric with phrases like, ‘the bearded bard of Snohomish,’ ‘gadfly of golliwoggs and gooser of governmental gophers’ … ‘the pricker of political stuffed shirts,’ ‘the scourge of junkmailers,’ ‘implacable foe of pollution and corruption,’ ‘aider and abetter of bees, trees, and ocean breezes.’”

  David Dilgard, a librarian at Washington’s Everett Public Library, knew John Patric. In an April 2, 2015, interview, he recalled:

  John’s lifestyle, including his diet, was highly idiosyncratic and he was a heavy smoker. The brief glimpses I got of his eating habits were startling. He apparently subsisted at times on canned mackerel and chocolate bars, washed down with large quantities of coffee. Although it may sound pretentious, his comparison of himself to the Cynic Diogenes was pretty convincing to me. Like Diogenes, his lifestyle was austere and he spent a lot of his time looking for honesty and virtue in his fellow man and loudly proclaiming that he had failed to find it.

  John Patric passed away on August 31, 1985, at age eighty-three. His headstone in a Snohomish cemeter
y reads, “A Little Eccentric, But Justified.”

  Self-described screwballs can be heroes. John Patric was both.

  Lessons from John Patric

  Dare to be different: You don’t have to be a hobo or a screwball like John Patric to want to emulate his daring, candor, and independence. His eccentricities should not overshadow his powerful reflections on protecting individual liberty from an overweening state, particularly his accounts of Imperial Japan and Mussolini’s Italy.

  Stand for something and say so: Patric needled politicians with hard-hitting sarcasm and by making himself a candidate for public office at least fifteen times. Throughout his writings he emphasized that a person should use “whatever peaceful means his ingenuity may devise” to diminish “the power of government—any government—to tell him what to do.” Patric demonstrates the virtue of speaking out for your principles, even if some people think you’re crazy.

  37

  Haing S. Ngor

  “To Give of Your Soul”

  Every year when the Academy Awards are presented, I seem to find something else to do that evening. The program is always too long and often celebrates movies I didn’t like while ignoring ones I did. Wherever I am and whatever I’m doing, however, my thoughts turn to a friend who won an Oscar more than thirty years ago.

  At the 1985 Oscars, Amadeus claimed best picture; F. Murray Abraham won best actor; Sally Field, best actress. Then came the announcement for best supporting actor. To the stage, bearing the widest grin of his life, came a man few Americans had heard of, a man who had acted in only one motion picture.

  A physician in his native Cambodia, Dr. Haing S. Ngor witnessed unspeakable cruelty and endured torture and forced labor before escaping. He made it to a Thai refugee camp and found his way to America in 1980, less than five years before he claimed his Academy Award. His Oscar-winning performance in The Killing Fields gave him the platform to tell the world about the mass murder that occurred between 1975 and 1979 at the hands of Cambodia’s Khmer Rouge communists.