This is a letter from Harold Lufkin to Pop. Since Pop’s previous letter mentions Colfax, as well as the next one, I’m including this letter as a bridge between the two.
Mr. Leon Sinclair February 13, 1961
Box 473
Norfolk, Connecticut
Dear Leon:
You have an excellent memory. What you were talking about at Colfax is Captain James Norman Hall who was a Captain in the LaFayette Escadrille in France during World War I. In 1914 at the outbreak of the war, he enlisted in the British Army and was in the original Kitchner’s Mob and wrote his original book with that name.
When he came back after the war, he spent some time in the extreme Northern Scandinavia area and wrote another book about that.
Later on, he did go to the South Seas, married a girl down there who was part English and part Polynesian and spent practically the rest of his life down there. Some of his best known books were written at that time, and a couple of them were made into movies.
Hall wrote some of the greatest sea stories of our time including “Mutiny on the bounty”, “Men Against the Sea”, “The Hurricane”, and “The Dark River,” novels which blended the courage and the fortitude of the Anglo-Saxon with the exotic beauty of the South Seas.
He was about my age and I knew him as a boy. Many months after he had achieved fame on one of his rare and brief visits back to his home port.
He seemed to be fed up with civilization and as near as anyone could tell, was happier during the period of his life that he spent in the South Seas than in any other place. Some of his books were written in cooperation with a fellow by the name of Nordhoff who he met in France at the time he joined the French Army after he had been discharged from the British Army.
Hall was shot down over Germany and his experience in the German Prison Camp led to another book.
He was definitely a citizen of the world. His brother lived out his life in Colfax, but even while Norm’s mother was alive there, he rarely ever came back. Actually, I don’t believe after he left Colfax and Grinnell College, that he spent more than ten days in Colfax during the balance of his life. He wrote often and nostalgically about Colfax and his boyhood, but he recognized as we all do that times change and return trips never restore the conditions as they were originally.
Well, enough of this chatter, but I thought you did mighty well to remember that all these years and to associate it with Colfax.
It is now indeed a defunct town. We still go over there for Mineral Water occasionally, but the hotels are all closed and gone and the special trains that they used to run to Colfax have quit running. Its days as a Midwest Spa died somewhere around the outbreak of World War I….1914.
We’re having another wonderful February day here. Temperature around 50, bright winter sun and a yellow glint to the willows that is a promise of spring.
Surprisingly enough, the business recession or whatever you want to call it has had little effect on our business. Apparently more salesmen are more active and that brings the businesses any time. Besides, when things get a little tough, it separates the men from the boys and some of your annoying competition has a way of stopping cold under these conditions…and that’s a welcome thing.
Cheerio,
NEWTON MFG. CO.
HALufkin/ab
Tags: Pop's Letters
