TV Radio Mirror (Jul - Dec 1962)

earning things for themselves. Being country kids, Pete and I had the best of it. We were never bored or at loose ends. City kids have so much done for them, one way or another, they don't know where to look for activity that can amuse them and keep them useful, at the same time. This accounts for some of the mischief and juvenile shenanigans we read about." Fond childhood memories of Jim and Peter revolve around the annual summer trips to the family cabin in the North Woods of Minnesota. They lived on an island there for almost three months, spending their time hiking, fishing, swimming and boating. Two young cousins from Pennsylvania were usually there, too, and all the kids spent a great deal of time on the water in a sailboat. It is now an ingrained source of pleasure that will be with them to the end of their lives. Often, in meditative moods, one or the other will still turn to the water for a few hours of relaxed thinking. While on the island, the only contact the Aurness family had with the mainland was the weekly trips to buy supplies and fetch the mail. Jim's earliest ambition was fostered during these summers. He wanted to be a Naval architect, but gave the idea up when he found the entrance requirements to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology required straight A's! "Can you feature that?" Peter teases. "He starts out, wanting to spend his life on the sea — and ends up, riding for seven years on the desert around Dodge City." "My first dream of owning anything came in those days," Jim recalls. "There's nothing I wanted so much as my own sailing boat." Recently, he brought this dream to reality when he acquired a fifty-foot sloop. "Pete and I have hopes to sail it to Australia, maybe next year. We'll take Craig along — he's old enough to make the trip." An early, watery Graves Peter's recollections of the cabin, and life on or in the water, got off to a notso-happy start. Jim was six at the time and, glancing about the dock, suddenly said to his mother, "Where's Pete?" Three-year-old Pete had fallen off the dock and was splashing merrily in the water, almost ten feet deep. "That was the day he learned to swim," laughs Jim. "Not only swim," nods Peter, "but underwater! We were a couple of water-rats in those days, and nothing but a chunk of cold watermelon could lure us out of the lake." As a boy, Peter was called "Padre Peter" by their father and "Pod" by everyone else. He was considered the more serious of the boys. Oddly, though Peter now plays a devil-may-care adventurous character in "Whiplash" — while Jim is the soul of stability as Marshal Dillon of "Gunsmoke" — it was Jim who was always the more restless and unpredictable. He played hooky as often as he could get away with it, and though "Pod" tagged along at times, Jim admits that his younger brother "liked school and had more serious interests than I did. For instance, Pete was a great Benny Goodman and Artie Shaw fan. His bedroom was plastered with pictures of jazzmen and his ambition was to be a great clarinet player." Peter, in fact, did enroll in the school band — but as soon as the teacher glanced at this fourteen-year-old sixfooter, he promptly handed him a tuba! "I guess he figured I was the only one big enough to carry the darn thing around," sighs Peter. At fifteen, he was an expert at both clarinet and saxophone and was a member of the musician's union. "He used to sit in with name bands when they came to Minneapolis," Jim proudly recalls, "and, by sixteen, he had his own combo and was on Station WNIN as a radio announcer." According to Jim, Peter was not only the steadier as a youth but "he was also the most popular guy you ever saw. Having his band made him a big wheel on campus, and I must say he was quite the ladies' man in those days." On his side, Peter passes the buck right back. "Jim was the ladies' man, not me," he contends. "His restless nature appealed to the girls. At fourteen, he took off on a freight train and disappeared into the big woods to hunt and fish. He swaggered around, looking romantic, while I was practicing my clarinet. Then he went to work as a logger. This all added up to a guy the gals went for." There was one occasion both remember somewhat guiltily, when they did come dangerously close to a fist fight. Jim had agreed to teach Peter to drive and they went out for a lesson. Peter shifted into reverse by mistake and Jim angrily ordered him out of the car and took over control of the wheel. Peter was still arguing heatedly when Jim started the car rolling. Peter furiously leaped on the running-board. He had to hang on hard as Jim sped home! On another drive — a double date — Jim allowed Peter to take the wheel and, in pulling into a gas station, he knocked over a stack of oil cans. "It caused a devil of a racket and my whole evening was ruined. I was sure my girl thought me a chump and that Jim would never let me drive again." Jim graduated from high school shortly after Pearl Harbor. He lost no time enlisting in the Army, after being rejected by the Navy as "too tall." Here, Peter reveals a little-known fact about his big brother. "Jim's company was almost wiped out at Anzio, and he himself got his leg shot up. The wound developed into osteomyelitis (bone cancer) and, for a while, he didn't know whether he'd lose the leg or not. He spent a year-and-a-half in the hospital waiting for it to mend and, to this day, it bothers him. You'll never hear Jim tell about his war experiences. But believe me, he had them — plenty. He was a hero." Jim will only say, "I'm grateful. It could have been much worse. I might have been playing Chester's part in 'Gunsmoke' — and not with a phony limp, either." 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