Last week, I filled you in on some of the history behind Arlington National Cemetery (ANC). This time, we’re going to visit some folks that you might not have expected to find buried here.

Arlington National Cemetery boasts an estimated 400,000 interments.

The Brown Bomber

Near the end of our Tours by Foot tour, our group stopped in Section 7A by the grave of boxer Joe Louis (Barrow). I had no idea he’d been in the military but it turns out he served in the U.S. Army during World War II. Realizing Louis’s potential for raising moral among the troops, the Army placed him in its special services division rather than sending him into combat. Louis went on a celebrity tour with other notables, including fellow boxer Sugar Ray Robinson. He traveled more than 22,000 miles and staged 96 boxing exhibitions before two million soldiers.

Joe Louis Barrow (his full name) was eventually promoted to the rank of technical sergeant on April 9, 1945.

Nicknamed “the Brown Bomber”, Louis is regarded as one of the greatest boxers of all time. He reigned as the world heavyweight champion from 1937 until his temporary retirement in 1949. He was victorious in 25 consecutive title defenses, a record for all weight classes. Louis had the longest single reign as champion of any boxer in history.

Joe Louis Barrow died on April 12, 1981.

Louis died of cardiac arrest near Las Vegas on April 12, 1981, just hours after his last public appearance viewing the Larry Holmes–Trevor Berbick heavyweight championship fight.

While Louis did serve in the U.S. Army, he technically did not meet the requirements for burial at ANC. President Ronald Reagan waived the eligibility rules in his case, and Louis was buried there with full military honors on April 21, 1981. His funeral was paid for in part by former boxing competitor and friend, Max Schmeling, who also acted as a pallbearer.

Joe Louis is buried with his third wife, Martha Jefferson. She died in 1991.

PFC Lee Marvin

While I enjoyed our Tours by Foot tour of ANC, I was left a little irritated by one thing. It wasn’t until after we got back to our hotel and I was looking online that I realized actor (and former U.S. Marine) Lee Marvin is buried only a few feet from Joe Louis. Because of the direction we were standing at the time, you couldn’t see the front of Marvin’s marker. Our guide didn’t even mention it. That’s a pretty glaring omission, in my opinion.

When I went back on my own a few days later, I photographed Lee Marvin’s grave. If you’ve ever watched a movie he was in and thought what a tough guy he was, it’s because he earned it in real life.

In August 1942, Marvin, 18, enlisted in the U.S. Marines in New York. He trained at Parris Island in South Carolina and a base at New River, N.C.

Lee Marvin was a Marine before he was an actor in Hollywood.

Marvin went to quartermaster school in North Carolina and was promoted to corporal, then ordered to Camp Elliot in San Diego, Calif. He was demoted to private after Marvin, known for being a troublemaker, caused some issues.

In January 1944, Marvin was shipped to the Marshall Islands. He was part of the 22nd Marines, which would survey the area before the attack, specifically Kwajalein. Once the Marines had taken Eniwetok and Kwajalein, Marvin was sent to Hawaii for training and then was sent to Saipan in June 1944. In the invasion of Saipan, Marvin was one of six out of 247 men in his unit who wasn’t killed, according to a Sept. 27, 1968, Life magazine article.

Marvin was treated for 13 months in Navy hospitals for a severed sciatic nerve and was awarded the Purple Heart in a hospital on Guadalcanal. He was nearly permanently paralyzed by his injury. Marvin wanted to get back into combat but his injury kept him in the hospital, preventing that.

Lee Marvin earned his toughness while serving as a Marine in World War II.

Back in the U.S., Marvin worked odd jobs until he got into acting in New York. He was in off-Broadway plays from 1948 to 1950 until he started in television and films in 1950. In 1968, Marvin returned to the Pacific to be in the movie “Hell in the Pacific,” co-starring Toshirô Mifune, about an American pilot during World War II who is on a deserted uninhabited Pacific island with a Japanese Naval captain. During World War II, Mifune was a Japanese officer.

Marvin appeared in at least 10 war movies during his acting career, including the classic 1967 film, “The Dirty Dozen”. He won an Oscar for his role as a drunken gunfighter in “Cat Ballou” in 1965.

After Marvin died of a heart attack at age 63 on Aug. 29, 1987, he was buried with full military honors at ANC.

Polio Vaccine Pioneer Lt. Col. Albert Sabin

Another surprise to me was learning that Dr. Albert Bruce Sabin, inventor of the oral polio vaccine, is buried at ANC. His grave was not on our tour so I looked for it on my return visit.

Born Abram Saperstejn (later Albert Sabin) in 1906 in Białystok, Poland to Polish-Jewish parents, he emigrated New York in 1921. In 1930, he became a naturalized citizen of the United States and changed his name to Sabin. He began college in a dentistry program, but changed majors. He received a bachelor’s degree in science in 1928 and a medical degree in 1931 from New York University.

Dr. Albert Sabin’s oral polio vaccine was licensed in 1961, about six years after Jonas Salk’s injection polio vaccine.

Dr. Sabin trained in internal medicine, pathology, and surgery at Bellevue Hospital in New York City from 1931 to 1933. In 1934, he conducted research at the Lister Institute for Preventive Medicine in England, then joined the Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research (now Rockefeller University). During this time, he developed an intense interest in research, especially in the area of infectious diseases.

Dr. Sabin’s military involvement came in World War II, when he served as a lieutenant colonel in the U.S. Army Medical Corps and helped develop a vaccine against Japanese encephalitis.

Dr. Jonas Salk developed an inactivated poliovirus vaccine (IPV), a “dead” vaccine given by injection, which was released for use in 1955. It was effective in preventing most of the complications of polio, but did not prevent the initial intestinal infection.

Dr. Sabin’s oral polio vaccine was licensed in 1961, based on mutant strains of polio virus that seemed to stimulate antibody production but not to cause paralysis. The Sabin vaccine worked in the intestines to block the poliovirus from entering the bloodstream.

A native of Poland, Dr. Albert Sabin served in the U.S. Army Medical Corps during World War II.

Dr. Sabin’s oral vaccine proved easier to administer than Salk’s, and its effects lasted longer. The Sabin vaccine became the predominant method of vaccination against polio in the United States for the next three decades. Dr. Sabin also developed vaccines against other viral diseases, including encephalitis and dengue.

Sabin, who did not patent his vaccine, never earned a dime it. He died on March 3, 1993 from congestive heart failure. He is buried with his wife, Heloisa, in Section 3.

North Pole Explorer Rear Admiral Robert Edwin Peary

Before I go any further, I preface my words about explorer Robert Peary with this caveat. I’m well aware that the claim that Peary was the first to discover the North Pole in 1909 is hotly disputed. There is strong evidence that Dr. Frederick A. Cook did so a full year before Perry did.

Born in 1856, Peary served in the U.S. Navy Civil Engineering Corps. While in the Navy, Peary made four trips to Greenland, his first expeditions into the Arctic region. Joining him was Matthew Henson, an African American explorer he hired as an assistant. These exploratory journeys earned Peary fame and prepared the way for his most ambitious journey to the North Pole.  

There’s some question as to whether or not Peary made it to the North Pole first.

Granted a leave of absence from the Navy, Peary first attempted to reach the North Pole in 1898, but returned four years later without having reached his destination. In 1905, Peary and Henson set again, pushing their way northward on sledges over the icebound Arctic Ocean. In April 1906, Peary set a new “farthest north” record, which the National Geographic Society recognized by awarding him its highest honor, the Hubbard Medal. But due to a shortage of supplies, he turned back before reaching the North Pole. 

In February 1909, Peary and six teams left Cape Columbia, on the northern coast of Canada’s Ellesmere Island. Peary, Henson, and four Inuit companions made up one team, and together they inched their way northward until, on April 6, they stood where no human had ever stood before — the North Pole. In 1911, the U.S. Congress officially recognized Peary’s achievement. In March of that year, the Navy promoted him to the rank of rear admiral.

Peary’s monument at ANC. The star at the top of the globe marks the North Pole.

Peary died on Feb. 20, 1920 in Washington, D.C. He was buried with full military honors at ANC three days later.

As plans proceeded for erecting a monument to Robert Peary, the National Commission of Fine Arts began a study for a more accessible grave site. The original site proved too difficult to develop because of its location on a hillside.

Peary’s remains were later disinterred from Section 3 and re-interred in Section 8. On April 6, 1922, the National Geographic Society unveiled a monument at Peary’s grave site, featuring a large, white granite globe. A bronze star on the globe, pointing north, marks the North Pole.

Unsung Hero: Arctic Explorer Matthew Henson

Peary’s assistant Matthew Henson was never famous in his own lifetime. But he’s just as important as Peary and I want to share it here.

Matthew Henson was born in Charles County, Md. in 1866. His parents, who were sharecroppers, died during Henson’s childhood. At age 12, he went to work as a cabin boy on a merchant ship. Aboard the ship for six years, he learned how to read, write, and navigate.

Later, while working as a clerk in a Washington, D.C. hat shop, he met Peary, who was planning a surveying expedition to Nicaragua. Upon learning of Henson’s sailing and navigation experience, Peary hired him as a valet. On the 1888 Nicaragua expedition, Henson impressed Peary, and subsequently accompanied him on seven Arctic expeditions between 1891 and 1909.

Unlike Robert Peary, Matthew Henson’s role in the discovery of the North Pole was not well publicized.

In 1912, Henson published an account of his experiences, “A Negro Explorer at the North Pole,” and he gave lectures across the country. But he received relatively little immediate recognition for his part in the 1909 expedition. He spent the remainder of his career in obscurity, working as a clerk at the U.S. Customs House in New York City.

Later, Henson received some long-overdue accolades. The prestigious Explorers Club finally admitted him as a member in 1937, Congress awarded him the Peary Polar Expedition Medal in 1944, and Presidents Harry S. Truman and Dwight D. Eisenhower welcomed him to the White House.

After his death in 1955, Matthew Henson was buried at New York’s Woodlawn Cemetery. In 1987, at the request of Dr. S. Allen Counter of Harvard University, President Ronald Reagan granted an exception to Arlington National Cemetery’s burial policy, allowing for the bodies of Henson and his wife, Lucy Ross Henson, to be re-interred at Arlington with full military honors.

Matthew Henson should have received the notoriety Peary did in 1909 but he saw little of it in his lifetime.

On April 6, 1988, the remains of Matthew Henson and his wife were transported to Washington, D.C., where they were buried near the gravesite of Admiral Peary and his wife, Josephine Deibitsch Peary. That same year, the National Geographic Society posthumously awarded Henson the Hubbard Medal, its highest honor.

The monument on Henson’s gravesite features an inset bronze plaque commemorating the North Pole discovery. At the top sits a large bas relief bust of Henson in Arctic gear. Immediately below, an inscription describes his part in reaching the North Pole. Globes of the world, tilted with the Pole in view, sit at either side.

On one side, an inscription quotes Henson’s book, “A Negro Explorer at the North Pole”:

“The lure of the Arctic is tugging at my heart. To me the trail is calling! The old trail. The trail that is always new.”

There’s still more to cover at Arlington so Part III is coming soon.

Monument to Corporal Claude Christman, who died of typhoid on Dec. 21, 1899 in the Philippines while serving in the Spanish American War. He was 21.