A List of Influential People From the Pages of 1 Life

Life Magazine has just released the results of a study in which a passel of historians were asked to name the 100 most influential Americans of the 20th Century. Not, as the editor noted, “the most famous but the most influential.”

I always read essentially meaningless lists like this, just as I frequently take those idiotic quizes in magazines to find out how I shape up as a father, lover, intellect or whether or not I’m happy, underachieving or generally screwing up my life. If I make a good score, I know the quiz was thoughtful and scientifically conceived; a bad score tells me it was a sham, drawn up to fill a last-minute hole in the magazine.

So I studied the Life list critically and decided--as I’m sure most of you who read it did--that I would have made quite different choices. Then I realized the names that popped in my head were the Americans who were most influential in my life. Only in a few instances did those names parallel the list compiled by Life. And few of them ever came into the view of historians.

But once I began brooding about the people most influential in my life, I was compelled to make my own list. Here, without in any way assessing an order of importance, are some of the names that come quickly to mind:

* A young advertising man named Arthur Madsen, who befriended a lonely 12-year-old neighbor boy in Spokane, Wash., and spent many hours with me going carefully and quite seriously over my efforts to rewrite the Tarzan and Oz books.

* A brilliant, troubled writing professor at the University of Missouri named Winston Allard who apparently saw the same spark in my writing when I was a 25-year-old war veteran and made work demands that turned me into a professional in one intense year.

* A former editor of Esquire Magazine named Frederic Birmingham whom I first met when he spoke at Missouri Journalism Week and who encouraged me to write for a living. Because I already had a family at the end of World War II, I chose to take the safe route into public relations instead. Every time Birmingham came to Chicago, he would call me and we would have lunch and he would ask, “What are you writing?” And I would tell him that although I wanted to desperately, I didn’t have time to write. For five years he accepted that answer, but the sixth year, he told me that was baloney, that if I was serious about writing I would find time, and that he didn’t intend to meet me for lunch again until I had something to show him. I started writing that week. And I haven’t stopped since.

* Former Minnesota football coach Bernie Bierman, who was in charge of athletics at the Navy Iowa Pre-Flight School in 1942. Bierman had just put us through some debilitating exercises and we were lying, exhausted, on the ground when he asked if there was a quarterback in our group. I raised my hand, figuring he needed someone to call signals while the rest of these slobs worked out. He stood over me, looked down, and said. “We don’t need a quarterback for this next drill, son, so why don’t you take 20 laps around the track.” In one sentence, Bierman taught me 1) never to volunteer, and 2) never to underestimate someone I way trying to con.

* Former Sen. Joseph McCarthy of Wisconsin, who almost bankrupted me my first year as a free-lance writer because I spent so much time watching the Army-McCarthy hearings on television. But it was time well spent because it raised my political consciousness about 500%, taught me that there are intrinsically amoral people who have to be dealt with at that place, and made me realize that there are times we have to take a stand regardless of the risk.

* A real estate broker named Stuart Standish who showed me how to live and may have been the single most important influence in my early postwar life. I met Standish when I walked into his real estate office in Westchester, Ill., with my young family by pure chance. He took us house hunting and very quickly became almost an extension of our family. He refused to let us buy a house that would have given him a sizable commission and finally put us in one which offered him nothing, but was absolutely right for us.

Over the years as we moved about the country, Standish would pop in and out of our lives, always wise, always honest and straight-forward--and tough when he needed to be, and always full of an infectious zest for life. The last time I saw him was about 15 years ago, shortly after his wife died.

He was about 75, then, and he stopped by our house en route to Mexico on a snorkeling expedition. When we didn’t hear from him for some months afterward, I tried to reach him and found his phone in Chicago had been disconnected and my letters were returned. I guess I prefer not knowing what happened to him. That makes it easier to think of him as immortal--and to know that his soul is surely projected in my life.

There are so many, many more when I let my head roam over all those years. There’s a factory worker named Joe Swedie about whom I wrote for the Saturday Evening Post. He was an orphan who learned that he could bring joy to orphaned French children during World War II by showing them movies, then kept on doing it when he got home, using his modest income to rent movies to show to kids who were desperately sick in hospitals.

Just as McCarthy made me accept the existence of amorality, Joe Swedie showed me that there are people so inherently good, decent and unselfish that it is almost obscene to look for hidden motives.

John Kennedy showed me there can be substance in style and Oscar Hammerstein that there is great strength in gentleness and Adlai Stevenson that thinking is fun.

And my father--late in his life, when I was ready to let go of my own problems and reach out to him where he was--taught me the dignity of privacy and that humor leavens everything it touches.

I’m suddenly aware that there are no women on this list, and I’m not sure why. I think the main reason goes to the nature of men and women. The influence of women on my life was lengthy and pervasive and usually (partly because of the times) subtle--and quite possibly more profound than any of the men listed above. But the nature of that influence makes it more difficult to identify and tabulate in specifics, while the men come easily to mind.

(I showed this to my wife as a matter of self-preservation, and she accused me of “kissing off” the importance of women in my life with a soporific at the end. She also suggested I include Coco, our female dachshund, who taught me patience late in my life, and Mary Todd Lincoln for providing a role model in what to avoid in a wife. I think there is some sarcasm here., but I’m not sure.)

At any rate, I’m glad Life Magazine didn’t consult me in this matter. I not only couldn’t have been objective but would probably have been distressed to see so few of my entries on the final list.