Outcast Ran Past Bigotry, Adversity on His Way to Glory

Louis Silvie Zamperini, 85, took up running when he was about 5, the same age he took up smoking. Sometimes his fleet feet came in handy for escaping the police.

But they also took him to the 1936 Berlin Olympics, to USC, into NCAA and wartime record books, and into a museum that will highlight the contributions of Italians in the history of the West. He even has a new autobiography coming out, “Devil at My Heels,” co-written by David Rensin; it is a more detailed version of one he wrote in 1954.

Nothing could deter Zamperini from running, which helped him transcend the mean streets. When he was about 7, a boy who had challenged him to a race took the lead, only to run in front of a car and be crippled for life.

“I was lucky he beat me,” Zamperini said in a recent interview.

Zamperini was born in upstate New York in 1917 to an Italian immigrant father and Italian American mother. Two years later, his family left the East Coast because doctors warned that Louie and his older brother, Pete, would die of pneumonia if they didn’t escape the harsh climate.

They moved to a tough Torrance neighborhood where anti-Italian sentiment ran high. Until first grade, he spoke only Italian and was mercilessly teased by other kids. He quickly learned English, along with how to fight to survive.

His bravado made him tough but also made for close shaves, from hopping and falling off freight trains to almost drowning at the Redondo Beach saltwater plunge, when someone pushed him off a 20-foot-high platform. He was pulled from the water unconscious, but earned the family nickname “Lucky Louie” by surviving.

“ ‘We move to California for your health, and here you are almost dying every day,’ my mother always reminded me,” Zamperini recalled.

Like many Depression-era kids, he grew up tough and poor. Neighborhood parents warned the violent and rebellious teenager to stay on his own block and away from their children.

“I cursed freely. I destroyed property. I ordered kids around. I never used my head, never thought about consequences,” he said.

Undisciplined and constantly in trouble, he ditched school, rang church bells in the middle of the night, let air out of teachers’ tires, stole beer from bootleggers, spread axle grease on railway tracks so the train had a hard time braking, peppered neighbors’ pets with a BB gun, stole pies from a bakery and bullied kids into fistfights.

When a Catholic priest twisted his ear for being late to Mass, he got even by attending the Baptist church with a buddy.

His thirst for revenge against anyone who crossed him dominated his life, until he discovered how to earn respect by running.

At first, he ran to escape the police, who always seemed to be after him for something. But in February 1933, he entered the mile race at Torrance High as a favor to Pete, who was trying to keep his sibling out of trouble. Zamperini won in 4 minutes 58 seconds, breaking the school record, which Pete had held.

The next year, with his brother’s help, he cut back on smoking and drinking, and won the interscholastic mile with a record of 4:21.2 at the L.A. Memorial Coliseum. That high school record would stand for 20 years.

The newspapers began calling him “Leather Lung,” “Iron Man” and “Zamp the Champ.” Classmates cheered him on as the “Torrance Tornado.” No longer a loner, Zamperini made friends fast. Even the principal learned his name. He relished every moment in the limelight, knowing at last how he could make something of himself.

In 1936, he won a scholarship to USC and, at 18, made the U.S. Olympic track team. But he partied and danced his way across the Atlantic by ship, gaining more than 14 pounds and losing any real chance to be competitive. He finished eighth in his only event, the 5,000-meter race.

But his final lap of 56 seconds set a record and caught the eye of Adolf Hitler, who demanded to shake the hand of the spunky American.

“ ‘Hitler grasped my hand and said, ‘Ah! The boy with the fast finish!’ ” Zamperini recalled.

After a few celebratory beers, Zamperini wanted a souvenir. On a whim, he scaled a 15-foot wall surrounding the Reich Chancellery, the Nazi equivalent of the White House, and seized the Nazis’ swastika flag off the flagpole. But he’d been seen. As guards called for him to stop, he leaped to the ground and ran -- which had worked before. But no one had ever shot at him before. The Germans did; he stopped.

He got the souvenir anyway. When Gen. Werner von Fritsch, Hitler’s commander-in-chief of the army, learned the thief’s identity, he gave Zamperini the flag, which he still has.

Zamperini returned from Berlin to start his freshman year at USC, where he shed the excess weight and set the best NCAA mile mark two years running: in 1938, with 4:08.3; and in 1939, with 4:13.6. His 1938 time set a collegiate record that lasted 15 years.

He graduated in 1940, traded in his running shoes for wings and signed up as a bombardier. While he was on a rescue mission south of Hawaii on May 27, 1943, two of the plane’s four engines stopped. Then the plane exploded.

“I felt like someone hit me in the head with a sledgehammer,” Zamperini said. He blacked out, but his Trojan ring caught on the window latch and saved his life. He came to as the plane was sinking. He crawled aboard a life raft with the only other survivors of the 11-man crew, Francis McNamara and Russell Phillips.

The trio exhausted their meager supplies in a few days -- eight half-pints of water and six chocolate bars. They tried to fish, but sharks bit off their catch.

“We were in constant, horrible fear,” Zamperini said. “Sometimes one [shark] would put its head right up on the raft and look at us. We’d whack them on the nose with the paddles.”

On the 27th day into their journey, a Japanese plane spotted them and opened fire. Zamperini dived into the water as the others played dead in the raft. All three survived, but their raft wound up with 48 holes.

They worked to plug them, but six days later McNamara died of starvation and dehydration. Then it rained, enabling Zamperini and Phillips to survive.

After 47 days adrift, they were each down to about 70 pounds. A Japanese patrol boat found them at the southernmost part of the Marshall Islands -- nearly 2,000 miles from where they had crashed.

They weren’t exactly rescued. The two, so weak they could barely stand, were blindfolded and dragged from one POW camp to another. After three months, they were sent to different camps. Both suffered, but both survived.

Zamperini was tortured, beaten, fed vermin-infested rice balls and used as a guinea pig by a Japanese doctor, he said. “When the Japanese found out I was a star runner, they broke my nose three times,” he added.

Perhaps it was a cosmic carry-over from his childhood nickname, but he was luckier than those who had come before him. “I found a crude engraving on the wall of my cell which read, ‘9 Marines marooned on Makin Island -- August 12, 1942,’ ” he said. The Marines, who had included their names, were later beheaded. Zamperini memorized the names and reported their fate after the war.

He’d been in captivity more than a year when, under duress, he made a Japanese radio propaganda broadcast in November 1944. His family was stunned to learn he was alive. “My parents had already received my Purple Heart for ‘wounds resulting in my death,’ ” Zamperini said.

When he refused to make another broadcast, he was sent to a special camp where he endured even greater torture, he said. His anger at his tormentors helped him survive, as did his dreams of renewed glory in running.

When the war ended in 1945, Zamperini returned home but was never able to run the way he once had. The dreams that had sustained him for 2 1/2 years in captivity collapsed in the face of harsh realities.

“I was drunk, angry and I didn’t know what I was looking for,” he said.

While on R & R in Miami in 1946, he met a local debutante, Cynthia Applewhite. They were married that year. But he had a hard time finding a job and, because of a housing shortage, they lived with friends.

Nightmares plagued him and his drinking worsened. He swore to take revenge on his Japanese tormentors. His worried wife urged him to go listen to a young preacher named Billy Graham. That sermon changed his life and saved his marriage.

In 1950, Zamperini returned to Japan -- not for revenge, but to forgive. “The warmth that the Japanese people showed me more than compensated for the suffering I had in those camps,” he said. Upbeat and encouraging, he traveled the world for more than a decade to tell his story and spread the Gospel. He made a living in commercial real estate and as a youth counselor with a local Presbyterian church.

In 1998, he returned to Japan to appear in a CBS feature about his POW experience, which aired during the Winter Olympics.

He plans to be at the unveiling of the Italian American history museum in Italian Hall when it opens sometime next year in the shadow of City Hall at El Pueblo de Los Angeles Historic Monument. Memorabilia from his life and sports career will be featured in the sports history exhibit.

Zamperini will be 86 next month, and he still walks two miles every day in his Hollywood Hills neighborhood. He has carried the Olympic torch four times. He still skis and flies planes, but gave up skateboarding in 1998.

“I’m having the time of my life,” he said. “My new book is coming out next month, and a studio has optioned my life story. Nicolas Cage might play me.”