Marshaling His Forces for the Future

In the summer of 1958, actor Hugh O’Brian received the invitation that would change his life.

O’Brian, then 33, was in Winnipeg, Manitoba, parlaying his fame as television’s legendary Wyatt Earp into extra income by guest-starring with a circus.

Then the cable arrived from French Equatorial Africa: Dr. Albert Schweitzer would welcome him at any time.

O’Brian had long admired the German doctor-missionary-theologian-musician. “I’d read so much about him,” he reflects. “He was a great humanitarian who could have done anything he wanted in the world, and there he was in the middle of Africa taking care of people.”

O’Brian had mentioned that to his friend Norman Cousins, then editor of Saturday Review, who set the trip in motion. Still, the cable, seeming more a summons than an invitation, was a complete surprise.

On summer hiatus from shooting “The Life and Legend of Wyatt Earp,” O’Brian shuffled his schedule. Within two weeks he was on his way--by commercial airliner, bush plane and rowboat--to the famed hospital that Schweitzer had founded in 1913 on the banks of the Ogooue River in Lambarene.

There he was met by a very old man with a walrus mustache, wearing white pants, shirt and pith helmet. “That was his uniform,” says O’Brian, recalling his first sighting of Schweitzer. “He introduced himself and I was given a little room with a cot, kerosene lamp and mosquito netting. Everybody pumped their own water.”

The actor spent nine days at the clinic complex where Schweitzer and volunteer doctors and nurses, working without electricity or running water, cared for patients, including many with leprosy.

Before dinner the first night, Schweitzer, a renowned organist, sat down at an old piano with missing keys. “We had a Bach prelude in the jungle, which was mind-boggling,” O’Brian recalls. “Then I was seated at a roughhewn table with men and women from around the world who were donating months of their lives.”

Each day of his stay, O’Brian worked as a volunteer, passing out medicine and doing odd jobs. At night, he would talk with Schweitzer. “He invited me to his quarters--the same single cot and mosquito netting--and started talking,” O’Brian says. “He could communicate in four languages, but preferred to speak German through a translator.”

Schweitzer, then 83, who had received the 1952 Nobel Peace Prize for his efforts in behalf of the “Brotherhood of Nations,” was concerned about global peace prospects and was impressed that the young American had taken the trouble to visit him. The doctor led the actor through history over those evenings. The League of Nations had failed, the United Nations seemed shaky and Schweitzer was convinced that the United States was the only country in the world with the ability to bring about peace.

“He said the United States must take a leadership role,” O’Brian recounts, “or we are a lost civilization.”

It was an unforgettable nine days. And, as O’Brian departed, Schweitzer took his hand and asked: “Hugh, what are you going to do with this?”

That question echoed in O’Brian’s mind as he looked back at the doctor, his figure growing smaller as the boat rounded the last bend in the river. “That was very simple, but a helluva challenge,” O’Brian says.

Traveling back to California, he had 48 hours to reflect:

“Why of all people in the world was I in show business? Why of all people in show business did I have one of the top five shows in the country? And why, of all the people in show business, did this happen that I was invited to come visit this man?

“I said, ‘That’s enough, God, I think I got the message.’ I decided to create something out of my own efforts.”

*

It is 10 a.m. on a 1996 May morning and 216 sophomores, each from a different Central California high school, have signed in at Mount St. Mary’s College, a mountaintop complex of Spanish tile-roofed buildings perched serenely above Brentwood.

It is opening day of the regional Hugh O’Brian Youth Foundation seminar.

Two weeks after returning from his 1958 meeting with Schweitzer, O’Brian put together a makeshift seminar for young leaders. The program has since been refined and broadened, reaching about 14,000 students at 90 seminars each spring. HOBY now boasts more than 185,000 alumni.

Wearing new blue T-shirts with the gold motto (“Catch the HOBY Spirit”), tomorrow’s leaders have assembled in the Little Theatre at Mount St. Mary’s and, guided by an army of volunteer counselors, are learning the HOBY ropes.

They have seen a video of the “Hugh O’Brian Story,” which explains how the actor launched a program in 1958 to develop leadership potential by offering motivational workshops to high school sophomores, teaching them to think for themselves and learn what makes America tick.

Now, Andy LeMay, a 10-year HOBY volunteer speaks to them: “You will be told over and over again that you’re special, and you are. You’re going to get turned on to things you never thought possible. And when you leave you will have a group of friends anyplace you go.”

The novitiates are coached how to ask meaningful questions and instructed in the ritual cheers (“to keep you alert and awake”), chants and songs that give the HOBY experience its unique blend of scout camp, Kiwanis Club and the chautauqua circuit.

“This is why we volunteer, this is the end result--to see you here,” says Tawnya Falkner, who, with co-chair Karen Oxrider, has spent the past nine months putting this weekend together.

The program is formidable. More than 60 experts, in keynotes and panels, will give the HOBYs a chance to question both sides in a fiery debate on Proposition 187, rethink partisan government, take a 20-question test on using personal skills, ask newspaper reporters if they really look into both sides of a story before they report it, and talk with career professionals over a “power lunch.”

Many of these sophomores have never been away from home before, but they were tapped for leadership potential and it already shows. After greeting the opening panelist with the traditional roar--”Hi John! What’s Up?”--they are launched into a serious examination of affirmative action and the California Civil Rights Initiative.

Panelists John Hill, Abby J. Leibman and London Steverson, all lawyers, not only make presentations (only five minutes each) and take questions, but rotate among small discussion groups when everyone moves outside for box lunches (donated by the Kiwanians) and soft drinks (donated by Costco), and more discussion. They talk about the difference between handouts and opportunity, and the fact that “35 years ago this group would have been white and male.”

“What can we as teenagers do?” someone asks Leibman, director of the California Women’s Law Center.

“Stop yourself when you begin to make assumptions about someone based on their race or gender,” she replies. “Get to know people--don’t go out there and make up what you think they are.”

The seminar’s objective has always been to listen, says Ken Dickerson, current chairman of the HOBY board of trustees: “Tenth-graders have incredibly strong views.”

Dickerson, a senior vice president for Arco, remembers chairing a recent panel in Arizona where a student from Panama asked: “The United States came to our country and took away a bad government, but don’t you think you owe us a good government?”

Dickerson’s panel of CEOs “just ducked,” he recalls.

By early afternoon, when O’Brian arrives at Mount St. Mary’s, the new HOBYs have immersed themselves more deeply into the dynamics of affirmative action in three hours than most California voters are likely to do in six months.

David La of Rosemead High School was a HOBY last year and has returned this year as a junior counselor. Finishing his turkey sandwich, he looks over the bustling picnic scene on the green quadrangle with pleasure. “I wanted to come back because it was such a terrific weekend,” he says. “The whole experience was so different--people coming together and not knowing each other, then not wanting to leave each other.”

The panel discussions gave him insights on topics teens usually don’t dive into, he adds: “I had a new sense of purpose when I left. You see these 200 kids interacting and think the same thing is happening all over the country. You have the feeling the future is going to be so much brighter.”

*

O’Brian describes HOBY as “preventive medicine,” and he has honed the motivational workshop program over the years. His label of “America’s Incentive System” and his boast that the program takes no money from either the government or United Way strike a warm chord in the business community. He can, and does, pick up the phone and call almost any CEO in the country, offering them a chance to “put your arms around tomorrow.”

“I call the East Coast in the mornings, then when they go to lunch, I start on the Midwest,” O’Brian explains.

Right now, on a Sunday, he is calling seminar chairpersons to see how their weekend is going. At 71, O’Brian still has the same square jaw, thick, wavy hair and laconic manner that made him an instant hit in 1955 when he rode into America’s living rooms as ABC’s new western hero, Marshal Wyatt Earp.

Wearing a T-shirt and shorts, the actor is sitting at a cluttered glass-top desk at home. He’s talking to the Louisiana chairman, a typical booster conversation in the resounding baritone voice that made him, at 17, a U.S. Marine Corps drill instructor:

“Hey buddy, how’s it going? How’d you do money-wise? Did you give them the futures kit yet? Sounds great, I’m very, very proud of you! . . . And remind them to give their parents a big hug. They wouldn’t be there if they didn’t have good parents. . . .”

O’Brian puts down the telephone. “One of the greatest problems with the world today is that parents don’t take responsibility.”

That’s an O’Brian theme--modern children being raised without direction or discipline, and he sees HOBY training as an effective cure for teenage drifting. Born Hugh Krampe Jr. in Rochester, N.Y., O’Brian had “wonderful parents” and he loves being the catalyst, sending hundreds of high school sophomores back home from a HOBY weekend, charged up to become captains of industry.

After juggling the program with his career for many years, the actor now devotes full time to the work. “I believe I have come as close to finding the fountain of youth as anybody,” he says earnestly. “I have unbelievable passion and purpose. Think of it--at my age!”

O’Brian has relinquished the telephone only temporarily for a brunch of fresh fruit, lox and bagels, on a patio overlooking a majestic sweep of the Santa Monica Mountains. He, companion Virginia Barber and their dogs, Bali and Hoby, moved back into the Benedict Canyon house last October, after a million-dollar remodeling project transformed a modest dwelling into a soaring showpiece of salmon stucco, glass and redwood, accentuated by copper trim.

“I love my home,” says O’Brian, who has never married but considers his extended family to be the 185,000 HOBY alumni who call him “Big Daddy.” “I can’t go through an airport without being recognized by a HOBY.”

And although he enjoys walking his dogs, fishing and other sports, and regularly works out, he doesn’t really think of life in terms of hobbies or other interests. “That phone rings 30 times a day,” he says. “It’s not about a job; it’s about a life.”

He and Barber, a fashion merchandiser, both have full schedules. She teaches classes in retail sales and fashion merchandising in an occupational program for teenagers and is active in the Fashion Institute of Design and Merchandising speaker’s bureau.

They met at a party eight years ago. “I wasn’t really interested in meeting an actor,” she recalls, “but when people explained he was involved with young people, I realized we had something in common.

“People can’t believe that this man does not stop working for the foundation. He’s not afraid to call anybody and always starts at the top.”

O’Brian views all this as “giving back” for a lot of lucky breaks.

After the Marines, he enrolled in Yale Law School in 1947 and spent the summer in Hollywood “because it was a golden place in those days.” He got hooked on acting when he filled in for an ailing star in Somerset Maugham’s “Home and Beauty,” enrolled in theater classes at UCLA and within a year was signed by Universal Studios. He’d made five movies and was doing live television when the Wyatt Earp role presented his big break.

The story of Wyatt Earp, which called for bringing law and order to Tombstone, Ariz., was an adult western, breaking the stereotype of the Saturday matinee singing cowboy, O’Brian recalls: “The character had a job to do, and the people had real psychological needs and frailties.”

The actor built on that, learning the quick-draw and insisting on wearing a flat black hat and frock coat instead of cowboy garb. (“The producers wanted me to look like Roy or Gene.”) O’Brian today is hearing-impaired because of his demands that realistic gunshots be used on the set, but says he would do it the same way again.

The show, in ABC’s Tuesdays at 8:30 p.m. prime slot, was a huge hit at a time when television was so new that friends still gathered to watch a favorite show. (Even today, fans can still sing the theme: “Wyatt Earp, Wyatt Earp, brave, courageous and bold. . . .”)

O’Brian didn’t even realize he was a star until his first out-of-town trip. When he got out of the cab at the airport, he was besieged by fans wanting his autograph.

*

Hugh O’Brian’s resume lists performances in 41 movies, 39 TV shows or series, five Broadway shows and 17 regional theater productions. Yet he has never relinquished his role as a legend.

“This is where ol’ Wyatt is putting all of his guts, bucks and time these days,” he likes to tell interviewers when he brings up HOBY.

“Hugh had a vision to do something, and he used his celebrity to build it,” Dickerson, the HOBY trustee chairman, says. “He’s still the door-opener and fund-raiser, but the system works because we have this enormous number of volunteers [an estimated 4,300 invest a million hours per year] throughout the entire country.”

Today, HOBY has grown from a 1958 group of teenagers visiting Catalina to a highly structured national organization with a high-powered advisory board of corporate executives plucked from the Fortune 500. Its chairman, John W. Teets, CEO of Dial Corp., describes O’Brian as “a man who makes it hard to say no.”

This nonprofit empire is run by a relatively trim paid staff of 25 from two HOBY offices on the 11th floor of the Oppenheimer Tower, a glassy high-rise in Westwood.

O’Brian’s suite is adorned with honorary degrees, awards and autographed pictures of presidents, cabinet members and astronauts--the icons of celebrity. But he’s more interested in loading a visitor with programs and brochures documenting HOBY activities, which include a world congress (in Houston this summer) and prestigious Schweitzer dinners in Los Angeles and New York.

In an office down the hall, Mary Leslie talks about the future--the Internet potential for coordinating volunteers or bringing HOBY alumni together in cyberspace, new one-day programs in leadership training: “The sky’s the limit--it’s just a question of your creativity.”

Leslie, 36, a former Democratic Party fund-raiser and economic development deputy for Los Angeles Mayor Richard Riordan, joined the organization in January as president and CEO. She’d never even heard of HOBY before she was recruited to run the foundation but has since discovered that “these HOBYs are everywhere!”

Thousands of alumni around the country will testify without prompting that the HOBY experience changed their lives.

“It was the turning point for me,” says Jorge Valencia, 33, a marketing executive appointed by President Clinton to the Small Business Administration. As a sophomore in the Rio Grande Valley, he went to HOBY in Dallas. “I was very shy and don’t think I said a word all weekend, but it was such a self-esteem booster. I went back with a new resolve. I ran for student body office and won, and went to Brigham Young University, where I was the first Hispanic student vice president in a student body of 28,000.”

Such feedback is common, Leslie has discovered. “You feel like a priest, with people wanting to tell you about their lives,” she says. And such fervency frequently translates into volunteer service, the heart of the program. It works, she says, because the volunteers are given a lot of structure.

“We have four directors who oversee about 250 volunteers around the country,” she says. “We have 58 affiliate nonprofit organizations that operate like franchises. We provide a standard operating manual--the gospel--on how a seminar is run. And we are very democratic. There are roughly 19,000 public and private high schools in the country and every single one gets a HOBY nomination form. We get a 70% participation.”

O’Brian is the fund-raising engine, she adds:

“Hugh is old Hollywood; he gave back. Hugh was Wyatt Earp, but his legacy is HOBY.”

(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX / INFOGRAPHIC)

Hugh O’Brian

Background: Age 71. Born Hugh Krampe Jr. in Rochester, N.Y. Served in the Marine Corps during World War II, planned to study law but the lure of Hollywood diverted him. After making five films for Universal, he moved to television and got his big break in 1955 as Wyatt Earp; the series ran for seven seasons on ABC and made him a household name.

Passions: The Hugh O’Brian Youth Foundation, which he founded in 1958 to encourage leadership through motivational weekend seminars. It now boasts more than 185,000 alumni whom he considers his family, having never married.

Personal Philosophy: “I believe every person is created as the steward of his or her own destiny with great power for a specific purpose: to share with others, through service, a reverence for life in a spirit of love.”