1940: At age 15, young John Goddard sat down and wrote what he called “my life list.” It consisted of 127 goals to achieve in his lifetime. Most of them seemed like they came from the wild imagination of a boy growing up during the Great Depression, and many adults could easily dismiss them as pie-in-the-sky dreams.
The list included dozens of worldly adventures: traversing the Nile, the Amazon, and the Colorado Rivers; climbing such mountains as the Matterhorn, Mount Fuji, Vesuvius, Rainier, and the Grand Tetons; visiting the world’s greatest waterfalls at Niagara, Yosemite, and Victoria Falls; scuba diving at the Great Barrier Reef, Fiji, and the Bahamas; and touring sites like Easter Island, the Galapagos, the Taj Mahal, the Vatican, Chichen-Itza, and Ayers Rock.
For most of us, accomplishing even a fraction of those 127 goals would be a grand achievement. Over the course his lifetime, however, John Goddard completed all but about a dozen of them.
The Los Angeles Times hailed him as “the real life Indiana Jones.” (However, Goddard never inspired the character and had no affiliation with the movies.)
He was born in Utah but grew up in Greater Los Angeles. During World War II, Goddard served three years with the US Army Air Force in Italy. He set speed and altitude records as a pilot.
After the war, he did his missionary work for the Church of Latter Day Saints (the Mormons) in the US plains states and Canada. Then he entered college at the University of Southern California where he majored in anthropology. By the start of the 1950s, the pursuit of his 127 life goals began in earnest.
Goddard visited the lands of his ancestors in Denmark and England. But his primary concern was to study primitive people, which he did in Borneo, Kenya, New Guinea, and the Congo among other locales.
He traveled to almost every country, and he spanned the globe four times. He flirted with death on numerous occasions.
He took a dangerous kayak expedition down the Nile where river pirates shot at him. Elsewhere, remote native jungle tribes almost killed him.
He survived attacks by all manner of wild animals including stampeding rhinos and elephants, poisonous snakes, crocodiles, and more.
Goddard withstood bouts of dysentery, malaria, and desert temperatures of 140 degrees F. He was rescued from quicksand, walked away from a plane crash, and nearly drowned four times.
Some of his goals were comparatively benign. He read all of the works of William Shakespeare, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Plato, Aristotle, Mark Twain, and a host of famous poets. He also read the entire Encyclopedia Britannica as well as the Bible. He learned to play piano, to speak multiple languages, to surf, to ride a motorcycle, and to use a bow and arrow. He studied martial arts and fencing. Also on his list: to get published in the National Geographic magazine and to write a book. He did both of those, too (actually, two books).
He traversed the Congo Rivers, climbed Kilimanjaro, as well as mountains in Turkey, Peru, Argentina, and Java. He saw the Everglades, the Great Wall of China, the Panama Canal, and several of the world’s largest freshwater lakes.
Among the only goals on his wish list that he did not accomplish: visiting every nation on Earth (he fell a few short); a career in medicine; climbing Mt. Everest, Mt. McKinley, and Mt. Cook in New Zealand; and traveling to the moon.
Goddard was feted at many of the Adventure Clubs of which he was a member, and he often shared his life’s motto: To dare is to do - to fear is to fail.
John Goddard lived to age 88 and died in Glendale, CA on May 2013 after a long life filled with astounding adventures.
Comments