As a wartime “hero” with a compelling story that I made my mission to share, I also made friends with Hollywood royalty, Los Angeles business bigwigs, sports figures, politicians, and even a noir era gangster or two. I climbed a glacier and almost died, and managed to run into trouble at sea again. Twice.
Mostly, though, I settled into a comfortable life as a veteran, Olympian, and man of faith. With my wife, Cynthia, an author and an artist with an irrepressible zest for living, I raised two wonderful children, Cissy and Luke. I was happy.
THINGS CHANGE. IN 1997, I was “rediscovered” by CBS Sports. They were looking for stories to tell on their broadcast of the 1998 Winter Olympics at Nagano, Japan, which was very near to my last prison camp during the war. They were surprised to find me alive. My story, produced by Draggan Mihailovich and reported by Bob Simon, aired on the night of the closing ceremonies. The next year it was repeated on 48 Hours. I got the chance to completely rewrite and update Devil at My Heels the way I thought it should have been done in the first place. The result shared very little with the original book—except the title. The movie interest started again. We got closer, but it didn’t happen. I didn’t mind.
Just before Devil at My Heels was published in 2003, author Laura Hillenbrand wrote to ask if she could write my biography. I was flattered. I had read her marvelous book, Seabiscuit. But I said no: I’d just finished my own book.
Laura didn’t give up, she didn’t give in. She kept calling and eventually convinced (charmed?) me into changing my mind. I’m glad I did. Seven years and hundreds of hours of interviews later (plus her in-depth research that told me more about my life than even I knew), her book, Unbroken, came out in 2010, and has been on the New York Times and other bestseller lists ever since. Then the movies called again, and this time it happened, with Angelina Jolie directing. A phenomenal woman, one in a million, with her whole heart in the project.
What does it all mean? One of my favorite Bible verses has the answer: “All things work together for good.”
SOON AFTER DEVIL at My Heels went to press in 2003, my coauthor, David Rensin, and I began work on a little follow-up. My life hadn’t ended with the war, or when I became a Christian. In fact, my most important life’s work had just begun: helping kids, telling my story, inspiring a positive attitude in others. As a result, I was overwhelmed with mail thanking me and, often, asking me for advice. I kept the letters for the longest time, making thick notebook binders, but because I couldn’t begin to answer them all, I decided that I might instead share a few stories and see if there were any universal lessons I could draw from my entire life—before, during, and after World War II.
But I had also begun to help Laura with Unbroken and there just weren’t enough hours in the day. David and I put our book—this book—on hold until we could come back to it.
We had to wait ten years, but I finally found the time to do that.
Whether at a book signing, a friendly meal, a public appearance, talking to the press, or in casual encounters, I’m inevitably asked three questions:
1. What did you do after the war?
2. What’s your secret for a good life?
3. How does your faith play a role?
Don’t Give Up, Don’t Give In is my answer to those questions. The answers aren’t always simple but they have recurred throughout my life.
What I hope you’ll discover is that I’m just an ordinary man with faults who, when confronted with extraordinary circumstances—in sports, in war, in life, and in faith—resolved to not give up and not give in, to keep looking for answers, and to make my life count right up to the last minute. I’m just a grateful survivor who realized I had something to give and became devoted to setting an example for others by being prepared, by having the proper attitude, and by trying to inspire.
It wasn’t easy. Sometimes I just got lucky. But I gave it a try. You can, too, in your own way, whatever your goal in life.
Enjoy. And thank you.
LOUIS ZAMPERINI, HOLLYWOOD, CALIFORNIA, JULY 2014
Run for Your Life
Running at USC, 1938, the year he set the NCAA mile record of 4:08:03.
The Family Rules
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My father had a rule: We pay our bills first, and then we eat.
We all need a code of ethics to guide us, especially in tough times when everyone has to do their part for the greater good, for the family or the group to survive.
We lived on Gramercy Avenue in Torrance, California. In the 1920s and 1930s it was a small industrial town on the outskirts south of Los Angeles. There were more fields than houses and the barley rose three feet tall.
The open land was full of rabbits, ducks, mud hens, and, in the ocean, abalone—the poor man’s food. If we were short on money, I had to go out and shoot or catch something for dinner. It was a good lesson for all of us: pitch in and help. Everyone in the family knew that to survive we had to make sacrifices.
I had odd jobs that earned me a nickel here, a dime there. If I went with the ice man all day, I got fifty cents for the eight hours. I churned butter at the dairy to make a dime. I gave it all to my mother so she could finish out the week with food until my dad got paid. A dime went a long way. When we could afford it, we took great joy in buying something from the ice cream sherbet man, who pushed his cart down every street in town. My favorite flavor was grape.
My mother was strict, but she was fair. She worked hard and taught her children essential values in the process. Every morning before school we had a chore to do—so we got used to participating and working when we were young.
My mother was also a fabulous cook. When times improved she served more than one main dish at dinner. Everybody ate. Everybody was cheerful. After dinner we’d walk around the block and talk among ourselves and with neighbors. We played music: my mother on the violin, my father on the guitar and mandolin. My mother’s brother Louis could play just about anything. He was in the orchestra on the Lurline, the cruise ship that journeyed between Los Angeles and Honolulu. Neither my older brother, Pete, nor I played an instrument, but we sang.
Sometimes, when we ran out of money, Pete and I headed for the beach—but not to fish. I’d made a sifter out of quarter-inch screen. We ran it through the sand hoping to find small change. We swept under the monkey bars at our grade school—maybe some kid had lost his lunch money—and then we scoured the high school lot. If we were lucky we might pick up as much as fifty cents.
Of course, we didn’t keep any of it for ourselves. That would have been against the family rules of all for one and one for all.
Anyone Can Turn Their Life Around
_______
I was a rotten kid.
It’s true. Sure, I helped out at home, but I was restless and mischievous (and worse), and my behavior upset my family and eventually forced me to make one of the most important choices of my life.
I was always in trouble: with my father and mother, with the neighborhood, with the school, and with the police—when they could catch me. I had wonderful parents, good sisters, and a great brother who always wanted to help me go straight. Yet I still tried to find ways to get in trouble, mainly to see if I could get away with it. I used to blame it on having an itch for adventure. I wanted to try everything.
Looking back, I realize I also had a big problem with self-esteem.
When I was very young, I couldn’t speak English. Even though I was born in America, my parents spoke Italian at home, and so did I. I was held back in first grade because I couldn’t understand my teacher. My English was so broken that my teacher told my folks that they had to speak English at home in order to help me. What’s funny is that now, years later, I’ve forgotten how to speak Italian.
Because I spoke so poorly, I was picked on. I dreaded recess. The other kids surrounded me, taunted me, jeered, kicked, and punched me until, out of pure frustration, I spewed a stream of Italian swear words. They seemed very entertained.
I thought I wa
s ugly. I hated my legs, big ears, and especially my hair. It was black and wiry and I wished it were straighter. I combed it back but it wouldn’t stay. I wet it down at night, pushed it into shape, and slept with a nylon or silk stocking on my head. Didn’t work.
Because I spent so much time trying to get my hair to behave and look like the other guys’, if anybody touched a single strand they were in trouble. Once, I even hit a girl who did—though I didn’t know she was a girl. I just felt the touch and turned and swung without looking. Fortunately, the blow was only glancing.
My older brother, Pete, could have teased me; instead he tried to help me. He thought that wearing the stocking at night was a great idea. We also experimented with different ways to grease my hair back—including olive oil. (Later, in the deepest part of my antisocialness, I chewed raw garlic to keep the kids away. I guess all I was missing were stewed tomatoes, spices, and a saucepan.)
School fights were common, and I was usually on the losing end. My dad, who worked as a bench machinist for the Pacific Electric Railroad, made me a set of weights out of lead and taught me how to box. Got me a punching bag. I took to it like a starving man, and soon, when I was teased, I fought back. Viciously. And won.
I STARTED SMOKING when I was six years old. In those days many of the adults we were supposed to look up to smoked, so it makes sense that I was curious.
I remember the first time. I was walking to school when somebody tossed a lit cigarette butt out of their car window. I picked it up and took my first puff—just to see what it was all about. I got a little bit in my lungs, coughed, and got dizzy.
But it felt good. After that, I watched passing cars. If someone tossed out a butt, I grabbed it. I scavenged the tobacco scraps left at my house and wandered, head down, in and out of stores and hotel lobbies to rescue butts from ashtrays. I only tried chewing tobacco once, though—in class. The teacher thought it was gum and told me to spit it out. I swallowed it instead. I got sick as a dog.
When I was in the third grade, the principal decided he’d had enough of my bad habits. He put me over his knee and whacked me with a big strap he kept hanging on his office wall. Later that night, my parents saw the purple bruises and asked what had happened. “The principal beat me,” I moaned.
“What for?” my mother said, comforting me.
“He caught me smoking.”
Their sympathy stopped cold. I don’t know what I’d expected, but my father put me over his knee and whacked me, too. I didn’t cry. I didn’t stop smoking, either.
When I was a little older, my uncle Louis sometimes sent me to the store with a note: “Please sell my nephew a pack of Chesterfields.” He gave me the money, I showed the note, and the clerk gave me the cigarettes. Of course, I wanted my own cigarettes instead of picking them out of ashtrays and off the street. It’s not tough to figure out what I did: I copied my uncle’s handwriting for my own note.
But the second time I tried it, I got caught. The store owner had saved one of my uncle’s notes and compared the handwriting. He called my mother. I got punished and figured out a way to get even with the rat.
The buildings on both sides of his store, and across the street, were industrial. During the summer the heat could be so thick that many establishments didn’t close and lock their doors; they just drew a big steel gate across the front and secured that, allowing the air to circulate thoroughly. One Sunday, when no one was at work, I took my fishing pole to the candy store and got a buddy to keep a watch-out. Sure enough, the gate was down but the front door was wide open. The candy and cigarettes display was about eight feet inside the threshold, and I went “fishing” for goodies while my buddy kept his eyes peeled for pedestrians and cars. I did this every Sunday until my mother got suspicious, found my stash, and called the store owner—who called the police.
The police knew and liked my parents, and cut me a lot more slack than I deserved. I took advantage of their good intentions by continuing to misbehave. This time I endured yet another lecture from the police and my parents, and that was that.
WHEN I BECAME an altar boy I figured out where the priest kept the wine, and added drinking to my list of bad habits. I also became the leader of my little gang of pals. They called me “the Brain” because I could always come up with ideas about how to get away with something. We stole booze from home-brew beer bootleggers who were just our neighbors. During Prohibition and the Great Depression, they’d make a batch, sell most of it to make ends meet, and drink the rest. You could smell the stuff as you walked down the street. That’s how the police found it, too. Our neighbors the Winklers kept a big crock of beer behind a curtain under their kitchen sink. On Saturday nights, when everybody went to the movies, we broke into the house and helped ourselves.
Sometimes we took our plunder to the beach, but after we got caught drinking at Hermosa, I had another idea. By then I was maybe 13. I had a part-time summer job at the local dairy. I helped myself to an empty quart milk bottle, put some white paint in it, and rolled it around so the whole bottle was coated from the inside. I turned it upside down on a newspaper, left it overnight, and the next day, I put it on the garage roof to dry in the sun. The next time we went to the beach we filled that bottle with whatever alcohol we’d stolen, and lay on the sand with only our heads swimming. The lifeguards thought we were clean-cut kids drinking wholesome milk
If we had been drinking milk it would have gone well with the pies we stole from Meinzer’s Pie Shop. Again, I had masterminded the plot to get revenge. Since businesses were closed on Sundays, markets and restaurants would sometimes give away unused or damaged food to the hungry and needy that came to their back doors near closing time on Saturday night.
By the time we showed up at our local market they had nothing left, so we went to Meinzer’s to ask the owner if he had any broken pies they were going to throw out. He was nasty and slammed the screen door.
I was madder than an angry hornet.
I modified my fishing-for-candy-and-cigarettes technique by using a heavy wire and fashioning a hook at the end. I slid the wire carefully through the pie shop’s screen and opened the door catch. We grabbed a few pies and ate them at our hideout up on Tree Row. Everyone liked apple, but I’ve always had a fondness for cherry.
We were so successful that another gang of kids tried the same thing—and got caught. Then they bragged and took credit for our mischief. The arrest made the Torrance paper’s front page: MEINZER’S PIE SHOP THIEVES CAUGHT. We waited two days, and then took some more pies, just to show that the police hadn’t caught the real culprits. The newspaper ran another story, only smaller: “Meinzer’s Pie Shop Robbed Again.”
My family must have despaired that I might never turn things around.
MY PARENTS, WHO were Catholic, didn’t go to church. And when the priest came to the door asking for money, if they didn’t have any to give they acted like they weren’t home.
I went to church sometimes and once I was late because I’d been goofing off. When I got there the place was jammed. I found an end seat in the back. The priest walked over, grabbed me by the ear, and twisted it. He said, “You go home and get a note from your mother about why you’re late.”
Boy, I got so mad, I wanted to strike him. Instead, I walked out.
I told my mother, “I’m never going back.” Instead, I went with a buddy to his Baptist church, which had a big bell tower. One day, just for fun, I found a huge spool of wire and took some. I climbed into the tower, tied the wire to the bell, and then dropped the rest to the street, where I hoisted it into a nearby pepper tree. After dark I pulled the wire with all my might. Ding-dong! Ding-dong! Lights went on in all the houses. People rushed onto the sidewalks. A woman shouted, “Oh, mama mia, it’s a miracle!”
The fire truck came, and the police. I slid out of the tree and disappeared.
I had lots of mischief to spare.
I shot a bull in the scrotum with my BB gun, as well as a dog that bit me while I delivered newspap
ers. I liberally peppered girls in school with spit wads—and often ended up in a classroom corner for my trouble. Once, when I was wrongly punished for spit wads I hadn’t, well—spit—I got back at the teacher by letting the air out of her car tires after school.
I could go on.
Compared to what passes for teens getting into trouble today, I suppose most of what I did seems like kids’ stuff. But then the errors of my ways got more serious.
I’d stolen some pies from a bakery truck and the boy who drove it squealed to the police. I had to pay for what I’d taken. But I wanted revenge. I lay in wait and confronted him as he and a friend left the Torrance Theater. We faced off in the alley. At first, a mutual friend of ours volunteered to stand in for me because the driver weighed thirty pounds more than I did, but I knew my friend would just pussyfoot around and no one would get hurt. I had an axe to grind.
“No, that’s okay,” I said, then suddenly lit into the driver. After many punches, the fight ended when I knocked him down and he rolled into a ditch and lay there bleeding. I went home. I was covered with blood. My mother thought I had been injured. She screamed and my dad came running in. I mumbled some excuse and they left me alone.
When you fistfight, you never think about the real damage you might cause, or somebody dying. When I got up the next morning it bothered me how badly I’d beat up the driver. So much blood. I couldn’t stop worrying about what I might have done. I forced myself to go back to where we’d fought. I hoped he wasn’t still lying there. Of course, he wasn’t, but two days later I saw him in the truck again, his face massively swollen. I was relieved. He was alive. My concern disappeared only to be replaced by excitement: I’d really whooped him.
TORRANCE POLICE CHIEF Collier could only tolerate so much. He decided that he had to do something, and took me to the local jail to meet some of the inmates. We stopped in front of one cell and stood there for a couple of minutes. The chief said, “Louie. Where do you go on Saturdays?”
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