“Freddie, you come out tonight?”
        -- Female with a thick Checkoslavian accent, Prague, 1968.

        The Warsaw Pact tank was coming over hill above Prague when Fritz Apking, who was playing the part of a Nazi officer in the movie, The Bridge at Remagen, first saw it.

        By the time the gun atop the turret had raised its elevation — click, click, click — and was pointed at an angle just above the International Hotel in downtown Prague, Apking had already stripped off his Nazi officer's cap and was working on the top button of his uniform jacket.

        He had gotten a good enough look at the tank to know it wasn't one of the old Sherman tanks that the movie crew had brought with it to Prague.

Apking cuts a rug with Gwynn Vanderbilt on the set of Mister Roberts. (Enquirer file photo) | ZOOM |

        No, this was no movie. This was the real deal. Prague Spring. 1968. Even before the tanks arrived, Apking knew enough about the political situation in Prague to know that the Soviet Union was irritated with the action programme that new Czech party boss Alexander Dubcek had launched to end censorship and police repression and to introduce a more participatory political system. Apking knew the tanks might be coming.

        Still, he couldn't resist at least watching to see what the tank would do. Ka-boom! An orange flash burst from the gun of the tank and Apking saw the projectile burst in mid-air above the hotel. He didn't need any more warning than that. Before the rest of the tanks could reach the downtown streets, Apking had raced back to his hotel room and was out the door, in a cab, watching the scene through the back window as the cabbie sped to the airport.

        He knew the cab would be waiting for him. He had paid the driver a retainer to always be on stand-by for him. Czech money was worth nothing outside Czechoslovakia, and since Apking was earning $1,500 a week that was being banked back home in America — and at least another $100 American in expenses each day, paid in Czech currency — he had to find a way to spend his per diem.

        Having the cabdriver on retainer was one way. Another was buying rounds of drinks at the local nightspots — Apking was still a very much a bachelor in those days and he enjoyed the social scene. It was nothing for him to plunk down a couple of big Czech bills on the bar and pay for a round of drinks. He knew the spots where the most attractive Czech women visited.

        To them, he was “Freddie” (the affection version of his baptismal name of Fred), even though back home everybody called him “Fritz.” Fritz is a German name; Apking is of German descent. No need to start off on the wrong foot. The Czechs — especially the Czechs in Prague — hated the Germans who had first occupied the Sudetenland (it rimmed Prague) and then annexed the western half of the country (including Prague) prior to World War II.

        So, to the lwomen of Prague, the 6-foot-4 and 205 Fritz Apking was “Freddie,” the not-so-ugly American. Great smile, a story-teller, fun-loving, life of the party. On a nightly basis, the women of Prague had gotten so accustomed to Freddie's presence that — on more than occasion, when “Freddie” had been late shooting and been couldn't get to the nightspot at his appointed time — he had received a telephone call in his hotel room.

        “Freddie, you come out tonight?”

        ***

        The three-foot tall hurdle — a “low hurdle,” as it is known — is already set up on the new track in Reading. We have come out for a photo shoot of Fritz Apking, 74, who has returned to Cincinnati after a lifetime in the picture business.

        This is the track that Reading High will begin using for meets in the spring. The track circles the football field; at the northern end of the field is a scoreboad; atop it is a sign, “Home of the Reading Blue Devils.” To present-day Reading High school students, “Fritz Apking” is only a name in the high school Hall of Fame. But to anybody in Cincinnati who was old enough to be following sports in 1946, Fritz Apking is a legend.

Apking won two golds in the state track meet in 1946, his senior year at Reading. (Dick Swaim photo) | ZOOM |

        He was a high school star in track, baseball, basketball (led the Millcreek Valley Interscholastic League — the MVIL — in scoring his senior year) and football (the only player from a then “Class B” sized school to start in the North-South All-Star football game in Toledo; the South team was coached by the Notre Dame legend, Frank Leahy). Apking went on to star at left end for the University of Washington...and then spurned an offer from the NFL's San Francisco 49'ers, choosing Hollywood instead. Nobody who had ever seen Fritz Apking catch passes at Washington ever doubted he would have been a star in the NFL. Apking possessed not only sprinter's speed, but the second- and third- gear burst of the great ones. He also had hands, height (6-foot-4) and hops (state high-jump champion).

        In a two-day stretch in Columbus at the state prep championships in 1946, Apking won gold medals in the 220 low hurdles, the high jump, and a team gold for baseball (he was a centerfielder). His qualifying time in the 120 high hurdles — his best event — was better than the time of the winner who got the gold in the finals. But Apking hadn't been able to run in the finals; he was playing in a baseball game.

        Kenny Powers, the Reading High School track, football and basketball coach who had once held the world record for the 60-yard hurdles while at Ohio State, had counseled Fritz that he should not turn his back on his baseball teammates, because what if they didn't win while their best hitter and fielder was off running the 120 highs? It's hard to quibble with the spirit of that advice. Still, it would have been almost mystical to have become the first athlete to tie the record of Ohioan Jesse Owens of three individual gold medals at the state track meet. At the time, Fritz didn't even know he could have tied that record if he'd have raced and won the gold in the 120 highs.

        Reading High athletic director Pete Muehlenkamp adjusts a couple of screws that transform the low hurdle sitting on the new Reading track into a high hurdle. Fritz raises his right leg and rests it atop the hurdle, parallel to the track. He can feel his hammy stretch. As good as Apking was at the ball sports, the ones he'd been playing since he was a boy growing up on Morrow Street, he may've been the most impressive on the hurdles, because a great coach had come into his life.

        Powers saw the 98-pound gangly kid at a seventh-grade track meet, and began teaching him the proper technique. Not a lot of it, but just enough. You can't run in the air, get down as close as you can going over the hurdle. As you go into the hurdle, duck your head. Don't let your right arm fly out like a flag; tuck it.

        Apking didn't spend enough time at it to be able to do what his coach could do in his prime: set a quarter on each hurdle and, as he raced over the hurdles, clip off each coin with his leg without knocking over the hurdle. Closer to the hurdle, better the time.

        Yep, Apking still has some of his old stretch. But he declines an offer to be photographed trying to leap over the hurdle.

        “I'd fall on my kiester,” he says, laughing. “But I don't think I'd get hurt. Anybody can fall down.”

        ***

        Fritz discovered early on that his multi-sport athletic career was of great help to him when he went to Hollywood — first as an actor, then as a stunt man. A great help, that is, except for when he was applying for a part that put him head to head with a former athlete from USC or UCLA. Invariably, they'd always get the part.

        “Go to school where you plan on making your home,” Fritz has already told Reading High star wide receiver and defensive back Charlie Vample.

        It is a life lesson, but it is borne out in the statistics. Most college grads wind up working within a 200-mile radius of where they go to college. Half wind up marrying a person they met at school. Fritz doesn't need the stats. He didn't marry any of the co-eds. He had gotten married only once, to “The Most Beautiful Showgirl in Las Vegas — 1960.” It had lasted only a short time, ending in annulment. Probably the gal he'd loved most, an Irish-Italian beauty, had gotten married four times, but never to him. Kept coming back to him. Kept dumping him. Died four years ago. Cancer.

        Fritz's leisure-time sport was golf. As with everything else sports-related, he was an excellent player, senior champion at Rancho Park. Fritz, who has bought a home in Amberley Village, is going to join a country club — but only after he sees whether he still has some game, and not too much pain. He enjoys watching Reading football practice. He plans on watching track practice come spring. He still has the keen eye. Maybe he can help if some kid wants to talk. Judging from his warm and engaging manner, his easy laugh, his way with telling a story, there's no maybe about it.

        Fritz never had any kids. No kids or grandkids to dote on. No reason to stay in California. Almost all of his Hollywood buddies are dead and gone now. For 25 years, he was Chuck Connors' stunt double. Chuck died of lung cancer a few years back. He had been paid big money money by an advertiser to stop smoking. When people would come into the dressing room, Chuck would hand the Camel to Fritz.

        Chuck was a fun-loving guy, too. When the producer of “Tomahawk Trail” ran of money, and couldn't rent the necessary horses to keep the actors on horseback, the writers wrote a scene to explain the peripatetic cavalry: the Indians had stolen their horses. The men had to walk across the desert.

        “Chuck started walking like John Wayne, and the rest of us followed suit,” says Fritz, tears of laughter coming to his eyes. “The director never caught it.”

        Chuck and Fritz had to be the most athletic pairing of leading man and stunt man in cinematic history. Connors was one of only nine people to play in both the NBA (Boston Celtics) and major league baseball (Brooklyn Dodgers). The Brooklyn-born Connors was an excellent actor, and played all sorts of roles. (“Don't worry, you're so ugly, you'll always get work,” Fritz had told a crestfallen Connors over a few beers after “The Rifleman” was cancelled after its fifth year, a great run for TV. Connors, who wasn't sure how to take his buddy's comment, could only laugh.) Connors did not normally bear insults well. Once, when he was playing baseball for the Los Angeles Angels of the Pacific Coast League, he bought a five-pound carton of hamburger and walked along the fence near the bleachers and threw handfuls of it at the fans: “Eat it, you animals!” Fritz cracks up at the re-telling.

        “Played Chuck one-on-one in basketball in his backyard,” Fritz remembers, laughing. “Hacked me to death. Those pro's (in the early NBA) played a rough game.”

        Fritz was never hurt seriously doing any stunts, even though he'd never gone to stunt school. He hadn't even ever ridden a horse before when he told the director on the Zane Gray Theater that he had. (“That day, I was starting to jump off my first horse ever, when a gun went off and the horse bolted — flipping me up and landing me on my neck; everybody thought, "Hey, this guy's great! What a fall!' They didn't know it, but my neck was screwed up for a year.”) But the rheumatic fever he had contacted while serving in the Army in Japan and the bum knee that the team physician at UW had botched in an operation affected him more than any stage stunt.

        In The Rifleman, Fritz was on the set every bit as much as Connors. Stage fist-fights were frequent. Even when Fritz was falling off horses, his hat never fell off. It couldn't fall off. It was fastened to his head by an iron wire pulled cerebellum-tight inside the hat's rim. Fritz's hair was darker than Connors', and if the viewers ever caught on that it wasn't Chuck doing the stunts, it would have been curtains for the show. Instead, it got as high as No. 4 in the Nielsens, and was a perennial Top 15. Every night when Fritz took his hat off, he had an eighth-inch strip of reddened forehead where the hat had been pierced to his head.

        “Still got that hat,” Fritz says.

        With many males in their late 40's and early 50's, The Rifleman may be the greatest show in the history of television. In their mind's eye, they can still see — if not hear — the staccato boom-boom-boom of Lucas McCain's Winchester rifle staccato to open the show.

        Fritz goes back to stretching.

        “Didn't have a track at Reading when I was in high school,” Fritz says. “I'd run around the football field. Sometimes, I'd pedal my bike down Benson over to Lockland Stadium, about two miles away. They had a track. I rode that bike everywhere. Didn't have a car until I got to the University of Washington.”

        Who says you can't go home again?

        “Maybe if you're a millionaire writer hobnobbing with famous people eating at fancy restaurants in New York City, you can't go home to Reading, Ohio,” said Fritz, referring to Thomas Wolfe who wrote You Can't Go Home Again. “But if you still have your high school friends, and all your relatives and your church, it's easy to come home.

        “I prefer Voltaire. He said, 'Don't believe any generality — including this one.'”

        For a shorter version of this story, see “Top of the Second,” page two of Sunday's Enquirer sport section, Dec. 2, 2001.

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