On the Road Again

For E. Bruce Heilman, a mere lifetime is not enough

E. Bruce Heilman exemplifies Tennyson’s Ulysses better than any man I know. It’s not coincidence either. The former University of Richmond president reprints the poem in his recent autobiography, An Interruption That Lasted a Lifetime: My First Eighty Years.


Like Ulysses
Pick a line, and it fits the 83-year-old Heilman, a man who like Ulysses has “seen and known” much, rubbed elbows with world leaders and fought in an epic war, but who cannot stand “to pause, to make an end, to rust unburnished, not to shine in use!” Heilman, like Ulysses, refuses to rest at home while there is “some work of noble note” to be done.

The mythic Trojan War hero Ulysses traveled by ship, of course, in Homer’s Odyssey, as in Tennyson’s poem. Heilman’s favorite way to travel today, however, is on his motorcycle, a Harley-Davidson Electra Glide Classic Ultra Patriot Edition, a gleaming beauty: chrome and black with red and blue stripes, a permanently affixed Marine Corps badge on the gas tank and an American flag on the rear fender.

It’s not just a show bike. Last fall, Heilman, one of The Greatest Generation who fought in World War II, rode it on his own odyssey: a re-tracing in reverse of the cross-country route he took along historic U.S. Route 66 when he hitchhiked home from California to Kentucky after serving with the Marines in Japan at the end of the war. Heilman drove about 300 miles a day in the 3,000-mile trip from Richmond to San Diego.

 

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Interstates have gobbled most of 66, but he still managed to get strips of it and even ate at one of the restaurants where he dined in 1946 in Williams, Ariz., near the Grand Canyon.

“Life is an adventure,” he says. “When do you cut it off? You shouldn’t use all your energy up when you’re young. And when you’re older, don’t waste any more time. Have your adventure.”

Betty, Heilman’s wife of 60 years, rode behind him in a car loaded with a trunk full of his books, which Heilman happily “peddled across the country.”

The book is a Horatio Alger story of a Kentucky tenant farmer’s son who rose to buck sergeant during the war and later served as president of two universities.

Heilman sold his book at board meetings — he’s still a member of 14 boards — and at book signings, at UR alumni gatherings, at restaurants, at Marine bases, at colleges and to anyone who asked for one.

“I’d sell a book and fill my tank,” he joked.


Follow Up Journey
He followed up that journey this spring when he drove the Patriot from San Diego to Harlingen, Texas. He passed through such places as Yuma, Ariz.; Gallup, N.M.; and Kingsville, Texas, before arriving in Harlingen, where a Marine Military Academy board meeting was being held.

He braved dust storms, ferocious winds that burned his face and nearly knocked him off his bike, cold desert afternoons doing 70 miles an hour and, believe it or not, wild boars on the side of the highway.

By now, these cross-country treks are a matter of course. Heilman took the Harley on a 400-mile trip almost before it was out of the box. He drove to Huntington, W.Va., two years ago to pick it up from the dealer and rode it back to Richmond, with Betty, of course, following him in the car.

“People ask me, ‘Why?’” he told the audience at a recent speech —“and I answer, ‘Why not?’ I have lived a life of adventure, so why would I as a healthy [83]-year-old man not be seeking adventure . . . now and well into the future? I am doing just that.” And then he finished his speech with a reading of Ulysses: “. . . for my purpose holds/To sail beyond the sunset, and the baths/Of all the western stars, until I die.”

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