“To Tell the Truth” about Jim Cortese

The longtime “Commercial Appeal” editor roller-skated across Texas, resided in a nudist camp, and walked up and down steps inside the Empire State Building.

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“My name is James Cortese,” said three middle-aged men as they sat before a live audience at CBS Television Studios in New York City. On the night of September 15, 1959, the actual Jim Cortese, the Sunday editor of the Memphis Commercial Appeal, and two imposters claimed that they were the man who recently roller-skated 588 miles across the entire state of Texas. They were guests on To Tell the Truth, one of television’s most popular game shows for more than a quarter-century. After questioning the prospective Corteses, three of the four celebrity panelists voted incorrectly, guessing that one of the imposters was the real Jim Cortese. The genuine article sat between a Manhattan restaurateur named Jack Miller and an employee of Gulf Oil from Philadelphia named Henry Beau.

It turns out that roller-skating across Texas was far from Jim Cortese’s sole claim to fame (“-tese” is pronounced like “Swayze”). The longtime Commercial Appeal columnist and editor gloried in the outrageous. To compensate for a self-professed “mid-life crisis,” Cortese became the first person to walk up and down the entirety of the Empire State Building steps; he took up temporary residence at a nudist camp, Trappist monastery, and Walden Pond. Cortese rode a mule deep into the Grand Canyon while blasting Beethoven over a loudspeaker. On both his 40th and 60th birthdays, he swam back and forth across the Mississippi River.

When a colleague at The Commercial Appeal asked why he did all these things, Cortese said, “To break the monotony of life.” More than any of this, Jim Cortese loved his hometown of Memphis and the people he encountered in the city.

“His premise was life is as interesting as one decides to make it,” said his son, Ted Cortese. Even before Jim Cortese gained notoriety for his writing and his stunts, the Cortese name was well-known in Memphis.

Anthony James Cortese was born on August 11, 1917, in Ontario. Jim was the second of Angelo and Lorienne Cortese’s five children.

Jim’s grandfather, Antonio Cortese, emigrated to Canada from Marsicovetere, Italy during the 1880s. Marsicovetere is a mountain village 80 miles southeast of Naples in the Basilicata region, located in the arch of the boot in the Italian peninsula. Antonio was an accomplished violinist who lived and worked initially in Sarnia, Ontario, before returning to Italy to pay off the debts on his family’s small farm. He brought his wife, Maria, back with him to Canada, settling in London, Ontario.

Jim’s father, Angelo, was the eldest in a family that became renowned for their skill in classical music. Angelo was a virtuoso on the harp while his younger brothers, Jack and Joseph, excelled on the flute and violin, respectively. The “Cortese Brothers,” as they came to be known, were not the only noteworthy musical family on their street in London, Ontario. The Lombardo family were their neighbors, most notably Guy Lombardo, who formed the Royal Canadians in 1924. Lombardo’s group went on to become one of the most popular big bands of all time.

“Guy Lombardo’s father used to get on his kids for not playing the good music like the Cortese Brothers did, who played parlor music,” Ted said. 

When he returned from the war, Cortese bounced around several jobs before landing a spot in 1949 as assistant Sunday editor at The Commercial Appeal.

Angelo came to Memphis in 1911 to play harp for the original Memphis Symphony Orchestra. Renowned soloists from around the world came to Memphis to perform with Angelo, who quickly became the toast of the town. His brothers soon joined him in Memphis and became the most popular musicians in the region. The Memphis Auditorium (opened in 1924 and renamed the Ellis Auditorium in 1930) was built in large part to serve as a home for Angelo Cortese and the Memphis Symphony.

Angelo and Lorienne Cortese’s family would resettle permanently in Memphis, though all five of their children were born in Canada. Angelo wanted his children to become doctors. His eldest son, Dick, followed that path, becoming an optometrist. His second son, Jim Cortese, found a very different path. He liked books, adventure, and writing.

Jim attended high school at Sacred Heart Academy. Located at 1325 Jefferson Avenue, Sacred Heart opened in 1901 as a small, coeducational high school which served primarily Irish and Italian Catholic families from the surrounding Midtown neighborhoods. For much of its history, total enrollment at the school was less than 200. In 1946, Sacred Heart became an all-girls school. It closed in 1970. The main building is now the home of the Catholic Diocese of Memphis and Catholic Charities of West Tennessee.

He played tackle and guard for Walter Koch’s Sacred Heart Cardinals football teams, serving as captain his senior season of 1933. That fall, the team had just 14 players but posted a respectable 4-4 record in the city’s highly competitive nine-team “Prep League.” Cortese earned All-City honors for his performance. Before an October 1933 game, The Commercial Appeal described Cortese as a “deadly tackler and great offensive man.”

Cortese read widely as a teenager. He idolized Memphis-based travel writer and adventurer Richard Halliburton, who had a clear influence on Cortese’s own deeds. Halliburton’s feats included swimming the Panama Canal, traveling by elephant across Hannibal’s path through the Alps, and duplicating the original run from Marathon to Athens.

In March 1939, Haliburton attempted to sail a junk of his own design from Hong Kong to San Francisco, planning to arrive at the ongoing 1939 Golden Gate International Exposition. He never made it. He disappeared in a typhoon on the high seas.

Later in life, Cortese befriended Halliburton’s father, Wesley. Every Friday night, Cortese would go over to Wesley Halliburton’s home and talk with him about his son. Cortese transformed eight years of interviews with Wesley into the biography Richard Halliburton’s Royal Road.

Jim’s first concerted efforts as a writer came as an adolescent. He worked for years on a science fiction novel about a man with a time machine who fell in love with women in two different eras.

After graduating from Sacred Heart, Jim enrolled in pre-med at Memphis State. It wasn’t smooth sailing. He earned five straight D’s in college and flunked out of the pre-med program. Jim would get a job at a local Coca-Cola bottler, taking care of returned bottles. He saved money for six months before talking with his father about his future. He wanted to pay his father back for his tuition at Memphis State. He told his father that he didn’t want to be a doctor. Instead, he wanted to go to journalism school at Louisiana State University (LSU).

“My grandfather put his head down and told him to keep the money and pack his clothes. The next morning, my grandfather got on the train with my father, and they went down to Baton Rouge,” Ted said.

After completing his education at LSU, Cortese worked at small newspapers in Louisiana before America entered the Second World War.

“Dad was a naturalized citizen. When World War II broke out, he tried to join the service like all the other young men were doing. When he got there, they told him he could not do so because he was not an American citizen; he was a Canadian,” his son, William James “Jim” Cortese, said.

After working out his citizenship status, Cortese served in the U.S. Army Air Corps during World War II. He worked as a reporter for base newspapers at Camp Williams in Wisconsin and Sedalia Army Airfield in Missouri. Later, he served for a time in the Philippines.

When he returned from the war, Cortese bounced around several jobs before landing a spot in 1949 as assistant Sunday editor at The Commercial Appeal.

In 1951, he married Anna Lee Slagle of Tulsa. Anna was a talented artist who worked primarily with oil paints. The couple shared a love of the outdoors and spent their honeymoon fishing in the White River in Arkansas.

The Corteses had four sons: Ted, Jim, Richard, and Mike. Initially, they resided at 3954 Berkshire Avenue before relocating to a larger home at 4383 Castle Avenue in the late 1950s.

“My mom idolized my father, and she was all for anything that he did,” Ted said, noting that she was his constant copy editor, reading over every column and every book he ever wrote.

“She was a quiet woman, very spiritual and so was he. They prayed the rosary together every day,” Jim said.

Jim Cortese wrote several columns simultaneously for The Commercial Appeal. His best known was “Rambling,” which tended to be character studies of local people, often older people who represented some disappearing aspect of the city’s culture. Through his writing, Cortese displayed a great love for the city and its idiosyncrasies, both past and present.

“We were raised to be newspaper children. You can learn something from everybody if you take time to listen. His premise was that you could interview anybody and get a great story out of them,” Ted said.

He proved it one time by pulling out the Memphis yellow pages, selecting a random business (the Katz Drug Store at Poplar & Avalon) and speaking with the fourth person to walk out the door (four came up on the dice in his pocket). He wrote a fascinating story about the life of the woman whom he interviewed.

Cortese kept his family close to his work. Once, he brought his sons to the most “haunted” place in the region to try to interview a ghost. None were forthcoming. Another time, the Corteses went out into the woods with their father with a woman who claimed to see Bigfoot regularly. They brought a flashlight and a baseball bat for self-defense but didn’t find Bigfoot.

Outside of work, Jim took his family boating frequently. Their first vessel was called The Little Man, which was followed by The Four Sons,” both tributes to their growing family.

“Every weekend, we were on an island of the Mississippi River with bonfires, cooking hot dogs and stuff. He just spent all his spare time making sure that the family was absolutely stuck together like glue doing things as a family,” Ted said.

The Cortese kids had a similarly tight relationship with their grandparents. Angelo took the boys fishing in Horseshoe Lake and would cook them bacon and eggs alongside the road.

“People would stop my grandfather and ask him for autographs,” Ted said. He recalls being confused when a woman asked for his grandfather’s autograph while they were out getting ice cream.

It was Jim Cortese’s 40th birthday that transformed him from a chronicler of all that was unique in Memphis to an architect of numerous unique adventures near and far from his hometown. To channel his “midlife crisis” energy, he made a list of wild things he wanted to do in the year after he turned 40. The stunts which Cortese completed proved to be great fodder for his columns. He spent many days calling in stories to The Commercial Appeal after doing something extraordinary, far away from Tennessee.

He kicked off Year 40 by swimming a mile back and forth across the Mississippi River. Friends and family followed along in a boat in case he got tired. For the next few years, he completed the feat annually, doing it each year with a companion who asked to join him for the swim.

Over the next few months, he walked the route of Paul Revere’s Midnight Ride from Boston to Lexington and Concord. He made the Gettysburg Address at the same spot where Lincoln delivered it nearly a century earlier. He spent a week as a novice at a Trappist monastery in Kentucky. Several of his feats were completed on a family road trip that swung through the Appalachians all the way up to Vermont and upstate New York.

The following summer, Cortese completed his wildest feat, roller-skating 588 miles across Texas on Highway 80. He traveled from just southwest of Shreveport, Louisiana, to just east of Hobbs, New Mexico, over three sweltering August weeks.

In August 1958, he spent several days at a nudist camp in New Jersey. After joining “the American Sunbathers Association,” Cortese was assigned to one of 45 cabins. He was informed of the camp’s rules of modesty, which included dressing for meals. Cameras and alcohol were banned, though his cabinmate Walter brought some scotch, which they enjoyed each night.

The time at the nudist camp was uneventful. He played a lot of table tennis with a Swiss gentleman and listened to women from Canada and New York City tell him about the health benefits of sunbathing nude.

Mostly, he said, people sat near a pool and got sunburned. He concluded that people came to nudist camps simply to break up “the mundane of life,” as he wrote in a column about his experiences.

Next on the agenda was climbing the 1,472-foot Empire State Building, at the time the tallest building in the world. In September 1958, Cortese became the first person to walk all the way up and all the way down the building’s staircases. The ascent and descent of 1,860 steps took a total of 3 hours and 10 minutes. Roughly 2 hours and 40 minutes were spent going up. He said the 30 minutes coming down was much harder on his knees. After weeks of cajoling building officials, Cortese received special permission to attempt the feat. The building’s manager gave him a master key that fit all doors opening into the stairways in case he needed to stop.

Cortese stopped to change his socks and rest at the 52nd floor. He rested again at the building’s 86th-floor main observation deck, where he bought a hot dog and an orange juice. He then ascended to the very top of the 107-story building, sticking his head through an opening near the giant television antennas to look down at the Chrysler and RCA buildings nearby. Later that week, Cortese climbed the 14,115-foot Pikes Peak in Colorado, which he had done nearly 20 years earlier while hitchhiking across America.

The following summer, Cortese completed his wildest feat, roller-skating 588 miles across Texas on Highway 80. He traveled from just southwest of Shreveport, Louisiana, to just east of Hobbs, New Mexico, over three sweltering August weeks.

During his journey, he wore a straw hat, a t-shirt, and khaki pants, with a canteen of water hanging from his belt. He carried his mother-in-law’s purple parasol to avoid cooking in the Texas sun. In three weeks, he wore out six pairs of skates.

Cortese did himself no favors. He hadn’t donned a pair of skates in 25 years and performed this stunt during the hottest part of the year. About halfway across Texas, he realized he was going uphill. Shreveport is 171 feet above sea level while Hobbs stands 3,266 feet above sea level.

All along the route, people greeted him and handed him soft drinks and food. A 16-year-old family friend named Tommy Wilkinson followed him by car throughout the journey.

The skate across Texas made him a celebrity in the state. He spoke with local television, radio, and newspapers almost every day. He was also filing a story each evening with The Commercial Appeal. Word of Cortese’s antics soon spread to New York.

“One day I received a call from New York. A producer with Goodson-Todman Enterprises Limited was on the line. ‘Will you fly to New York, all expenses paid, and be on To Tell the Truth on Tuesday’?’” Cortese wrote in his column.

The Corteses didn’t have a television in their home and Jim was unfamiliar with the program. He consulted with Commercial Appeal television critic Henry Mitchell, who spoke highly of the show. Cortese was soon on a flight to New York.

Cortese assured his readers that the game wasn’t fixed. In his column, he walked them through his time in New York.

The show’s producers briefed him and the two imposters on the inner workings of the program. The producers and Cortese taught the other panelists about Memphis, Tennessee, and the details of Cortese’s skate across Texas. On the morning of the show, they went through a dress rehearsal in CBS’ Manchester Theatre, where hired actors questioned the three Jim Corteses as the four celebrity panelists would on the show that evening. Two of the hired actors guessed the correct Cortese.

The panelists on To Tell the Truth that evening were Polly Bergen (a native Tennessean), Kitty Carlisle, Chester Morris, and Peter Donald, all of whom were well-known performers on stage and screen. Eisenhower-era ingenue Polly Bergen was the only one who picked the real Jim Cortese.

During her question time, Bergen asked the real Jim Cortese (known that night as “Jim Cortese #2”) the name of the highway from Knoxville to Gatlinburg. Cortese said he didn’t know its name but knew that Gatlinburg was a resort town in the Smoky Mountains. That was enough to earn Bergen’s vote.

By tricking the other three panelists, the three Jim Corteses won $750 to split. The show was taped at 7:30. The three Jim Corteses watched the show at Miller’s restaurant, the Whiffenpoof, at 8:30.

The other Corteses all watched the program at Angelo’s home at 1870 Union Avenue in Memphis.

“We were over at my grandfather’s house, and we went to the music room. His harp was in there and a baby grand piano. And a TV set. We didn’t have one in our house. Everybody in the family was over there. Our friends all thought it was outrageous that our dad was on TV,” Ted said.

The following summer, Jim Cortese completed what he often described as his favorite stunt. “I had wondered how the power of Beethoven and the vastness of the Grand Canyon would compare. Now I know. They supplement each other,” Cortese wrote in July 1960.

Jim Cortese decided to fill the vastness of the Grand Canyon with the sounds of Beethoven. He worked with a Memphis electrician named Glenn Allen to create a battery-operated sound system which could be carried and played deep in the recesses of the canyon. Cortese and a colleague from the Commercial Appeal carried the sound system down into the canyon on mules but struggled to get it working. They ended up driving to a record store in Flagstaff, procuring a tape recording of Beethoven, and jerry-rigging a less elaborate sound system.

They traveled back down Bright Angel Trail on a mule named Elmer and started blasting Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony. Hikers could apparently hear the music over the roar of the nearby Colorado River.

“He was told that 15 miles away people could hear him, and they came to find out where the music was coming from,” Ted said.

For a time, Cortese’s adventures slowed down. He ran the Democrat-Argus newspaper in Caruthersville, Missouri, for several years in the 1960s before returning full-time to The Commercial Appeal. Soon thereafter, Cortese’s sons developed their own wanderlust. After earning money on their own, the Cortese brothers gallivanted across Europe, climbing Mt. Vesuvius and eating pizza in the Leaning Tower of Pisa.

In a broader sense, Jim Cortese imparted that legacy to his large Memphis readership. He encouraged people to not only seek adventure but to be interested in the adventures that other people have experienced.

For his 60th birthday in 1977, Jim Cortese once again swam across the Mississippi, this time with three of his sons swimming alongside him for either the inbound or outbound trip.

He retired from the paper on his 62nd birthday: August 11, 1979.

“Daddy always said if you retire you better have something to do. Otherwise, you’ll sort of implode,” Ted said.

Jim and Anna hit the road in retirement, hitching up a truck and trailer and heading out on annual, multi-month fishing expeditions, typically to Alaska or Mexico.

“For the next 18 years like clockwork, they left Memphis around the first of May and headed north to Alaska, going over the gravel Alaska Highway, and circling back to Memphis around Thanksgiving,” his son Jim said. They headed to Mexico after Christmas and got back to town in mid-March. Cortese filed stories with The Commercial Appeal about his experiences while his wife painted the things they saw and the people they met. Year after year, they encountered many of the same people the locations they visited.

“Every so often I’d get a phone call [from his parents], ‘Hey come to the airport.’ I went to the airport and there’d be 50 pounds of filleted salmon and trout,” Ted said.

Cortese wrote several books in retirement, including his Halliburton biography.

In his seventies, he hiked the Appalachian Trail and canoed the entirety of the Mississippi River.

Jim’s health declined considerably after the death of his wife, Anna, in 1999. In his later years, he battled dementia and a range of physical ailments. He relocated to Knoxville for the last years of his life to live with his son Jim’s family.

Growing up, Mary Cortese (William James Cortese’s daughter) didn’t know that her grandfather had done all these incredible things. He died when she was 10 years old.

“I always took it that he didn’t want to leave Memphis. His roots in Memphis were deep. He cared a lot about the city,” Mary said. 

“I don’t think I realized the scope of his legacy until much later,” she said. Her grandfather lived with her family for around three years. “What shines through to me is his jokey, jovial side,” Mary said.

Mary’s father, Jim, would read to his four kids as well as his own father in the evening. Her grandfather often watched Westerns with her father and listened to classical music.

“It was hard to get him to talk much,” Jim said. His father’s lower back ached constantly. Finally, Cortese entered assisted living, where he received daily visits from family.

He died on September 20, 2006, in Knoxville at age 89.

“I think what we got from him was a sense of adventure and to pursue our own diverse interests — his own sense of adventure and willingness to go see what’s out there,” Mary said. Both of her brothers have hiked the Appalachian Trail. She and her sister travel the world on scuba diving adventures.

In a broader sense, Jim Cortese imparted that legacy to his large Memphis readership. He encouraged people to not only seek adventure but to be interested in the adventures that other people have experienced. And one evening in 1959, Jim Cortese was able “to tell the truth” and share his passions with the entire country on one of America’s most popular game shows.