Robin D. Williams

I had no intention of getting up early and going to Sunday school but my mother changed that real fast. She got me up and drove me to Sunday school without fail. That was replaced later with “up in the morning and out the door and walk to Sunday school.” My Sunday school teacher was a man named Tommy Thompson who was soft spoken, rode a Honda 750 motorcycle and had only one eye from a dogfight with a Focke-Wulf 190 German fighter plane. The FW 190 was a radial engine airplane that the German pilots loved to sneak right up onto the wing of a B-17, and just sit there until the crew noticed it and jumped out of their skin and blasted away so fast they almost shot down other B-17s in the formation. In fact, they did injure crews in other bombers but that wasn’t mentioned when the men came home from the war.

Tommy Thompson read to us about a little baby in a basket set into the bulrushes along the river Nile to be discovered by a princess from Pharaoh’s palace. She wanted to keep the baby and was tricked into choosing the baby’s actual mother to nurse the infant and take care of him.

Twenty years later, I would be standing next to the Nile River and staring at the reeds and the papyrus in the marshy area, and then I would look back over my shoulder at the Pyramids of Giza and know I was experiencing that very moment of wonder that I had in Sunday school. It didn’t end there.

I would later become a filmmaker and just follow my nose to make films of subjects that I wanted to know more about. Tommy Thompson had no idea that his reading of the Bible inspired my little 8-year-old mind to someday film the story of the Apostle Paul. I tracked him from his birth in the city of Tarsus to his death in the city of Rome. Paul walked the distance at least three times in 20 years. It took me 7 years to find all the ancient cities and Roman highways where Paul once walked.

When I was 9 years old my uncle Dick Tunnicliff came home from the war. He told me that he was a bombardier in a B-17 Flying Fortress. I asked him to tell me what happened in that airplane and if he saw any action. “Oh my yes,” he said. “One day on our way to bomb Saarbrucken the pilot called me and said, ‘Dick, we have a German fighter sitting on our left wing.’ Sure enough, a German FW-190 was sitting RIGHT THERE! I swung my chin turret and you could see the bullets entering his cowling and down he went.” Little did I know that I would make a film that shows that exact incident, which was told by my uncle Dick just before he passed away in 2006.

Tommy reading the story of Moses would lift my mind into someday filming the Bible. Scenes from my youth are now sitting in my films and entertaining audiences across the United States of America. Yes, your youth is the key to your life. Just turn the key and walk in and visit thousands of stories!

I’ll be back with a lot more.

—Robin D. Williams

Editors note: The scenes Robin tells about are in his DVDs called MAYDAY Tugs of War and Paul’s Journeys.