Little St. Mary's Big Star, Part 3
After the St. Mary's-Davis game there was a reception for the Whiz Kids that Frank and I brazenly crashed. Frank sought out Wedey, and the two old teammates fell into a laughing embrace. After a few moments of reminiscing, Frank got around to introducing me. Talking to athletes has been part of my job for longer than I care to remember, and I attach no special feeling to it. Meeting a boyhood idol so many years later is quite a different experience, and at first I found it hard to say much of anything to this charming guy who is only slightly older than I. Wedey was more than cordial, but he also had a roomful of alums to entertain, so I told him my wife and I would be in Honolulu a few months later and if he had the time, maybe we could talk then. He said that was a wonderful idea, so we exchanged phone numbers, and he disappeared once more into the crowd.
A few months later I met him at the Waialae Country Club in Honolulu. He had just finished playing a round of golf (at 72 he often shoots his age) and was once again in rainbow raiment. We sat in the clubhouse before a window that overlooked lush green fairways extending to the crashing surf. It was a typically gorgeous day on Oahu--warm and with a gentle sea breeze taming the humidity. He ordered us a couple of beers and settled back, mildly curious as to why, after all these years, I wanted to talk about his glory years at St. Mary's. I told him, slightly embarrassed, of my childhood admiration and then realized that the passing years had pretty well closed the gap in our respective ages. It occurred to me that at the time I was canonizing him, he and I were both merely boys.
Wedey still has a touch of the actor in him, and some of the politician. His diction is flawless, his words meticulously chosen. He is Olivier in the body of a surfer.
"I am a walking United Nations," he began. "Mostly German and Hawaiian, but also part Irish, English and Chinese. My grandfather was a German seaman who sailed here, met a local girl and, under the influence of moonlight, music and balmy breezes, fell in love, married and stayed on. My father, William Wedemeyer, was a crane operator at Pearl Harbor the day of the Japanese bombing. He had been quite an athlete until he mutilated a foot jumping off a train when he was in his 20s. And my grandfather had been a wrestler in Germany, so you can see I had quite an athletic background.
"I was born on the Big Island <Hawaii> in an area so remote that we had no paved roads. We used cornstalks for goalposts, and we played a type of touch football with as many as 30 on a side. Let me tell you, you learned to dodge with that many people trying to catch you. And we threw the ball around all the time. According to our rules, you could pass the ball forward or backward whenever you pleased. It was chaotic. But I took that style of play with me to St. Mary's." Wedey was raised a Catholic, and when his family finally moved to Honolulu, when he was four, he entered St. Louis, a parochial school renowned for both its athletic and academic excellence. After his brilliant senior year there in 1942, he was recruited not only by St. Mary's but also by Ohio State and Notre Dame. Because of wartime restrictions, however, his transcripts were delayed in reaching the Midwest, and he got tired of waiting for the bigger schools to respond. Besides, St. Mary's was closer to home.
"I guess you could say I arrived with a surfboard tucked under my arm. We were just beardless youths that first year <1943>, but we had fun, and I got to play in the East-West game as a freshman. I played there again as a senior, and that has to be unusual. I thought back then that I was invulnerable. Then, in that Navy program, I broke my ankle skiing at Lake Tahoe. After that I transferred to the merchant marine. I must have sailed right past Honolulu five or six times, so close and yet so impossibly far away. You see, I get homesick easily. After the war I did some boxing--some promoters in Oakland wanted me to turn pro--and I think that helped build stamina, made it possible for me to play both offense and defense for 60 minutes. When I was 18 I got a brown belt in judo. Later, when I was in my 30s, I reached black belt in karate.
"That 1945 team of ours was small, but we had a lightning attack. There were times when not even we knew what we were going to do next. It was Hawaiian football all over again. I remember Jimmy Phelan telling us, 'You're a bunch of entertainers. Now go out and give 'em a show.' Can you imagine a coach saying that today? But it was just after the war and people really needed entertainment. We gave it to them both on and off the field. You know, we had quite a good singing group. Our quarterback, Denny O'Connor, was a fine Irish tenor, and I could always sing. We would entertain in hotel lobbies the night before our games. The Singing Saints, they called us. We may have lost that Sugar Bowl game, but we sure won the singing. We were all very close on that team."
He took a long sip of beer, his dark eyes brightening. He was fully involved in his memories, as I was, a kid again. How much easier it is, I thought, for a famous athlete to recall the past than explain the present.
"I think I'd finally gotten tired of football by the time I turned pro," he said, his voice trailing off a little. "The atmosphere was entirely different. It was no longer a game for me. There was so much pressure--somebody always behind you, trying to take your job. With everything that was happening to me, I knew it was time to go home again and try something new.
"In politics, I suppose that I hoped someday to be governor. But my health, which is fine now, got in the way. Then I was playing golf one day with one of the directors of Hawaii Five-O, and he asked me to do a reading. I'd had no acting experience, except"--Wedey laughed--"under Jimmy Phelan, but I found it was pretty much the same as being an athlete. Instead of a playbook you have a script. And then you perform. I started out as only a uniformed officer on the show, then I got promoted to plainclothes detective Duke. I lasted 12 years. And our stars, Jack Lord and Jim MacArthur, became my close friends. I've had a good life. Been married to Carolyn for over 40 years, and I've got two wonderful children and three grandchildren. I play a lot of golf now that I've retired from the car business. I was doing promotional work here for Toyota. Actually, I shot a 67 just the other day."
We finished our beers, and Wedey table-hopped his way out of the clubhouse, pausing before almost every group to exchange golf banter. At the doorway he paused, glancing back at his friends.
"These are nice people here," he said. "I feel no need to travel now. Everything I want is here in Hawaii. But returning to St. Mary's last fall for that reunion really pumped up my ego. It's nice to be remembered, to know that there is some affection that still exists between you and the school."
He strolled through Waialae's lobby, illuminated now by the brilliant midafternoon sun. "You know," he said, "I really consider myself privileged." He paused again, searching for the right words. "After all, on a Saturday afternoon I've heard the applause of nearly a hundred thousand people, and there aren't many around who can say they've had that experience, are there?"
A few days later as my wife and I were waiting for a cab to take us to the Honolulu airport for the trip home, we chanced to meet another Hawaiian celebrity, the popular entertainer Ed Kenney. After some casual conversation, a question suddenly occurred to me: Is Wedey still famous in his home state? After all, the only evidence I had seen of his popularity was in his own country club, where, it stands to reason, he would be a popular fellow. I also knew that, save for fans of my particular vintage, he was all but forgotten on the mainland. In fact, his youngest brother, Charlie--a high school coach who was the subject of a television movie because of his courageous struggle against Lou Gehrig's disease--is probably better known there. The public address announcer at Wedey's own school had called him, of all things, an end. So, I asked Kenney, is the name Wedemeyer still big on the islands?
Kenney, a tall man who speaks with a cultivated Ivy League accent, didn't answer at first. Instead he leaned back and gazed out at the vast expanse of the blue Pacific for a long time. Then he turned to me with a look of amazement on his tanned face.
"Oh, dear man, my dear man," he said. "Herman Wedemeyer well known here? Why, I suppose you could say he is still something of a god, that's all."
That, I can honestly say, made my day.