Ferdinand Waldo Demera aka Surgeon Lieutenant Joseph Cyr.
Long before “Sergeant” Franck Gervais showed up at the National War Memorial on Remembrance Day 2014, Waldo Demera, was arguably Canada’s most well known poser.
The Great Imposter – Demara, known locally as “Fred”, was born in Lawrence, Massachusetts in 1921. He ran away from home at the age of sixteen to join Cistercian monks in Rhode Island, where he stayed for several years. He joined the U.S. Army in 1941. The following year Demara began his new lives by borrowing the name of Anthony Ignolia, an army buddy, and went AWOL.
After two more tries in monasteries he joined the Navy. He did not reach the position he wanted, faked his suicide and borrowed another name, Robert Linton French, and became a religiously-oriented psychologist. He taught psychology in a Pennsylvania college, served as an orderly in a Los Angeles sanitarium, as an instructor in St. Martin’s College in the state of Washington. The FBI caught him eventually and he served 18 months in prison for desertion. After his release he assumed a fake identity and studied law at night at Northeastern University, then joined the Brothers of Christian Instruction in Maine, a Roman Catholic order.
While at the Brothers of Christian Instruction, he became acquainted with a young doctor named Joseph C. Cyr. That led to his most famous exploit, in which he masqueraded as Dr. Cyr, working as the ship’s Medical Officer aboard HMCS CAYUGA, a Royal Canadian Navy destroyer, during the Korean War.
He managed to improvise successful major surgeries and fend off infection with generous amounts of penicillin. His most notable surgical practices were performed on some sixteen Korean combat casualties who were loaded onto the CAYUGA. All eyes turned to Demara, the only “surgeon” on board, as it became obvious that several of the casualties would require major surgery or certainly die. After ordering personnel to transport these variously injured patients into the ship’s operating room and prep them for surgery, Demara disappeared to his room with a textbook on general surgery and proceeded to speed-read the various surgeries he was now forced to perform, including major chest surgery. None of the casualties died as a result of Demara’s interventions.
Apparently, the story of the removal of a bullet from a wounded man ended up in Canadian newspapers. One person reading the reports was the mother of the real Dr. Joseph Cyr; her son at the time of “his” service in Korea was actually practicing medicine in Grand Falls, New Brunswick. When news of the impostor reached the CAYUGA, still on duty off Korea, Captain James Plomer at first refused to believe Demara was not a doctor (and not Joseph Cyr).
Demara was very quietly, and honourably, released from the service, issued re-hab and back pay plus active service credits in the amount of just under one thousand dollars. He was then driven to the border and turned over to the United States Immigration Office at Blaine, Washington. The Americans had nothing against him in the way of outstanding warrants so, after a few routine questions, they let him go on his way…
The Great Impostor is a 1961 American film based on the story of an impostor named Ferdinand Waldo Demera starring Tony Curtis in the title role.
