The One-Legged Wanderer

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Help match Cap'n Jim's initial donation to a cancer research fund in Jim Valvano's name through this Facebook fundraising page.

© Tim Peeler, 2018

Cap’n Jim was a wanderer, a one-legged marcher that NC State picked up 35 years ago on the “Road to Albuquerque." He was also a Jim Valvano-esque dreamer who first came up with the idea to create a charity in Jimmy V’s name to benefit cancer research.

His name was really James Michael Letherer of Saginaw, Michigan, but he insisted that everyone call him by his self-appointed nickname: Cap'n Jim. He was just part of the cast of characters embraced by the Wolfpack, a guy with a world view they could appreciate.

“You see the world through a different perspective when you see it from a wheelchair or on a pair of crutches,” said Letherer, who lost his right leg to cancer at the age of nine. “You look for things that happen to the underdogs, the long shots, those who have to beat the odds just to get the little things that other people take for granted.”

No one knew what Letherer was supposed to be captain of, or where exactly he spent all of his time. This much is certain: Cap’n Jim appeared out of the blue one day in Corvalis, Oregon, having hitch-hiked from San Diego to follow the team he predicted would win the whole tournament. The day he met Valvano, he told the coach that the Wolfpack would beat Pepperdine in a game it had no business winning. That was just about the same time Valvano made his prediction to a handful of sportswriters that the Wolfpack would go all the way if it could find a way to get past Pepperdine.

Cap’n Jim claimed to be a good-luck charm, and nothing that happened over the next three weeks, as he hitch-hiked--on crutches, no less--his way from Oregon to Utah to Albuquerque to follow the Wolfpack, did anything to prove him wrong.

Cap'n Jim first had the idea to start a cancer fund inValvano's honor.

“It gives me cold chills to think about it,” Valvano said prior to the Final Four, recalling his first meeting with Letherer.

Cap’n was a little gruff, definitely a little rough and mostly full of puff. At least that’s what the players thought. He was on the court in Albuquerque the night the Wolfpack beat Houston, an uninvited guest who was allowed to join the celebration journey and enjoy the ride.

“He just showed up one day,” said Dereck Whittenburg. “Looking back, Cap’n Jim was part of that belief we had. We didn’t know if he was a war hero or what, but he is there with his crutches with all these badges and a red hat and he is with NC State. We just assumed that he was part of NC State. V just accepted him. We thought he was one of us. He’s exactly the kind of guy that some other programs aren’t going to let get close to them.

"Can you see Mike Krzyzewski saying ‘Come on Cap’n Jim, join in.’ Can you see Roy Williams doing that? That was the magical part of the late Jimmy V–he trusted a lot of people, more unwisely than not. He was carefree and he wanted to be open.”

The Cap'n's relationship with NC State grew after the NCAA Tournament ended. He moved to Raleigh weeks after the championship game, living out of his van around the Mission Valley Shopping Center. Occasionally, he would go to the apartment shared by Terry Gannon and Mike Warren for a much-needed shower. He told them stories about marching with Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. during the civil rights movement.

Jim Letherer marching with Martin Luther King Jr. in Selma, Alabama.

“How could he march with Dr. King with only one leg?” the players wondered.

Then one day Gannon, a history major at NC State, found some pictures in an African-American studies textbook of King’s 50-mile march on Selma, Alabama, in June, 1965. There was a guy on crutches, enduring chants of “Left...left...left” from the hecklers who lined the road. He talked to the national media who were covering the event and told them his only handicap was not being able to do more to help the struggle for freedom.

The players took him a little more seriously after that. He also had the trust of trainers, staff and students around NC State. He came up with a plan to run across America to raise money for cancer research, the perfect publicity stunt for someone who had once been told he would never walk again.

He spent a year in Raleigh, working with trainer Craig Sink and assistant athletics director Wright Wayne. He lost 80 pounds. He even had some special crutches made by three engineering students from NC State’s student chapter of the American Society of Mechanical Engineers: Bill Ridenhour, C.A. McDonald and Harry Wilfong. He gave them regular updates as he traveled the 2,550 miles to his destination, stopping along the way to give radio interviews and make phone calls back to Raleigh. In Texas, he stopped to talk to the Dallas Cowboys.

After 214 days of traveling, Cap’n Jim reached San Diego. He raised some $6,400 along the way, most of it coming from Thurl Bailey, who pledged to pay $1 per mile that Cap’n Jim ran. No one really knows where the money ever went–Letherer had a long history of raising money, but records of any donations he ever made are a bit sketchy. But his dream was to create the Jimmy V Cancer Research Charity, an idea that eventually became the Jimmy V Foundation, one of the nation’s most successful cancer-research charities.

Now in its 25th year, the Jimmy V Foundation for Cancer Research has raised more than $200 million for cancer research and is funding young scientists who have begun their careers in fighting the kinds of cancer that affected Letherer's life and claimed Valvano's.

Following his days in Raleigh, Letherer lived an adventurous life. His transcontinental trek inspired him to run a marathon and run with the bulls in Pamplona. Doesn’t mean he did either one, but he was inspired, and he inspired others, all while living a walk-about life.

“We had in our family something we called the ‘Jimmy Tax,’ which we used to bail him out of whatever he had gotten into,” said Bernard “Shirley” Letherer of Saginaw, Michigan, Cap’n Jim’s younger brother. “One time, he ended up somewhere in Asia, trying to swim across a river. They arrested him for vagrancy because he didn’t have any money. They threw him in jail, and he stayed there for about four months before we found out about it.

"I think that one cost us about $550.”

Cap’n Jim lost his right leg as a child, two years after cancer was found in the bone. He suffered a stroke in 1955 that paralyzed his left side. And he suffered even more damage when he was involved in a bus accident, which confined him to a wheelchair for years. He never let his disabilities slow him down, traveling every direction of the globe looking for adventure. He also became a huge sports fan, especially of the Seattle SuperSonics, the San Diego Chargers, Washington Redskins and, of course, the Wolfpack.

Letherer died Dec. 18, 2001, of a heart attack in Saginaw, where he had lived the last year of his life, as he fought several illnesses. He was 67. But in his first 66 years, he wandered the world, unhindered by physical limitations and unable to resist joining the journey of other big dreamers.