Ferdinand Waldo Demara

Demara, known locally as 'Fred', was born in Lawrence, Massachusetts, in 1921.

His father, Ferdinand Waldo Demara Sr., was born in Rhode Island and worked in Lawrence's old Theatre District as a motion picture operator.

Demara Sr. had been financially well-off, and the family lived in an upper-class neighborhood on Jackson St. in Lawrence.

Demara Sr.'s brother, Napoleon, owned many of the theatres in Lawrence, in which Demara Sr. was an active union member.

Early in the Great Depression, Fred's father became financially insolvent, forcing the family to move from the Tower Hill neighborhood to the poorer section in the city, at 40 Texas Avenue in the lower southwest Tower Hill neighborhood.

During this financially troubled time, Demara Jr. ran away from home at age 16 to join the Trappist monks in Rhode Island.

After two years, he was told he wasn't suited to being a Trappist and was sent instead to a Brothers of Charity home near Montreal, Canada.

He was then transferred to a Brothers of Charity boys home in West Newbury, Massachusetts, where he taught fourth grade.

After running away from the Brothers of Charity after an argument with his superior, he joined the United States Army in 1941.

The following year, Demara began his new lives by borrowing the name of Anthony Ignolia, an army buddy, and going AWOL.

He joined the Abbey of Our Lady of Gethsemani, a Trappist monastery in Kentucky under his assumed identity.

However, he met an acquaintance from his first Trappist monastery, and so he left before his true identity could be revealed.

He then moved to the New Melleray Abbey near Dubuque, Iowa, before finally returning home.

His father encouraged his son to turn himself in to the military police for his desertion but he did not.

He then joined the United States Navy where he trained as a hospital corpsman.

He did not reach the position he wanted, faked his suicide and borrowed another name, Robert Linton French, and became a religion-oriented psychologist.

"Dr French" then presented himself at the New Subiaco Abbey, a Benedictine monastery in Arkansas, as a would-be Catholic convert.

However, after a few weeks "he was summoned to the abbot's office, where he was accused of having forged his documents".

He denied the accusations but left the monastery.

He travelled to Chicago where he joined the Clerics of Saint Viator, before moving on to the Order of St. Camillus in Milwaukee.

After once more arguing with his superiors, this time over his lack of cooking skills, he left and moved to New Jersey where he joined the Paulist novitiate in Oak Ridge.

As "Dr French" he applied for various jobs at Catholic colleges and was eventually employed to teach psychology at Gannon College (now a university) in Erie, Pennsylvania.

Being made dean of the School of Philosophy, he taught general psychology, industrial psychology and abnormal psychology, and published a "well-received booklet" titled How to Bring Up Your Child.

He left after "an unfortunate incident involving forged checks".

He was briefly a member of the Benedictine Saint Bede's Abbey, Peru, Illinois, before joining the Brothers Hospitallers of Saint John of God.

Afterwards, Demara served as an orderly in a Los Angeles sanitarium, and served as an instructor in St. Martin's College (now a university) in the state of Washington.

The FBI captured him, and he served 18 months at the Naval Disciplinary Barracks, San Pedro, California, for desertion.

After his release he assumed a fake identity and studied law at night at Northeastern University, then joined the Brothers of Christian Instruction in Maine, a Roman Catholic order.

While there he became acquainted with a young Canadian surgeon named Joseph C. Cyr.

That led to his most famous exploit, in which he masqueraded as Cyr, working as a ship's doctor aboard HMCS Cayuga, a Royal Canadian Navy destroyer, during the Korean War.

He managed to improvise successful major surgeries and fend off infection with generous amounts of penicillin.

His most notable surgical practices were performed on some sixteen Korean combat injuries who were loaded onto the Cayuga.

All eyes turned to Demara, as several men needed urgent surgery.

Ferdinand Waldo Demara Jr. (December 1921 – June 7, 1982) was an American impostor.

He was the subject of both a book and a movie, loosely based on his exploits: The Great Impostor, in which he was played by Tony Curtis.

Demara's impersonations included a civil engineer, a sheriff's deputy, an assistant prison warden, a doctor of applied psychology, a hospital orderly, a lawyer, a child-care expert, a Benedictine monk, a Trappist monk, a naval surgeon, an editor, a cancer researcher, and a teacher.

One teaching job led to six months in prison.

There are not many facts that have been proven about Demara, in spite of the articles, book, and big screen movie made about him during his lifetime.

He was said to possess a true photographic memory and was widely reputed to have an extraordinary IQ.

He was apparently able to memorize necessary techniques from textbooks and worked on two cardinal rules: The burden of proof is on the accuser and When in danger, attack. He described his own motivation as "Rascality, pure rascality".