Paul Newman was a voice actor, film director, producer, race car driver, indy car owner, entrepreneur, and philanthropist. With all his numerous achievements in life, he still had more dreams: he wanted to become a pilot.
Newman joined the US Navy through a college training in Yale V-12, but his aspirations were a no-go. He was diagnosed as being color blind, and his dreams of taking flight abruptly crashed. Instead he became a rear-seat radioman and a gunner for the torpedo bombers. He was discharged in 1946 and decorated with military honors.
John Coltrane
John Coltrane’s first recording on the alto saxophone was made in July 1946 while he was a member of the U.S. Navy. Coltrane had enlisted in the Navy on August 6, 1945, one day after the U.S. dropped the first atomic bomb on Japan. In late 1945, he was shipped to Pearl Harbor as an apprentice seaman. He joined the base swing band and became one of few servicemen in the Navy who served as musicians without having a musicians’ rating. Because the band had only white members, Coltrane played as a “guest performer.”
F. Scott Fitzgerald
Scott Fitzgerald is forever cemented in history as one of America’s finest writers. When World War I broke out, he dropped out of Princeton and joined the military, where he awaited to be shipped out from Fort Leavenworth. He still had not abandoned his dreams of being a successful writer, so he devoted his free time, while waiting for word from command, to working on his stories in the hopes of leaving a legacy, even if the war ended his life.
Fortunately, in 1918, the armistice was signed just before he was about to be shipped out. His most popular novel, The Great Gatsby, is now a classic in American literature.
Robert Duvall
American actor and filmmaker, Robert Duvall, actually comes from a military family. During his younger years, he referred to himself as an “army Brat” because he was always moving around from state to state, dragged along on the current of his father’s orders. Did you know that his father was an Admiral? A famous one at that. Duvall is a descendant of Gen. Robert E. Lee.
After college, he decided to enlist in the US Army. He was a private first class for two years during the Korean War, and he liked to practice his acting while in the service. After his discharge, he then moved to New York, and enrolled himself in the Neighborhood Playhouse School, which opened a lot of doors for his career.
Ted Williams
Ted Williams was a patriot at heart who interrupted his baseball playing career to join the US Marine Corps during World War II for three years. He was also a famous Boston Red Sox Player who would go on to earn a spot in the Baseball Hall of Fame.
After the completion of his initial military service, his return to baseball was halted, as he returned to action from 1952 to 1953 as an aviator for the Marines Combat unit during the Korean War. Although he was in the military for most of his time, he never lost his baseball skills, batting 342 with 38 home runs in 1946 after returning home.