ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times
DATE: Saturday, January 6, 1996 TAG: 9601080002
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: C3 EDITION: METRO
TYPE: NEWS OBIT
SOURCE: MIKE HUDSON STAFF WRITER
WILLIAM GOODLETT, a longtime Salem resident who was one of the subjects of the 1985 book "Aliens Among Us," went off, he might have said, on yet another journey.
William Goodlett did a lot in his 87 years on Earth. By his own count, he taught 12,000 people to dance, helped 2,000 children learn to read ... and soared away on at least a dozen trips from planet to planet throughout this galaxy.
Goodlett, a longtime Salem resident who was one of the subjects of the 1985 book "Aliens Among Us," died Thursday - leaving, he might have said, on yet another journey.
He was a gracious gentleman who lived for many decades in a white Victorian home on Union Street. He was well-known in the Roanoke Valley as a painter, reading tutor and ballroom dance instructor, but he didn't gain national fame until Ruth Patterson's cult-classic book described him as a "space being who was born into an Earthly body."
"Your spirit leaves your body," he said in a 1986 newspaper interview. "It goes where it wants to go and sees what it wants to see and comes back."
Many doubted his tales of out-of-body travel on Earth and beyond, but few doubted that he truly believed he had made such trips.
"William Goodlett is a man of obvious integrity," Patterson wrote. "I defy anyone to talk with him and doubt his sincerity."
Goodlett, born in Atlanta in 1908, moved to Roanoke as a boy. Walter Sadlowski, who became a friend in recent years, said Goodlett was a precocious child and always something of a traveler.
Sadlowski said that as a teen-ager, Goodlett walked from Salem to Virginia Beach - and back - "so he could see the country, see the people." Along the way, he slept in barns, in people's homes and under the stars.
Goodlett also worked as a paperboy for The Roanoke Times. The story goes that he got flat feet from so much walking, and a doctor prescribed dancing lessons. "In two months," he later recalled, "I was able to stand on tiptoe."
He started performing as a 10-year-old and began teaching dance full time in 1931. He was especially smitten by Native American dances. He ran a summer camp on the Cowpasture River in Bath County and, after serving in the Army in World War II, began teaching Boy Scouts so they could get their Indian lore merit badges.
Teaching the Scouts made him realize that many boys couldn't read well. So he studied phonics and other instructional methods and eventually began charging $2 a hour for private reading lessons. Local schools called on him to help kids with dyslexia and other problems; one principal called him "an expert in his field."
His own reading about Native Americans led him to embrace the Indian belief in reincarnation. He also became interested in extrasensory perception and other supernatural phenomena.
He claimed he first traveled out of his body when he was a teen-ager in the 1920s: One moment, he was settling down for a nap at his home along Woods Avenue in Roanoke; the next, he was sailing above Franklin Road downtown to the old First National Bank building at Jefferson and Campbell. He sat on a parapet and watched ladies get on and off street cars.
Goodlett said he first began traveling beyond Earth in 1938, but it was not until 30 years later that he came to believe that these interplanetary trips weren't just vivid dreams.
A dozen years ago, he read one of Ruth Patterson's books and wrote to tell her his story. She told it to the world and made him famous. He got letters and visitors from all over the world.
Skeptics didn't bother Goodlett. He saw himself simply as being a little bit ahead of others on this planet.
"We are now in a revolutionary phase in our psychic abilities," he said. Look at your furniture, he said. Somebody had to think it up before they made it. "We are creators. ... Everything here was created by thought first."
Sadlowski said Goodlett was still spry and sharp as he got older. Sadlowski, who was helping Goodlett organize his writings about his experiences, said Goodlett went to the Salem Public Library regularly and read four books a week.
Things took a turn for the worse after Goodlett fell in late October, cracking five ribs and three vertebrae. Soon after, Sadlowski said, he was diagnosed with bone-marrow cancer. When he died Thursday, Goodlett left behind his younger brother, Robert, also of Salem.
Sadlowski said Goodlett claimed to have read the Bible 22 times "cover to cover," and in the end, he had no fear of death. "None."
"He said there's no such thing as death - because we just go on and on."
LENGTH: Medium: 85 linesby CNB