Afterward, he’d sometimes ask us to lunch with him and whichever of his girlfriends were in town. Once he asked me to come to his haberdasher to meet a new girlfriend, a buxom blonde. This was Candy Barr, who became a famous stripper and burlesque dancer. She was sweet and friendly, but kind of naive. I guess he wanted us to know that he was more than a thug because he could have a nice girlfriend. Our meetings ended when he went to prison in 1951 for four years for tax evasion.
ONE NIGHT, AFTER he got out, Cohen called just as I was getting ready to go to bed. He told me where he lived and insisted I drive there immediately. As soon as my car touched the semicircular driveway automatic floodlights went on. Security guys escorted me to the front door. Inside, I could see he’d had a party. Half a turkey and a big ham were on the dining room table. Jim Vaus was there. Mickey offered me food, but it was past midnight.
He suggested we take a little tour. We stopped first at his closet. It had glass doors and was as long as a hallway inside. He must have had a hundred suits and pairs of shoes. And overcoats. “Anything that’ll fit you, you can have,” he said. I knew nothing would fit me. He was stocky and I was lean. I wouldn’t have taken anything anyway. Jim Vaus was more his size. He got a beautiful overcoat.
Next, Cohen showed me his escape chute. In case of a raid, or if another gangster tried to kill him, he said he’d go down this chute. The door would automatically lock behind him and he’d end up in the basement.
“When I was in prison none of my friends visited me,” he said, with a sincere look. “Only Christians.” He added that, as when we first met, he was still interested in Christ. I wasn’t certain of his intent, and since the sun would be up in a few hours—and I had a meeting at noon—I told him we could talk about it anytime. I figured that if Cohen were serious I didn’t have to rush it.
TWO WEEKS LATER, I was at the Coliseum for a football game, walking up the steps to get some food. John Ferraro, who was on the Police Commission (and later became the longest-serving Los Angeles city councilman), hollered at me: “Hey, Zamperini! What were you doing at Mickey Cohen’s house a couple Saturdays ago?”
“You know what I was doing there!” I yelled back—meaning that I knew that he already knew. I could take a little ribbing.
To my surprise, Cohen got really gung ho on Christianity. He called me often. One day he announced, “I’ve been talking to the Sica brothers about Christ, but I don’t have the knowledge. Will you go over there with me and tell them about Jesus?”
The Sica brothers were big Mafia. They were in the papers all the time and had every racket in town. But, I thought, why not?
Cohen and I went to a big flower shop on Vermont Avenue, near Olympic Boulevard. “Why are we stopping here?” I asked. “Are you going to buy your girlfriend some more flowers?”
Instead, it was as if we were in a scene from an old gangster movie. We walked through the big cooler doors, found and opened another door, and ended up in a private room. There were the Sica brothers.
Cohen was thrilled to death, and I was excited that I’d get to discuss my faith with the Sica brothers.
When I explained, they said, “But we’re Catholic.”
“That’s not the point,” I said. “It makes no difference what you are.”
Cohen had earlier told them my war story, and they seemed much more interested in hearing about that. Afterward, with a sidelong glance at Cohen, they thanked me for coming. I believe I bought some flowers for my wife on the way out.
MICKEY COHEN WAS desperate to meet Dr. Billy Graham. Even after all our talking, he said he wouldn’t accept Christ as his savior unless it was directly through Graham.
Vaus and Hamblen wanted to make this happen. They were very eager and tended to act as the inspiration hit them, instead of thinking matters through. They arranged for a friend of ours from Modesto, who had a twin-engine Beechcraft, to fly down to Santa Monica airport to pick up Cohen and take him to Graham.
I had an odd feeling. “You’re not going to make it,” I said. “Why does he have to go to Billy Graham to find God? A ten-year-old kid can show anyone the way.”
We were driving to Santa Monica to meet the plane, after an engagement at a church in Bakersfield. The whole way they tried to convince me that their plan was solid. “He’s a criminal,” I said. “He’s been pulling the wool over everybody’s eyes. He just wants the publicity that Billy Graham led him to the Lord.”
They kept at me. I said, “I don’t know what’s going to happen, but you’re not going to make it.”
Of course, they didn’t believe me. “The plane will be in Santa Monica in an hour and a half,” Vaus said. “We’ve got Mickey ready to go, to fly him to Billy Graham.”
We got to the airport and Cohen was waiting. Then we heard the Beechcraft. The pilot landed and headed for a line of planes parked on the ramp. Because the night watchman wouldn’t turn on all the lights for one flight, the pilot didn’t realize that there was a four-foot culvert between where he landed and where he wanted to park. By the time he realized it the plane was nose-down in the ditch. Tore up the motor.
I didn’t say, “I told you so.”
COHEN EVENTUALLY GOT his way, though. According to Time magazine in April 1957, after getting out of prison in 1955, Cohen, who said he was trying to go straight, met with Graham in Manhattan. Graham wasn’t crazy about the publicity but he did say he’d gone to work on Mickey in 1949, “and I have high hopes that Cohen will repent in earnest.”
Cohen’s comment? “I am very high on the Christian way of life. Billy came up, and before we had food he said—what do you call it? That thing they say before food? Grace? Yeah, grace. Then we talked a lot about Christianity and stuff.”
In June 1957, Time reported that “Graham … once said of [Cohen]: ‘He has the makings of one of the greatest gospel preachers of all time.’ “
Cohen never followed through. As far as I was concerned he just had the makings of a great con artist.
Give Back
Campers on their way to a new chance at life, 1955.
It Takes a Camp to Help a Child
_______
When the head of the Fred C. Nelles School, a California State Youth Authority (CYA) facility in Whittier, asked me to talk to the residents (at the time we called them “wards of the state”) I was eager to do it. (That school was later closed due to budget cuts. The CYA was renamed the Division of Juvenile Justice, and is part of the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation that provides education, training, and treatment services for California’s most serious youth offenders.)
These were older kids, 16 to 20, in for all types of crimes, including homicide. But I didn’t just want to show up and lecture. Lectures had never helped me when I got in trouble. I decided instead to share the story of how I’d been a first-class troublemaker who had once had the same poor attitude as my audience. I figured we could relate.
The kids seemed pretty impressed that I’d gotten away with so much. Then, I turned the tables. I explained how, with help and support, I’d transformed myself from a delinquent into an athlete. I finished with my prisoner-of-war experiences.
Let’s just say they were surprised. They’d expected a sermon. Instead, I led them with me down Failure Road and then showed them that it was possible to get off that path and onto the Self-Respect Highway. I felt as if I were giving my younger self the support and advice, by example, that would have benefited me.
The next time I spoke to some CYA kids it happened again. And again. They seemed to finally realize that they had control over their own paths. I remember one group of boys who said, “Hey, after listening to your story, we can do our time standing on our heads.”
Words are nice, but helping someone is all about action. I wondered: Did any of these boys have someone like my brother, Pete, in their lives? Did someone care enough not to give up on them? And if so, why hadn’t it worked?
Maybe there was something more I could do to help.
SPEAKING TO THE boys at the Fred C. Nelles School led to an epiphany. I decided to help by creating the Victory Boys Camp in 1954. It was nonprofit and existed on donations. I set up the first camp on an abandoned campsite on the Angeles Crest Highway. The owner was a printer who belonged to my church. The accommodations were very basic but potentially wonderful: no electricity, but four cabins where I could house the kids, and another one I could use for a kitchen. There was also a freshwater stream, and water that came from an underground pump. The rent was cheap. We made a deal.
I signed on two other Olympians as counselors: Keith Wegeman and his older brother Paul. Keith was an Olympic ski jumper who competed in the 1952 Winter Games in Oslo, Norway. He later became a ski instructor and eventually moved to California to host a television series titled Ski Tips in the early 1960s. A couple of years later, we would scale the Gannett Glacier together.
Keith was also the body—but not the voice of—the Jolly Green Giant.
Paul, a Nordic combined skier, competed in the 1950 World Championships at Lake Placid, New York, and the 1952 Olympic Winter Games. He was also a big part of developing the Steamboat Springs recreation area in his home state of Colorado.
Most of the boys I met would explain their “crimes” as something they’d done “just for kicks.” “I wanted a thrill.” “For laughs!”
I figured I could give them a new kind of thrill. Athletics had changed my life, so my plan was to take about thirty-five troubled boys, mostly from the California Youth Authority schools and homes I had visited, for an all-expenses-paid week, and expose them to sports, survival skills, and an authentic wilderness experience. In the evenings we’d sit around the fire and talk about the day, about their lives. Sometimes we’d talk about the Bible and I’d answer any questions, but that was just one aspect of our program, and never forced. All we asked for was respectful attention. If someone wanted more information we were happy to answer questions afterward.
WE ONLY STAYED at the Angeles Crest Highway location for a few years. During that time I was determined to improve the camp and build a swimming pool.
Everyone told me construction was impossible because the camp was at six thousand feet. “How will you get the water? Even if you can, it will freeze in the winter. And there’s no power; you need two hundred and twenty volts to run the filters.”
You know me: I had to find a way.
I did need electricity. Because my speaking engagements always generated goodwill, people who attended would sometimes want to help. A construction company gave me two Jeep motors. Each one was 110 volts. I put them in a little shack, wired them together, and got the 220 volts I needed to run pool filters—and more. They also gave me a Jeep with a bulldozer blade. I could put the blade on or take it off in less than two minutes. It came in handy clearing roads.
My biggest concern was finding a suitable spot for the pool above the local flood zone. A ranger showed me the highest water line from previous inundations, and we picked a site above any flood marks in memory. “If you put the pool here you’ll be fine,” he said. “Safe forever.”
Great. But the plot was covered by a huge mound of dirt. To clear it I approached Elwain Steinkamp, who built Bel Air and belonged to my church. “I can help you,” he said. “I’ll bring up a D8 Caterpillar and three crews and their families. You provide a picnic for the women and the kids, and they’ll remove that mound.”
After the mound was gone I called a big pool building company. They inspected the ground and had bad news. “It’s all gravel,” they said. “We don’t think it will hold together. But if by some miracle you can get the steel basket framework into the hole, and do the gunite, we’ll do the rest for free.”
I took that deal. Steinkamp dug the hole and, although it caved in here and there, I figured out a way to divert some of the freshwater stream into a moat around the hole, which made the walls slightly damp and more cohesive. The stream would also supply the water for the finished pool.
I worked with a crew to put in the rebar framework for a 22’ by 45’ pool. The gunite crew came next. Gunite is a mixture of cement, sand, and water that is pumped through a big hose and pneumatically sprayed at high velocity onto a mold—in this case, the steel framework. If you’ve watched a pool being built in your backyard, you know what I mean. A typical pool uses four inches of gunite over the steel basket. I needed gunite almost a foot deep to create a rigid structure.
When the pool company saw what we’d accomplished they kept their word, giving us stanchions and a springboard, a chrome ladder, a beautiful light for the bottom. I got the tile work done. I built a cabana at one end, and also put a seventeen-foot-wide cement deck and a four-foot wall around the deck. No way could a flood touch the pool. Everyone who saw what we’d accomplished couldn’t believe it.
I filled the pool with water from the stream. Here’s how: about 125 yards up the hill I built a small dam, with a two-inch nipple. I fused together 20-foot sections of black World War II rubber pipe, which is impervious to most everything, and ran it down the hill. Since the pipe was black and it ran aboveground in the sun, the water arrived heated.
This may not seem like a big-deal story, but it shows what you can do when you put your mind to it.
AFTER THE POOL was in, my wife and I thought it might be great to own the property. The owner told us the price: $13,000. I didn’t have the money. But that was okay. I had the camp, and the rent was reasonable.
So you can imagine that I wasn’t pleased when the owner decided to triple the rent.
“What? I just built a pool.”
“Yes, and now it’s worth more. Sorry.”
“But I’ve improved your property at my expense!”
He didn’t budge. It didn’t seem fair.
While I pondered what to do, unbeknownst to me the television host Ralph Edwards decided I should be a guest of honor on his extraordinarily popular show, This Is Your Life. No one told me, because that’s how it worked: like a surprise party. The cover story was that the sportscaster Elmer Peterson wanted to interview me. I said sure. But when my driver got me to Peterson’s studio, his door was locked. We went outside and stood next to these huge stage doors and waited.
“He’ll be here any minute,” the driver said.
Suddenly the stage doors opened and a bright light hit me in the face. I backpedaled. I heard a voice say, “Louis Zamperini” a few times. The driver walked me toward the light. There was Ralph Edwards. I’d handled crashing in an airplane, and being tortured in prison camp, but I was so astonished I couldn’t move. “Louis Zamperini,” Edwards said. “THIS IS YOUR LIFE!”
What I also didn’t know is that the producers had asked my wife what great surprise gift they could get for me. She told them about the camp and the $13,000 price tag. But when they approached the owner, he suddenly wanted $25,000. Instead, the show gave me a beautiful gold wristwatch, a Bell & Howell movie camera, a thousand dollars in cash, and a 1954 Mercury Station Wagon.
I told the owner he could have the camp, the swimming pool, the flagpole, everything I’d built or improved—and made other plans.
YEARS LATER I ran into the campsite owner’s daughter. “Are you still using the pool?” I asked.
“Oh no,” she said. “A terrible flood blew it out of the ground.”
“What?! That pool was made to be there forever.”
She just shook her head. Seems there’d been a big fire on the mountain and the camp was gutted. Every single building on the property, every tree and shrub, burned to the ground. The place was useless. Then a heavy rain and flood did the rest. I was disappointed to learn that pool was lost, but I realized not being able to buy the camp had been a gift that had only revealed itself later.
Sometimes what we see as a loss turns out in the end to be a gain, and sometimes a gain is a loss. I try not to be too swift to pass judgment on any situation, preferring instead to be patient and take the long view because I believe that in the end all things w
ork together for good.
Get Their Attention
_______
I had to move my camp to a different location, but had no idea where. So I went skiing at Mammoth Mountain and talked about my predicament with some friends. I met a woman and her husband who had a chalet. They said, “The summertime is slow, so bring your kids.” Their place was like a first-class hotel. She also said, “I’m going to cook a lot of food and put it in the freezer so your kids will have food all summer.” That was a big help.
The camp operated in both summer and winter. Now, instead of maintaining a permanent campsite, I could restructure the program and be more flexible. Dave McCoy, who ran Mammoth and was a lifelong friend, promised me free equipment and complimentary lift tickets for all the kids. As the years passed, we found different places to stay, like the old McGee Creek Lodge, where we got a great deal on room and board.
And the outdoors, of course, was free. I’d have the kids climb on ice, ride horses in the High Sierras, cook outdoors, plunge into icy mountain streams—not to mention fish, swim, learn archery and how to handle firearms, camp in the wild, climb in the summer, and ski in the winter.
EVERY WEEK WE’D pick up a busload of new campers from one of the Youth Authority schools and drive north on Highway 395, on the east side of California. For most of the drive the boys would talk to each other and ignore me and Keith and Paul. Maybe they asked each other who we were, but they didn’t have much to go on. They could also act surly and resentful. I understood. They knew in advance we’d come to rehabilitate them. They were frightened and unhappy and trying to look strong (particularly to each other), as if they didn’t have a care in the world.
After a few hours we’d stop at Little Lakes, just off the road, northwest of Bishop. The area was covered in volcanic rocks and lava that had tiered because of water running through. I’d lead the group a mile into the hills to a dry waterfall called Fossil Falls. We’d climb to the top and I’d take them as close to the edge as was safe.
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