All at Sea

The Royal Canadian Navy was so proud of Surgeon Lieut. Joseph C. Cyr of H.M.C.S. Cayuga, that it fired off a publicity puff about him and the emergency operations he performed on wounded South Koreans. In one case, he took only ten minutes to remove a bullet lodged a quarter of an inch from a man's heart. In another, where the wounded man had a bullet through the lung, Surgeon Cyr saved his life by expertly sealing off the chest. Ashore, he performed skillful amputations by flashlight in a mud hut. In short, the navy's medical service was doing a good, alert job.

Last week the Royal Canadian Navy was redfaced and backing water. In naval barracks near Victoria, B.C., a court-martial sat in judgment on the surgeon lieutenant who called himself Joseph Cyr. He was charged with fraudulent entry into the navy because that was not his name: he had borrowed it, along with copies of medical credentials, from a real Joseph C. Cyr who practices in Grand Falls, N.B. The court's sentence: "Discharge with disgrace" (a shade less disgraceful than a "discharge with dishonor").

But Why? The Canadian navy's interest in the surgeon of the Cayuga seemed to stop right there. It shielded him from reporters who had a host of questions. It did divulge that his real name was. Ferdinand Waldo Demara Jr., 29, of Lawrence, Mass.* That was all. Why had he posed as a doctor? "I'm as curious as everyone else is," said Commodore Kenneth Adams, "but it didn't come within the scope of the inquiry to ask him why. And so far as the navy is concerned, he is a doctor. No man without medical knowledge could have done what he did in Korea."

Canadian immigration authorities escorted Demara to the U.S. border, and shooed him across--for entering Canada illegally. But nobody asked him to explain himself, and Demara wasn't talking.

"Brother John." In Lawrence, Mass., his father knew part the story. "Fred," as he was called around Lawrence, was always a restless boy. A second-string football player, he did poorly in school, but he memorized all kinds of scientific treatises at home. He became silent, sullen and stubborn. At 16, Fred ran away and became a novice in a Cistercian monastery in Rhode Island. "He was a different boy when he came out," says Demara Sr. He tried two more religious orders, but did not stay.

His father said that Fred next joined the U.S. Navy, but he must have sailed under false colors--there is no record of an enlistment under his real name. Then, said Demara Sr., Fred went over the hill, and began a varied and fantastic career. He taught philosophy at St. Martin's College (enrollment: 277) in Olympia, Wash. He was reported in Los Angeles as "Dr. French." He spent a year at the Massachusetts Eye & Ear Infirmary as an orderly, shuffling dinner trays and bedpans, under the name of Cecil Boyce Hamann (actually the name of a science professor at Asbury College in Kentucky).

Tired of ward routine, Demara took to religion again. Shuttling back & forth across the Maine-New Brunswick border between two religious houses, he met the real Dr. Cyr and won his confidence. "Dr. Hamann" never betrayed himself in his medical shoptalk. At St. Romuald in Quebec, "Dr. Hamann" became "Brother John." But almost at once, he ran away and signed on with the R.C.N. as "Dr. Cyr."

He served in R.C.N. hospitals in Nova Scotia for three months last spring, and became a registered practitioner in Nova Scotia. From there, he went to the Cayuga, war, and fleeting glory.

If Demara had been tried for the illegal practice of medicine, a court psychiatrist might have unraveled the full story of his personality. And all concerned, including his father, might have learned how Demara picked up his skill as a surgeon.

* His exploit gave the U.S. and Canada a perfect record for reciprocal lend-lease in medical imposters. Quebec-born William Renwick MacLeod did his practicing without a license in the U.S., went to jail for it (TIME, Sept. 25, 1950).

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