EPILOGUE
ON A JUNE DAY IN 1954, JUST OFF A WINDING ROAD IN California’s San Gabriel Mountains, a mess of boys tumbled out of a truck and stood blinking in the sunshine. They were quick-fisted, hard-faced boys, most of them intimately familiar with juvenile hall and jail. Louie stood with them, watching them get the feel of earth without pavement, space without walls. He felt as if he were watching his own youth again.
So opened the great project of Louie’s life, the nonprofit Victory Boys Camp. Beginning with only an idea and very little money, Louie had found a campsite where the bargain-basement rent compensated for the general dilapidation, then talked a number of businesses into donating materials. He’d spent two years manning backhoes, upending boulders, and digging a swimming pool. When he was done, he had a beautiful camp.
Victory became a tonic for lost boys. Louie took in anyone, including one boy so ungovernable that Louie had to be deputized by a sheriff to gain custody of him. He took the boys fishing, swimming, horseback riding, camping, and, in winter, skiing. He led them on mountain hikes, letting them talk out their troubles, and rappelled down cliffs beside them. He showed them vocational films, living for the days when a boy would see a career depicted and whisper, “That’s what I want to do!” Each evening, Louie sat with the boys before a campfire, telling them about his youth, the war, and the road that had led him to peace. He went easy on Christianity, but laid it before them as an option. Some were convinced, some not, but either way, boys who arrived at Victory as ruffians often left it renewed and reformed.
Louie demonstrates rappelling to his campers.
When he wasn’t with his campers, Louie was happily walking the world, telling his story to rapt audiences in everything from grade school classrooms to stadiums. Improbably, he was particularly fond of speaking on cruise ships, sorting through invitations to find a plum voyage, kicking back on the first-class deck with a cool drink in hand, and reveling in the ocean. Concerned that accepting fat honoraria would discourage schools and small groups from asking him to speak, he declined anything over modest fees. He made just enough money to keep Cissy and her little brother, Luke, in diapers, then blue jeans, then college. On the side, he worked in the First Presbyterian Church of Hollywood, supervising the senior center.
Over the years, he received an absurd number of awards and honors. Lomita Flight Strip, which had been renamed Zamperini Field while Louie was languishing in Naoetsu, was rededicated to him not once more, but twice. A plaza at USC was named after him, as was the stadium at Torrance High. In 1980, someone named a great big barge of a racehorse after him, though as a runner, Zamperini was no Zamperini. The house on Gramercy became a historic landmark. Louie was chosen to carry the Olympic torch before five different Games. So many groups would clamor to give him awards that he’d find it difficult to fit everyone in.
His body gave no quarter to age or punishment. In time, even his injured leg healed. When Louie was in his sixties, he was still climbing Cahuenga Peak every week and running a mile in under six minutes. In his seventies, he discovered skateboarding. At eighty-five, he returned to Kwajalein on a project, ultimately unsuccessful, to locate the bodies of the nine marines whose names had been etched in the wall of his cell. “When I get old,” he said as he tossed a football on the Kwajalein beach, “I’ll let you know.” When he was ninety, his neighbors looked up to see him balancing high in a tree in his yard, chain saw in hand. “When God wants me, he’ll take me,” he told an incredulous Pete. “Why the hell are you trying to help him?” Pete replied. Well into his tenth decade of life, between the occasional broken bone, he could still be seen perched on skis, merrily cannonballing down mountains.
Louie on the torch run for the 1984 Summer Olympics.
Louie, skateboarding at eighty-one.
He remained infectiously, incorrigibly cheerful. He once told a friend that the last time he could remember being angry was some forty years before. His conviction that everything happened for a reason, and would come to good, gave him a laughing equanimity even in hard times. In late 2008, when he was about to turn ninety-two, he was moving a slab of concrete on a dolly down a flight of stairs when the dolly wheels broke, sending Louie and the concrete crashing down the steps. He wound up in the hospital with a minor hip fracture and a shattered thumb. As his daughter came down the hospital corridor toward his room, she heard shouts of “Hey Louie!” from the crowd of friends that her father had made among the hospital staff. “I never knew anyone,” Pete once said, “who didn’t love Louie.” As soon as he was out of the hospital, Louie went on a three-mile hike.
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With the war over, Phil became Allen again. After a brief stint running a plastics business in Albuquerque, he and Cecy moved to his boyhood hometown, La Porte, Indiana, where they eventually took jobs at a junior high, Allen teaching science, Cecy teaching English. They were soon parents to a girl and a boy.
Allen hardly ever mentioned the war. His friends kept their questions to themselves, fearful of treading upon a painful place. Other than the scars on his forehead from the
He never returned to Japan, and he seemed, outwardly, free of resentment. The closest thing to it was the flicker of irritation that people thought they saw in him when he was, almost invariably, treated as a trivial footnote in what was celebrated as Louie’s story. If he was rubbed wrong by it, he bore it graciously. In 1954, when the TV program
Allen Phillips with his children, Chris and Karen, bedtime, 1952.
As Allen grew old, he settled into retired life with Cecy. He walked quite a few back nines, changed his rooting interests from the Sox to the Cubs, and spent whole days just sitting in silence. “Dad must have swung a thousand miles on that front porch swing,” said his daughter, Karen Loomis. “What he was thinking, I don’t know.”
In the 1990s, diabetes and heart disease converged on him. In 1998, a few months before he died, he was
