I was a big fan of James Thurber when I was in high school. Thurber had an uncanny wit and a propensity toward satire that caught my fancy. One of my favorite Thurber works was the delightful short story “The Secret Life of Walter Mitty.” The story first appeared in the New Yorker in 1939, the same year that I first appeared!
I didn’t read it in the New Yorker; I read it in a collection of Thurber’s stories in a book called “My World and Welcome to It,” which was loaned to me by my freshman English teacher, Marion Felix. It was a very entertaining book, illustrated with Thurber’s own simple cartoons.
I loved Walter Mitty’s fanciful flights of imagination because I, too, was a dreamer when I was a kid. I had all sorts of imaginary adventures. Mitty was a meek, mild man with a vivid fantasy life: in just a few dozen paragraphs he imagined himself a wartime pilot, an emergency-room surgeon and a devil-may-care killer.
The story and the character became so popular that the words “Mitty” and “Mitty-esque” have found their way into the language to refer to any ineffectual dreamer.
A wonderful movie starring Danny Kaye as Walter came out in 1947. And a much-less-wonderful 2013 movie starring Ben Stiller was based on the Walter Mitty adventures.
As I grew older, my fantasies became more sophisticated. I was still a dreamer, but I was also becoming a bigger-than-life sports enthusiast, and many of my imaginary adventures involved my heroics in sports. (In real life, I was far from a sports hero!)
So, anyway, I became a fan of George Plimpton, a dreamer of a different sort. Plimpton was a journalist and a sports writer who became famous for what he called “participatory journalism,” which (for Plimpton, anyway) included competing in professional sporting events, being in a Western movie, doing stand-up at a Vegas club, and playing with the New York Philharmonic Orchestra, and then writing about those experiences from the point of view of an amateur.
In 1963, Plimpton went to the preseason training camp of the Detroit Lions as a backup quarterback, and he ran a few plays in an intrasquad scrimmage. His best-known book “Paper Lion,” was the result of that summer’s experiment. It was later adapted into a 1968 feature film starring Alan Alda as George Plimpton.
Plimpton tried pro football again in 1971, this time joining the Baltimore Colts and seeing action in an exhibition game against his previous team, the Lions. “Mad Ducks and Bears” came out of that experience.
“Open Net” followed his working out as an ice hockey goalie with the Boston Bruins. He actually played in an NHL preseason game.
“The Bogey Man,” a wonderful book, retells how Plimpton tries to play professional golf on the PGA Tour during the Nicklaus and Palmer era of the 1960s.
In the April 1, 1985, edition of Sports Illustrated magazine, Plimpton pulled off one of the greatest April Fool’s Day pranks of all time. Aided by the New York Mets organization and several of the Mets players, Plimpton wrote a convincing account of a new unknown pitcher in the Mets spring training camp named Siddhartha Finch who threw a baseball over 160 mph, wore a heavy boot on one foot, and was a practicing Buddhist with a largely unknown background.
The prank was so successful that many readers believed the story and the ensuing popularity of the joke resulted in Plimpton writing an entire book on the now-famous Sidd Finch: “The Curious Case of Sidd Finch.”
At Harvard, Plimpton was a classmate and close personal friend of Robert F. Kennedy. Plimpton, along with former decathlete Rafer Johnson and NFL star Rosey Grier, was credited with helping wrestle Sirhan Sirhan to the ground when Kennedy was assassinated following his victory in the 1968 California Democratic primary at the former Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles.
So … two dreamers, one fictional (Walter Mitty) and one real (George Plimpton), had some impact on my life.
I have never gotten over being a dreamer; my imagination still runs rampant on occasion, and I love reading things that make me see the world in a different light.
Walter Mitty said, “To see the world, things dangerous to come to, to see behind walls, draw closer, to find each other, and to feel. That is the purpose of life.”
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