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  While waiting for the first all-marine carrier to be launched, I was assigned to Lee Field as an instructor and a test pilot. Mostly I checked out airplanes that had been repaired to ensure that they were flightworthy. One afternoon my roommate was showing off a bit for his "chicklets," his new class of trainees. He came in very low over the field and started to do a roll, but he didn't have enough power. He mushed in, his wing hit, and his plane cart-wheeled down the runway before exploding. They found his body almost two miles from the point of impact. I had to inventory his effects. That was pretty tough. I was ordered to take over his class. "I promise you," I told them, "you're all gonna live through this. Flight safety is going to be the first thing we think about in the morning and the last thing at night."

  On our third training mission we flew to the satellite base at St. Augustine. Unfortunately, one of my trainees did a ground loop, meaning that his wingtip brushed the runway as he landed, causing the plane to start spinning. He was not hurt, but his plane was damaged. Mechanics had to take off the wing and repair the operating mechanism. When it was done, they suggested I take it up for a test flight. I had a lot of confidence in these mechanics, they were topflight, and I wanted to get my class into the air as quickly as possible. I tested the plane.

  As soon as I got into the air I knew I was in trouble. That plane would not fly level. I couldn't get my left wing up higher than my wheels. It was down at about a forty-five-degree angle. If I tried to land, that wing would hit first, and someone else would have to inventory my effects. I held the stick with both hands and pulled it as far as I could to the side, but the plane would not respond. I made a couple of passes at the field, hoping that miraculously the operating mechanism would suddenly start functioning and I'd land safely. It didn't happen. The flight manual solution to this problem is pretty explicit: jump out of the airplane. The marines had a lot more invested in me than a piece of machinery. I told the tower that I was going to abandon my airplane. I climbed to the proper altitude, set a course for the everglades where the plane could crash without endangering other people, checked my parachute straps to make sure they were good and tight, opened up my canopy, released my safety belt, and got ready to jump.

  Then the wind hit my face. Well, I thought, this is a really bad idea. I sat down in the cockpit, closed the canopy, and radioed the tower that I was going to attempt a landing. I made several passes over the field as I tried to figure out what to do. Below me I could see the fire engines and the meat wagons, the ambulances, lining up near the runway for my crash landing.

  I probably made a dozen passes over the field as I tried to figure out what to do. Then I had an idea. The Corsair had a plate in front of the wheels that acted as a dive break. When a pilot was making a bomb run, just before he released his bombs he would pop his wheels, which slowed the plane and increased accuracy. I reasoned that the sudden change in airflow might also lift the wing just enough for me to sneak in. I tested it in the air a few times and it seemed to work. It really didn't matter if it was a good idea; it was the only idea I had. Marines never use the word "scared." Instead we say "apprehensive." I think it's accurate to say that I was extremely apprehensive. In fact, I would say I was about as apprehensive as it is possible to be.

  I was coming in on the proverbial wing and a prayer. I made my approach with my wheels up. When I was just above the runway, I took a deep breath and popped my wheels. The wing came up and I hit the tarmac safely. Seconds after I hit the ground, the wing dropped again and I lost control of the plane. It swerved wildly across the field before I finally was able to brake. The first sound I heard was the fire-engine sirens racing toward me.

  I scrambled out of that cockpit. Someone handed me a big mug of hot coffee, but I was shaking so badly that I sloshed it all over my hand. I may be the only plane-crash victim treated for burns from scalding coffee. When I calmed down I decided against flying back to Lee Field. Instead I rode back to the base in the bus with my students. It was a moment of ignominy—instructors never rode the bus with students—but I didn't care. I was thrilled to be on that bus.

  Later in my career I occasionally heard claims that I laughed too easily and too often. Let me ask you, can you blame me?

  While I was stationed in Jacksonville, I did something truly daring. Testing airplanes was one thing; getting married took a lot more courage. My years in the Marine Corps had changed me. I wasn't just a pilot; I was a Corsair pilot, a marine fighter pilot. As far as I was concerned, there wasn't anything better. I was very proud and I suspect I showed it. I was confident, cocky, and I knew how good I looked in my pressed uniform. In high school I never had much luck with girls. I told myself I was too busy with my schoolwork and jobs; the truth was that I was too shy. At Boston College I discovered the pleasures of romance, but I was there for less than two years. I tried to make up for that lost time in the service.

  There were thousands of single women, the legendary Rosie the Riveters, working in defense plants in the Jacksonville area. Since I was a marine fighter pilot, basically all I had to do to attract some of them was survive. I was an officer and a gentleman and as such I was completely faithful to every one of the women I dated, at least while I was with them.

  We were young and single, many of us were living on our own for the first time in our lives, and we were in the middle of the most devastating war in history. We really did not know what was going to happen the next day. So we worked hard during the day and partied hard at night. Admittedly there were times when I might have partied a little too hard. I remember I once found myself dating two women who lived in the same building. However, my problem was not that I was dating two women; no, my real problem was that I met someone else I really liked, and she lived in the same building as the other two girls.

  Alyce Ferrell was adorable. She was working at the St. John's Shipyards as a secretary. We had met at the Officers' Club, where she was serving as a Junior Chamber of Commerce volunteer hostess, but since she knew both of the women I was dating—in fact one of them was her roommate—I did not pursue her. At least not immediately.

  But one night I called for her roommate, who wasn't home, and Alyce answered the phone and we got into a long conversation. One thing led to another and the next thing I knew we had been married twenty-six years and had had four children. Not right away, of course—it took us almost a year before we were married.

  We couldn't have been any more different. I was tall; she was small. I was raised in big cities like New York and Boston; she had grown up outside Dade City, Florida. I was a churchgoing Catholic; she was a Protestant. Somehow, though, it worked. There was a sweetness about her that I found irresistible.

  I don't think I understood how truly different we were until I visited Alyce's home in Lacoochee. The town was so small that if you put it in a corner of the skating rink at Rockefeller Center, you probably wouldn't notice it right away. It probably hadn't changed too much since the turn of the century. The main road through town had a wooden sidewalk—only on one side. But what I saw there shocked me.

  Maybe because I'd grown up around carnivals, where my family had lived and worked with people of different origins, races, and religions, or maybe because I knew all about the signs reading IRISH NEED NOT APPLY, I'd learned to judge people as individuals. In fact, when we lived in Bayonne, several of my friends were Japanese and I spent a lot of time with their families in their homes. That caused me some difficulty during the war. For example, I just couldn't use the word "Jap." I knew it was a derogatory term and I refused to use it. And I couldn't believe that our government would intern American citizens of Japanese ancestry in camps and take away their property. I ended up in a lot of pretty heated discussions with some of my fellow marines. On occasion I was called a "Jap lover," but that didn't bother me. I used to give a speech to each new class I taught, telling them, "This war started when several men went into a room and decided they wanted a war. It's not the Japanese people, it's their leaders. And it's g
oing to end the same way, a few men going into a room and deciding to end the war. Your job is to stay alive until that happens . . ."

  Prejudice of any kind has always been difficult for me to deal with. At Catholic University my senior thesis was titled "Against Restrictive Covenants in Housing." In any event, I drove into this town in which my future wife had been raised and just about the first thing I saw was a very small grocery store—the entire store couldn't have been more than fifteen feet by fifteen feet—but it had two doors, one marked WHITES, the other COLORED. It barely had room for a counter, yet it had two doors. Outside was a drinking fountain with a single pipe branching into two spigots, again marked WHITE ONLY and COLORED ONLY. Yet somehow Alyce had managed to break out of this environment, out of this lifestyle. And our four kids grew up completely without prejudice.

  We were married on July 5, 1945, in Atlantic City. I was twenty-two years old. I wanted to be married by a priest in a church, but we were not permitted to do so because Alyce wasn't Catholic. Fortunately, we found a loophole in the rules. There was a brand-new Catholic church on a naval base near Atlantic City, so new that it hadn't been consecrated. So it looked just like a church, it felt like a church, but technically it wasn't a church. Because it wasn't a Catholic church, a priest was allowed to marry us in it.

  Our first daughter was born the following April in what had once been the dining room of a lovely old home in Dade City. I wanted Alyce to be in the new hospital on the marine base at Cherry Point, but she insisted that her first child was going to be delivered by her family doctor. He had converted a home into a hospital. I stayed in the room with Alyce as long as I could, but after a while I couldn't handle it and waited outside. There was a book made into a movie that greatly affected me titled Claudia . Dorothy McGuire played the title role in the movie. It was about a lovely, innocent girl. And so our first daughter was named Claudia.

  When Alyce and I decided to get married we knew that as soon as the new marine carrier was ready to be launched, I would be shipping out. A month later my orders to report to the West Coast were issued. Ironically, I received those orders the day the atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima. Days later the second bomb was dropped on Nagasaki. My orders were rescinded; the war was over.

  I was prepared to go to war, not to peace. I had always been honest with Alyce; I had told her that when the war ended I was going back into radio. But while I was in the service I had started hearing about television. No one knew too much about it—it was still basically considered radio with pictures—but everyone knew it was coming. I had a big decision to make: I could either get back into radio or return to college to prepare myself for television. I really didn't know what to do.

  Right after the war ended, NBC hosted a series of welcome-home auditions to try to discover new talent for their vast radio network. The auditions were held on the mezzanine at 30 Rockefeller Plaza, the same building in which we would later do The Tonight Show. I remember so well that when the elevator doors opened I saw the beautiful art deco carvings on the wall. I was nervous; when I did this audition I actually heard my knees knocking. I was given a B+ rating and my acetate, a large record, was distributed to all NBC affiliates. I received offers from two radio stations, one in Springfield, Massachusetts, the other in Montgomery, Alabama.

  I wasn't used to turning down jobs of any kind, especially jobs on radio. But the prospect of working in television appealed to me. I knew it was a real gamble. I wasn't sure I could make it as a performer on television; I knew my voice was fine for radio, but I had no idea how I would look to TV viewers. Because there was no TV industry, no one knew how to prepare for a career in television. It seemed to me that learning how to act might be helpful. So, I decided to turn down the radio offers and enrolled in a university drama department.

  My attitude hadn't changed at all: if I couldn't be a performer, I would be a writer; if I couldn't be a writer, I'd be a producer. But somehow, somewhere, whether it was radio or television or whatever else was invented, I was going to be in broadcasting.

  I will now reveal a secret known to very few people. I coulda been a bulldog. I scored very high on the military version of the college entrance boards and was accepted to Yale University. Just imagine, if I had decided to go there, William Buckley's famous book could have been titled God and McMahon at Yale. It was not Yale's Ivy League reputation that impressed me but the fact that it was one of the few universities with a full drama department. In fact, I would have returned happily to Boston College if it had had a drama school. Alyce and I visited New Haven and I loved the Yale campus, but I was concerned about finding the kind of work that would enable me to support my wife and child there.

  I was also accepted to Catholic University in Washington, D.C. Washington was the kind of big city in which I felt comfortable. It didn't have a boardwalk, but since it was the center of American politics, I knew people there would appreciate a good sales pitch. Catholic University was the seat of Catholic education in America, the only college in the country that offered a degree in canon law. Because the presidents of all the other Catholic universities studied there, it had tremendous power to influence the Church. At various times the leading philosophers of most of the Catholic orders taught there. It was a very serious place, which is why it was so unusual that it also had such a fine drama department.

  The drama department was the creation of an extraordinary man, the Reverend Gilbert Hartke. Hartke somehow managed to convince the good fathers of this august university that drama should be an academic subject equal to philosophy or history, a task no more unlikely than giving a contribution to Jerry Lewis for muscular dystrophy and getting back change. Hartke proceeded to establish one of the premier drama departments in the world. He made it an exciting place to be. Helen Hayes gave her farewell performance in Eugene O'Neill's Long Day's Journey into Night on his stage. Walter Kerr, who later became the New York Times theater critic, taught my playwriting class—and married one of my fellow students, Jean Kerr.

  At Catholic University I learned that the hardest part of acting is being able to act as if you weren't acting. Besides carrying a full course load and working my usual four jobs, I performed in several productions. I played a lawyer in Aristophanes' comedy The Birds. I looked like Mercury—I was costumed in tights and a jerkin and my hair was powdered white and combed into a point. In order to make the curtain I had to leave the vegetable gadget stand I was operating in a store in Silver Springs, Maryland, at precisely the right moment. So as I was doing my spiel, "Yes, madam, I certainly will get to the onion slicer, thank you for reminding me," I was constantly glancing at my watch. At the last second I raced to the university, got into my costume and makeup, and walked calmly onstage to deliver my big line: "I 'm an attorney."

  Let me try that reading another way for you; "I'm an attorney! "

  I played a singing Polonius in a series of Shakespeareantype vignettes Walter and Jean Kerr wrote titled Thank You, Just Looking. I made a little extra money during that run by working as an usher. I'd seat the audience, then run backstage to get into costume.

  The play was a big success. I'm sure my fine ushering played no part in that, but eventually the title was changed to Touch and Go and the play went to Broadway. Some of the performers went with it, but not me. I'm not sure I was offered my part, but even if I had been, I couldn't have accepted it. At most the part paid seventy-five dollars a week, and I couldn't have afforded to give up my dry-cleaning business just to be a Broadway actor.

  I appeared on television for the first time while studying at Catholic University. An original play in which I had a small role was so successful that it was chosen to be used in an experimental broadcast. By 1947 many cities had their own television stations, but since these stations were not connected, there was no such thing as a network. I'm not even sure kinescopes, the very rudimentary videotapes, existed. Finally, several stations from Washington to New York were strung together by something called a coaxial cable
. As far as I know, this play was to be the first show broadcast on the coaxial cable.

  I played an officer in a play about the military. I suspect I got the part because of my strong audition and the fact that I had my own uniform. We transformed the basement banquet room of the Wardman Park Hotel into our studio and broadcast live on this makeshift network. When I look back on how we had to jury-rig lights and create our own sets, how our director and cameraman were inventing television as they went along, it seems impossible to believe that little more than two decades later technology had advanced so quickly that every person in America was able to watch Ed Ames toss a hatchet right between the legs of a human silhouette.

  Officially I was enrolled in the Department of Speech and Drama, but I minored in scholastic philosophy. I was pretty good at figuring out how, but I wanted to try to understand why. The course I most wanted to take at the university was metaphysics, taught by Father Hart. Father Hart was a brilliant philosopher who had taught Fulton Sheen, and he accepted a limited number of students. I took three philosophy courses in summer school in preparation for this course and finally I was accepted. If I had stayed at Catholic University one more year, I would have taken Father Hart's legendary course, "God and Beauty." Isn't that a beautiful name for a course?

  Father Hart was a very demanding teacher and his courses were difficult. At times he would give us the answers to his questions and I was so lost I still couldn't answer them. But I loved being in a classroom listening to him. I just loved it. Father Hart forced his students to wonder about the world. Unfortunately, it convened at ten o'clock in the morning, and on occasion I was so busy collecting dry cleaning that I had to cut it. Twice I was dropped from the class because of excessive absences, but each time I appealed to Monsignor Smith, the head of the philosophy department, and was reinstated.