Word: demara
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...Good Doctor. The astonished villagers soon learned why: Martin Godgart was an impostor. His real name is Ferdinand W. Demara Jr., and he is not just any everyday kind of impostor. At 35, he is a kid-gloved Walter Mitty, an audacious, unschooled but amazingly intelligent pretender who always wanted to be a Somebody, and succeeded in being a whole raft of Somebody Elses. Yet he apparently never bilked a penny from a soul...
When he was 16, Ferdinand Demara ran away from his home in Lawrence, Mass. to join the Cistercian monks in Rhode Island, stayed several years under monastic rule. In 1941 he enlisted in the Army, soon went over the hill, joined the Navy, became a medical corpsman. His first big bull-throwing exhibition came after he went over the hill again and turned up at the Trappist monastery near Louisville, Ky. claiming to be one Robert L. French, Ph.D. As in his later exploits, Demara had picked his identity from a university catalogue, had in some mysterious way assembled...
...Ferdinand Waldo Demara...
Tired of ward routine, Demara took to religion again. Shuttling back & forth across the Maine-New Brunswick border between two religious houses, he met the real Dr. Cyr and won his confidence. "Dr. Hamann" never betrayed himself in his medical shoptalk. At St. Romuald in Quebec, "Dr. Hamann" became "Brother John." But almost at once, he ran away and signed on with the R.C.N...
...Demara had been tried for the illegal practice of medicine, a court psychiatrist might have unraveled the full story of his personality. And all concerned, including his father, might have learned how Demara picked up his skill as a surgeon...