Word: godgart
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Never before had the 400-odd island villagers of North Haven seen such a fine schoolteacher and all-round nice fellow as lovable, affable Martin Godgart. A happy, hulking (6 ft., 250 lb.), multichinned chap with a Harvard accent, Godgart turned up last September on the tiny Penobscot Bay island off the coast of Maine, flashed a schoolteacher's certificate, got himself a job teaching high-school English, Latin and French. He quickly made friends with the normally reserved down-East folk; they liked his jolly ways, his eagerness to participate in North Haven affairs. He formed...
...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...
Always a candid confesser when he was caught, Ferdinand never reasonably explained why he could not be satisfied with his own identity; yet he always played his roles with urbane authority and considerable skill. Thus, while most of his neighbors in North Haven thought that "Godgart" was a little strange, they thoroughly liked him. It was his closest North Haven friend, Schoolteacher William Hopkins, who became suspicious enough of Ferdinand-especially after he gave Hopkins and his wife a captionless LIFE photo of himself-to supply Maine police with a set of Ferdinand's fingerprints taken from a beer...
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