JIMMY STEWART & HIS WONDERFUL LIFE

Nobody kept track of young Tom Swift after he grew up.

Maybe that inventive fictional American boy of the 1920s became an electronics wizard. Maybe he went to work on an assembly line. Maybe he took over the family hardware store and has spent the last 60 years tinkering in seclusion.

Or maybe he just chucked it all, went to Hollywood and became a movie star.

Like young Jimmy Stewart.

“Uh, I think, No. 1, uh, the whole sort of route my life has taken has been, uh, spotted so many times by good fortune,” the 78-year-old actor says.

Once upon a time, Jimmy Stewart was Tom Swift. He toyed with flying machines and crystal sets and homemade antennas and wireless transmitters. Back in his native Indiana, Pa., he learned Morse code so he could interpret the news flashes being filed at the nearby Arlington Times.

Young Stewart talked his father into driving 50 miles to Pittsburgh and buying him the first Magnavox speaker in town. He set it up in his bedroom, stringing wire from the chimney to his bedroom window so he could pick up the signal of Pittsburgh’s KDKA, the first commercial radio station in the United States. He heard the 1921 inauguration of Warren G. Harding as the nation’s 29th President.

“I put the Magnavox facing out the window. Then I’d back away from the house and see how far away I could still hear the thing,” Stewart said. “I could hear it a block-and-a-half away. I had to cut it down to just once a week because the neighbors didn’t care for the noise.”

By the time he was ready to go off to Princeton in 1928, it was pretty clear that Indiana’s young Tom Swift was going to become an engineer. But he flunked math in his freshman year and he switched majors. Stewart decided to become an architect instead.

America lost a young Tom Swift.

By the time he was a senior, the nation had also lost a young Frank Lloyd Wright. Thanks to a chance meeting with director Joshua Logan and the fact that Stewart knew how to play the accordion, he shifted career plans once more.

“But that,” Stewart said with characteristic digression, “that’s another story.”

Reflecting on how differently his life has turned out from the way he originally had it planned, Stewarthas no regrets. On Thanksgiving Day, 1986, life is as full and robust to James Maitland Stewart as a fine old claret.

“Luck and good fortune,” Stewart said. “Things, ah, happened almost accidental that have turned out in my favor.”

As he reminisced about the rapid changes he has witnessed during the last eight decades, he recalled how his own life has fit in with them all. For the most part, he has been able to adjust to the Swiftian shifts in technology, but occasionally his love of newfangled ideas and his belief in old-fashioned values come into conflict.

Lately, he has been back in the news as an outspoken opponent of Hollywood’s latest technical achievement, the colorization of old black-and-white movies. In the black-and-white Frank Capra classic “It’s a Wonderful Life,” Stewart’s George Bailey character is now in full and, according to Stewart, washed-out color.

“Everybody’s face is orange,” he said. “They sent me a cassette of it and I just can’t get it in color. I remember the time and care that (Capra cameraman) Joe Walker took on the scenes: the action scenes and the very close, intimate scenes. And now everything’s all gone. The shadows and everything that were a part of it. It’s all gone.”

While he conceded that musicals like “Yankee Doodle Dandy” might benefit from colorization, the Capra films and other black-and-white classics should be left alone, he said. Assuming that young audiences won’t watch them unless they are in color is an insult to their intelligence, Stewart said.

“I think it’s just worth fighting for,” he said. “I don’t think they have much reason for doing it except money.”

But Stewart’s love of technology and his conservative values don’t always clash. The Protestant work ethic coupled with his Tom Swift curiosity and a lifetime of lucky accidents has taken Stewart from a modest middle-class home in the Allegheny foothills to an English Tudor-style mansion in Beverly Hills. He is rich, respected and very nearly legendary.

His hearing is about gone now, his eyes need a sturdy pair of bifocals in order to see, and what’s left of his hair is thin, feathery and snow white.

But, in philosophy and temperament, Stewart is still a small-town American boy.

“I was in Boy Scout Troop 3 in Indiana,” he said. “I couldn’t get past Second-Class Scout because I had to take a swimming test and part of the test was saving another boy that’s in the water. I never could get that. I’d go in to save the other guy and then somebody’d have to come in and save me.”

He was born in 1908, the son of the local hardware merchant. His only early flair for acting showed at about age 10, when his father sent him a German helmet from the Western Front during World War I.

“I used the helmet and I wrote a play called ‘Beat the Kaiser,’ and I played the Kaiser and I played the American soldiers and my two sisters played Red Cross nurses and I played all the rest of the parts. Maybe that sort of was the thing that got me started in acting,” he said.

But he didn’t hit the hustings again for 14 years, after he was graduated from Princeton.

On commencement day, he picked up his diploma and planned to catch the next train back to Indiana, Pa.

A 1931 Princeton graduate buttonholed him and--in one of those fortunate accidents Stewart likes to remember--changed his whole life.

“Josh Logan was in the class ahead of me and he knew, I think . . . he knew about a couple minutes after he was born that he was going to be in the theater,” Stewart said.

Logan had heard Stewart play accordion and sing during one of the annual Princeton Christmas musical productions and he urged him to come to Cape Cod and try his hand at summer stock. A small group of Ivy League thespians who called themselves the University Players wrote, directed, acted and produced their own plays. Occasionally, Broadway producers came by to scout new talent.

“I thought it was a great idea, and they said ‘Bring your accordion and you can play for parties,’ ” Stewart said.

He also got to speak a few lines in some of the productions, acting alongside other unknown University Players like Henry Fonda and Margaret Sullavan. At the end of the summer, he was asked to say those same few lines on Broadway.

“And I said, ‘Yeah. That’s what I want to do.’ I went home. I said I wasn’t going to go to work in the hardware store. I wasn’t going to be an architect. I was going to Broadway. They all reached for chairs to sit down. I think they took it very well--considering,” he said.

In New York, he found his calling. From there, he went to Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer as a contract player. Along the way, he has gotten five Academy Award nominations for acting and a best actor Oscar for “The Philadelphia Story.” In 1980, Stewart was honored by the American Film Institute with its prestigious Life Achievement Award.

“But that’s the way it happened and you can see that it was almost accidental. Because I know if Josh Logan hadn’t spoken to me when I was on my way to get the diploma that I would have gone home and I would have gone to graduate school or I would have stayed at the store. I would have been working at my dad’s hardware store as I remember now. Looking back.”

Though he became one of the most successful of big-city success stories, it is his small-town Tom Swift beginnings that he credits with creating Jimmy Stewart.

“I still get quite a bit of mail from people who compare their hometown with Indiana in a lot of ways,” he said. “I don’t think those small-town values are a fading thing. I think they’re a very basic, vital part of America. It’s too important to fade out.”

When asked whether teen-agers who leave their small-town homes for the big city might be spelling an end to the Indianas of America, Stewart shook his head.

“I don’t believe that. They were saying the same thing when I was growing up,” he said. “When I went off to college, they said, ‘We’ll never see you again.’ ” He paused to rub his chin thoughtfully and grinned.

“ ‘Course, they were right.”

From Broadway, Stewart went on to make 75 feature films, including his memorable characterizations of Charles Lindbergh in “The Spirit of St. Louis,” Elwood P. Dowd in “Harvey” and Sen. Jefferson Smith in “Mr. Smith Goes to Washington.” Asked whether Smith was a Republican or a Democrat, Stewart--a staunch Republican and close friend of President and Nancy Reagan’s--said he wasn’t sure which party the feisty fictional senator belonged to.

“I’m sure he was conservative, though,” he said.

Stewart vowed to continue making and promoting films as long as he is able. One of the small-town values he still swears by is hard work.

“My father taught me that,” he said. “I believe there’s no substitute for hard work. I sort of tried to follow in his footsteps in that respect.”

When Stewart isn’t in Japan or Australia promoting a retrospective these days, as he did last spring with “The Glenn Miller Story” (Stewart portrayed the late band leader in the film), he continues to work at the craft he fell into 54 years ago.

Today, he hosts a three-hour special airing over the Westwood One/Mutual Broadcasting System on the life and music of Miller. In Los Angeles, “Moonlight, Memories and Miller” will be broadcast at 7:30 p.m. over KMPC-AM (710).

“He was sort of one of my heroes,” he said of Miller, who disappeared in an Air Force plane in December, 1944, over the English Channel. “I remember going to hear him at the Glen Island Casino. I remember all of them. Glen Gray, both Dorseys, Duke Ellington, Cab Calloway. That big-band music is still popular, I guess all over the world.”

During World War II, when Miller was flying via military transport to entertain the troops in Europe, Stewart was flying aboard Air Force planes, too.

He was a pilot for the Army Air Corps. Even after his discharge in the late ‘40s, when he was back making movies, he stayed on in the Air Force Reserves, eventually attaining the rank of brigadier general.

By the time he married his wife, Gloria, in 1949, he was light-years away from Indiana, Pa.

Still, the Tom Swift in Stewart never really went away. That’s what inspired him to fly in the first place.

He still wears a tie bar in the shape of a gold propeller given to him in the late ‘30s by producer and fellow amateur pilot Leland Hayward. It was Stewart’s reward for passing his private pilot’s test at Mines Field, the beanfield air strip where Los Angeles International Airport now stands.

“They brought out the Cessna 105 which was about the size of one of those Piper airplanes and, uh, the only trouble was not enough power,” he said. “Small engine. But I had one for two or three years and I used to go back to Pennsylvania in it. I think they called it a 105 because that was how fast you could go.”

Indiana is still a small town, but it has its own airstrip now. There are daily flights to and from Pittsburgh. It’s called Jimmy Stewart Airport in honor of the young Tom Swift who went off to college and never came back to settle down.

A bronze statue of Stewart stands in town, too.

“I’ve been back several times,” he said. “ ‘Course, my family’s all gone and most of my friends. I’ve got one or two friends left. But it’s a wonderful town. It’s kept its character. It’s still got one main street.”

He can’t fly back in his own plane anymore though. Poor hearing keeps him from hearing the air traffic controller directions in the cockpit.

“A little over two years ago I gave it up,” he said. “I knew all the controllers at Burbank where I keep my plane, and they started saying they were getting busier and busier and they just couldn’t take the time every time I’d say, ‘Say again?’ to repeat instructions.”

The Tom Swift in Stewart came up with a solution: the equivalent of one of those old Magnavox speakers installed in his cockpit to amplify the controllers’ landing and takeoff instructions.

“It didn’t do any good,” he said. “They came down to me and said they could hear the loudspeaker from my hangar where I was gunning out. They could hear themselves giving me instructions that I couldn’t hear.”

Stewart said he doesn’t have any secret formula for growing old gracefully. Like living in general, it’s a matter of hard work and good fortune.

“I’ve never liked to eat very much,” he said. “I’ve always exercised but I was never an athlete of any kind. At school I was always doing something that had to do with exercise, but as I got older, I just kept that sort of routine of everyday exercise going.”

And what is Stewart thankful for on this Thanksgiving Day, 1986?

“Well, I’m thankful for Indiana, Pa., for my mother and father, the way I spent my youth. I’m thankful I had the chance to get a college education. I’m thankful that I accidentally got into the theater and got into the acting business.

“I’m thankful for the wife that I found when I was 41 years old after I’d been in the war. I’m thankful for the family that we have and for four grandsons. I’ve had a wonderful life.”

A great title for a movie?

“Well, maybe,” Stewart drawls hesitantly. “It, it could work.”