I wanted to play again in the marching band, and my former director was still there. He said come play in the concert band. It was thought at the time that I could not march. I didn’t go to the concert band. Those dreams about a marching band dissipated forever.
I was not using my mind a great deal in classes, because I felt I’ve been to the war and I’m disabled. I would drink all the time. I would smoke all the time. Nobody cares. No matter what you do, nobody’s going to recognize it.
I met Dottie in college, and we started dating. I mentioned to her about my disability. I was always a little shy because of it. Never made love to a woman that I didn’t tell first. I just put it right out there. I knew probably the fellas had told her. And she asked me if it made me feel any less of a man.
As little as it sounds, what she said made a significant impact on my life.
I said, “It does not. I don’t have any limitations.”
We got married, and now we have three children.
When I was in Japan, I thought I was going to have to walk on a peg leg until I saw a brother walking with an artificial prosthesis. I said, Wow, that thing really looks neat. When they give me one, I’m gonna walk on it with no cane or anything.
But the one I got had to be big at the ankle. Cosmetically it was undesirable, and when I would hang around the gym and play basketball, it would break, and my foot would just be dangling until I went back to the hospital.
And the darn thing ain’t healing. Even with three more operations. I just didn’t want to go back to surgery anymore, so I let them make a BK amputee, cutting the leg off 6 inches below the knee.
The new prosthesis doesn’t break. Because of where the torque is applied, there’s no pressure in that ankle joint area. Nobody can step on your toe and snatch the darn thing off. I can jump higher. I’m thinking I can run down the basketball court. It has just opened up a whole new, new world. And now I want to run. It is as if you say to yourself, I don’t like to jog, and you don’t think about wanting to jog until you find out you can’t jog. But I don’t open up yet. I’m afraid the prosthesis will break. And I don’t know how to suspend it to get maximum performance.
I graduated with a degree in sociology and worked at counseling in the prosthetic treatment centers in Veterans Administration hospitals, first in Mobile, then in Indianapolis. I guess the counseling is a spin-off from my mother. But I needed to focus on the needs of others, ’cause I didn’t need to have so much time to think about myself.
In a few years I’m very comfortable with the prosthesis. Everybody tells me you don’t have an artificial leg. You don’t limp. I’m touching the rim when I play basketball. I’m playing softball with able bodies. And they are telling me how fast I can run, how fast I can run. And though I’ve never seen anyone with a prosthesis run before, I’m thinking that there are guys out there with one leg who do run. And I’m thinking that if that is true, then I am one of the best.
If I was going to run, I needed someone to work with me. At the VA Medical Center in Indianapolis, I met Douglas Moorman, a management analyst who was in the Army Reserves, had run track in college, and played for the Minnesota Vikings until he was hurt. From a standing start, I ran 100 meters in 16 seconds. I was dead tired, because I was out of shape. So Doug put me on an endurance program. I needed to work myself to the point where I could run a mile. But when I ran a lap, the prosthesis didn’t run out just right. I developed new pressure points. I needed a little piston action. That meant a little snugger fit. And the bony prominent may need a relief area. We got the bugs worked out, and I got to the point I could run three, four laps. Then I could work on speed.
Another friend, Mark Gregg, began to pace me. One day I was actually outrunning him. I thought he had slowed down. But I was really faster. Mark wasn’t pulling my leg. And it was just amazing to me.
Then I learned that in 1981 the newly formed U.S. Amputee Athletic Association will hold the first national track meet at Tennessee State University. I think I was the only one of 900 athletes who came who was training to run and run only. So I set the first U.S. records for the 100 meters and the 400 meters. And I won the high jump and long jump, too. But the time for the 100 meters was under the world record for an amputee of 13.7 seconds. I was at 13.07, but the U.S. organization was not sanctioned by the world amputee association yet. Magella Balanger, the Canadian, a BK amputee like me, still had his record.
Now I want a real track coach, and I found him in Gordon Mendenhall, a high school coach in Indianapolis. Gordon said, “Biomechanically, I don’t know anything about what’s going on with you.” But when he saw me run the first time, he couldn’t believe it.
Like many amputees, I was starting the race from a standing start. Gordon put me in the starting blocks. We would do nothing but starts. He would ask me, “Where’s your eyes? Where’s your hands?” Then we would work on the middle of the race. Then the end of the race. I always thought these guys just ran down the track and just leaned at the end. If you just lean, you will end up all over your face. There is a way to lean, a way to recover from the lean. Gordon was polishing me off, and I was beginning to feel like a professional athlete.
Meanwhile, some Canadian runners put the word out on me to Balanger. They had seen me in a meet at Georgia Southern College. In the 100 meters I had to race against a guy with a leg off above the knee, and guys with whole legs, but missing arms. I thought it was unfair, but the officials said, “We’ve only got one heat. Y’all have to run together.” So I ran. I just left the whole doggone field. But 10 feet before the finish line I fell. My prosthesis was not on tight enough. It was the only race I didn’t finish. The only time I wasn’t first.
In February 1982 I go to Windsor, Ontario, for the indoor games sponsored by the Canadian National Amputee Association. I’m thinking Balanger. I win the 60 meters, the 200, the long jump, and the high jump. My time in the 60 is 8.3 seconds. A world record for amputees. But Balanger did not show. And I’m running just about two seconds slower than Herschel Walker.
When I came home, Indianapolis gave me a beautiful press conference. About a 100 people were there. They were calling me the Mountain Man. And I got named to the national team that would compete in September at the world meet in Edmonton, Alberta. But I didn’t have $800 I needed for the trip.
Two days before I needed to leave, Tom Keating, a sports writer, put this story in the Indianapolis Star about how a disabled Vietnam veteran needed help to go to the track meet. And that night Emroes, a sporting goods store, gave me the $800, and another caller offered an anonymous gift of $800 more. Then people came by my home and just dropped $1, $2, $5 in this bucket. It was like a telethon. It was a tremendous feeling. After a while, we had $2,000. We couldn’t take any more.
When I’m leaving, it’s butterflies. How can I lose after what these people have done for me back home?
When I get to Edmonton, I’m introduced to Balanger. And he sort of shakes me up. This cat is telling me he is running 12.8 in 100. I knew if he was running 12.8, I was in big trouble. Butterflies again.
The first event was the 100 meters, and we took off. When the gun snaps, I don’t see anybody on the line but me. I go down the track. I don’t look left. I don’t look right. When I crossed the line, I looked back and I saw him. I know I ran under 13. But the Canadians say 13.1. As it turned out, Balanger’s psych game didn’t work. And he didn’t have the speed either. And I now have the world record.
The second event is the 400 meters. I don’t want to run it, because it takes the energy out of you. Everybody had a fit. Our teammates said, “Run, Mountain. Run, Mountain.” I just jogged around the track and finished last out of seven. Balanger not only won, he broke his own world’s record.
But Gordon had been training me for the 100 and 200. I wanted the 200 record, too.
When the 200 came, I was really shaking, because everybody told me you’d better win after the way you embarrassed us in the 400.
They put me i
n the far lane, lane 8. Coming out of the staggered start, Balanger was in lane 2. I never saw anybody, I just took off. Psychologically, he was beaten. I was starting in front, and if ever I’m in front, there ain’t no comeback because I never let up.
My time was 26.01, 2 seconds lower than his world record.
Now I hold two world records, four national records, and four indoor Canadian records.
I sent Mama the medal I won in setting the world record for amputees in the 100 meters. She put it beside my Purple Heart.
Lieutenant Commander
William S. Norman
Norfolk, Virginia
Airborne Controller
U.S.S. Ranger
November 1963–May 1964
Airborne Controller
U.S.S. Coral Sea
January 1965–July 1965
Combat Warfare Officer
Commander, Carrier Division 3
September 1969–June 1970
U.S. Navy
Yankee Station
South China Sea
It was one of those long nights on watch. In the combat operations room. Carrier Division 3. The command ship. On Yankee Station. In the South China Sea. In 1970. In the middle of the war.
I was directing aircraft. Giving orders. Whatever you are supposed to do militarily, I was doing it and doing it well. But at that point I decided to get out of the Navy.
I was not frustrated by the war as much as I was frustrated by the role of blacks in the Navy in that war. I wasn’t really certain by then that our best vital interests were being served by the war effort. Yet the Navy was asking black people to take part in a war while subjecting them to institutional racism—institutional racism intentionally.
You could go aboard a carrier with 5,000 people, and you would find the overwhelming majority of the blacks in the lowest level in jobs, in the dirtiest jobs, down in the laundry room, down in the bowels of the ship. You walk into the areas where I work with all the sophisticated computers, and it would look as if there were no blacks on the entire ship.
The commander of the carrier division felt that I was very good, that I had been promoted to lieutenant commander early, that I had a good career, and that I, therefore, ought not to be getting out. He felt that I was being affected by a lot of the other things that were going on in Vietnam. But Vietnam was secondary to my feelings of what was happening to blacks who were a part of the war. And I didn’t have the kind of disaffection with the war that would cause me to refuse to do certain things. When I gave directions, I made certain that they were effectively executed in a timely way.
Everybody knew how I felt about equal opportunity. I pushed actions on board ships. I used to write to people back here and make suggestions on doing things in equal opportunity. I felt that the system was set up in such a way as to perpetuate racism, and we were not doing anything about it. Other than symbolic things like trying to recruit blacks or work with a civil rights group. But the substance was not being done.
I didn’t just write an ordinary letter of resignation. Most of it had to do with improving conditions for minorities in the Navy. I felt I had an obligation. My letter went through channels, and when it reached Washington, they wanted to know who it was who had written it. Of course it was embarrassing that it was done by someone who was getting out of the Navy.
It was perhaps just fate that when I was writing the letter, we got a new Chief of Naval Operations. Admiral Elmo Zumwalt. Because of my letter, we would meet and I would go to work for him. Most of the admirals opposed the changes we would make. They would call Zumwalt a nigger lover. And they would call me Zumwalt’s Rasputin.
Probably the worst racial thing that happened to me in the Navy was on the second of my three tours in the war. We were in Japan. I had a date, and we stopped in this military place for a hamburger. I was in civilian clothes, and there was this chief petty officer in line in front of me. He had had too much to drink. He was talking to one of the Japanese clerks. He was being machismo and verbally abusive. He made some comment about the guy owing him some more money.
I said, “Look. You are wrong. Why don’t you just pay the man his money and move on?”
The chief turned around, and he says, “What did you say?”
“You’re wrong.”
And he said, “You’re a lying, fuckin’ nigger.”
And he punched me.
I immediately grabbed him and let him know my rank so that there was no misunderstanding. I was a lieutenant JG at the time. And he still was mouthing off. So I pulled out my ID card—I did know the rules—and he kept on. So I called the shore patrol, and I decided to put him on report. I couldn’t punch him back, which was on my mind.
The next day we got back on the carrier, and you would never believe the parade of people that came to see me, up to and including the executive officer of the ship. They were saying he was an outstanding chief. He never had gotten into trouble. He was drinking. And that it ought to be excused.
I said, “Look. This can’t be tolerated. This chief knew that I was an officer. I can’t believe that you are telling me that this ought to be called ‘extenuating circumstances.’ ”
The chief was brought around to apologize. And the executive officer urged me to drop the charges of disrespect, which I refused to do. To me there was a much higher principle that I was concerned about. But I left before anything ever was done about the chief. And I am certain that nothing ever was.
I admire people who didn’t always push every race issue, because they were doing everything proper, correct, by the book. They were the soldier’s soldier, the sailor’s sailor, the Marine’s Marine. I don’t put them down. It was tough. But I would raise holy hell every time. I would be ready to go to any authority. I was always very proud, probably still am now. There were just certain things that I was never willing to tolerate from anybody. I felt the same way about segregation.
I grew up in Norfolk, Virginia, and the separate but equal doctrine. Everything was separate, from the theaters to the hotels to everything. I lived in a neighborhood that was all black except for some Filipinos and Puerto Ricans. We didn’t think about them as such. It was white people and the rest of us.
You could not find two people who were more gracious and more ordinary than my parents. My father worked for the Naval shipyard as a carpenter. Worked very hard all of his life. My mother did what mothers did at that time—worked at home. Was a mother of five children, housewife, manager of the house. And occasionally she did day work for extra money.
During those days I was not a crusader. Not consciously. I was not conscious of going out trying to break the segregation laws. There were just things that I was not going to tolerate. It was incomprehensible to me to stand by willingly and allow myself to be limited for artificial reasons. I just have a strong belief in myself. It was the way I was raised.
I can recall getting on buses and being asked to move to the back. I wouldn’t sit in the direct front, but I would clearly sit farther than where the unofficial line was. If whites got on, you had to move back if there were more seats in the back. The bus driver inevitably would say, “Hey, you. Get to the back.” I would sit there and wait for someone to throw me out. But they wouldn’t. They didn’t want to make enough of an issue out of it to throw a kid out.
Perhaps some of the things we did in the segregated environment was not too dissimilar from what Solidarity is doing to Poland today. You may not have gone out and stood before a bayonet, but you did as many of the little things that you could to erode the system and show you did not accept it.
I remember when I was a senior in high school. In 1955. I was always president of my class and president of the student government. I recall going to a citywide meeting of student government presidents. There was one particular white guy who said he was going to be going to the Naval Academy. That sounded exciting. So I went to the recruiting station and told the recruiter I wanted to understand something about the Naval Academy. And
he simply wouldn’t give me any information. And he said he didn’t want to waste his time going through the tests. I was irate. To his mind, blacks didn’t go to the Naval Academy. Interestingly, there was a few at the time. A very, very few. But I didn’t know it.
I took an undergraduate degree in mathematics and chemistry at West Virginia Wesleyan College, was an exchange student in the Soviet Union for six months, and then started teaching mathematics at my high school. In 1961 I got drafted. And I just made the decision to go into the Navy because I didn’t think I wanted to go into the Army and because of what that recruiter had done to me.
I qualified for the Aviation Officers’ Training Program and was the only black in my class at Pensacola, Florida. At that time there were very few black officers. In fact, on a ship as large as a carrier, you might be the only one.
We had what they called smokers at flight school. And they would set up boxing matches. One day the sergeant was standing around and said, “We have to have some boxers. Who volunteers as the battalion boxers? Who boxed before?” A few hands went up. “Who else would like to volunteer?” I never fought before. And back home, in the streets, I was not known as the one that was raising all the hell. But the sergeant quote volunteered me unquote. After all, I was black.
The first boxing match I was a hero. They give you some training, not much. But I was just too proud to be beaten by anyone. I boxed someone else who had never boxed, and I just kind of beat the hell out of him and won.
When it came to the second smoker, I fought a guy who knew what he was doing. He was not one of those quote volunteers unquote. He had done Golden Gloves stuff. He won the fight. I got him some good ones, but he really punched me. Of course, all my people thought I was robbed. And although the scoring was close, he did a job on me. That’s when I retired.
I did not experience the terrible, overt racism that older black officers did who went through before me. At least at the officer level, the Navy was priding itself on being ahead of what was happening in society. But the discrimination was still there, just not so open.
Bloods Page 21
