Word: ferdinands
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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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 de Lesseps was the ideal 19th century man, a living embodiment of the "poetry of capitalism." His cheerful cry. "Open the world to the people!'' was echoed by the industrialists and investors of his time. The Suez Canal was to be only a beginning: De Lesseps dreamed of making an inland sea in the Sahara Desert, and of uniting Paris, Moscow, Peking and Bombay with a vast intercontinental railway...
...throne, by giving him free access to the consulate kitchen while the boy's militant father was trying to starve him into a semblance of manly vigor. Sixteen years were to pass before Said and De Lesseps met again. Then, pudgy Said was the ruler of Egypt and Ferdinand had resigned from the consular service. Said Pasha invited De Lesseps to come to Egypt, was quickly won over to the canal project...
...this admiring book Author Charles Beatty, nephew of Admiral Earl Beatty, Britain's World War I naval hero, writes a passionate defense of all the acts of Ferdinand de Lesseps' life. The biographer's adulation prevents the reader from discovering the man beneath the trappings of the hero. But of De Lesseps' effect on his time and on history, there is no doubt. The world still struggles clumsily with the problems he posed, and still has need of men like De Lesseps, who always "expected to meet friends rather than enemies, yet was always sword...