His Name Was Hugh
As I mentioned in a previous entry, I recently purchased a copy of National Geographic for a dollar – way more than I would usually pay – because it had an article by Dwight D. Eisenhower about his friend Sir Winston Churchill.
After looking over the images and the articles, I’d pay a lot more for this issue, August 1965. There’s a photo of Churchill testing carbines with Dwight Eisenhower and Omar Bradley, and a great shot of him with some soldiers in a rifle pit on the coast. (As if a rifle pit was going to stop a German invasion! These blighters would be gone with one shell from an German 88. The war was won in the air and on the sea.) There’s even a portrait of Sir Winston painted by… Dwight Eisenhower!
Here’s the opening of an article by National Geographic staff writer Howard La Fay. I’d pay a buck just for this snippet from real life:
He was a middle-aged Scot and his name was Hugh. He had taken three days of vacation to come down from Edinburgh for the funeral, and now we huddled together in the slow, frozen queue winding toward Westminster Hall.
Inside, beyond the statues of Cromwell and Richard the Lionheart, Sir Winston Churchill lay in state. For five hours Hugh and I shuffled slowly, foot by cold, tedious foot, toward the hall. And he told me why he’d come:
“I was a subaltern at Dunkirk, and the Nazis kicked my unit to death. We left everything behind when we got out; some of my men didn’t even have boots. They dumped us along the roads near Dover, and all of us were scared and dazed, and the memory of the Panzers could set us screaming at night.
“Then he got on the wireless and said we’d fight on the beaches and in the towns and that we’d never surrender. And I cried when I heard him. I’m not ashamed to say it.
“And I thought, ‘To hell with the Panzers. We’re going to win!'”
September 16, 2011 @ 11:32 am
Dear Mr. Hartshorne,
Thank you for writing this. I’ve posted it on Facebook, where there’s been a flurry of National Geographic presence in recent weeks, due to our loss of beautiful and beloved Head of the Travel Department, Ann Judge, and another staffer, on the plane that flew into the Pentagon. Thinking back on earlier times there got me to looking for old articles by Howard La Fay, and wondering if anything had been written about him. He was a senior writer at National Geographic when I was a very young and junior one, but he treated me the same as he did everyone, as an equal and with a humor and joviality that was unsurpassed among his peers, suggesting that he knew you had to be up to something, and he was in on the joke. Nor was the respect in which they held him. He was a large, round, laughing man who loved good food, great wine, and low-stakes poker, and who pricked the bubbles of his generation of colleagues as they rose up through the Geographic Headquarters’ nine floors to stratospheric levels of editorship and power and self-regard.He never let them get away with it. He’d also fought on the beaches of Okinawa as a U.S. Marine Corps Captain. I think that lies behind the power of the quote that you revived here. He knew what that British man meant, about red beaches, and the nightmares that linger after them, too. He was also, in my opinion, the best Geographic writer of his generation. I’d like to point you, when I’ve done a little research, to a couple more pieces of Howard’s true literary Voice, that are among the very top examples of vivid, human, beautiful writing that I’ve ever read in the pages of that magazine (which is one I know well, and continue to seek out old copies). The ads are studies in themselves, and the maps are freeze-frames of bygone times. I’ve been a free lance for some time, though keeping up ongoing associations with the Geographic, and I’ve just brought out a book about the Central Gulf Coast, pre- and post-Katrina. Should you be curious, It’s available on Amazon.com and Kindle under title or author, ‘On the Hurricane Coast–Trauma, Memory and Recovery in the Land of the Eye of the Storm–A Journey’ by Douglas Bennett Lee. But that’s not why I wrote. I’d like to tell you more about Howard, who died in his late 40’s, far too young, after I’d only had the pleasure and instruction of knowing him for two years. But I knew him well enough to never forget him, and never stopped liking the man he was. He set an example as both a man and a writer, of intolerance for nonsense and appreciation of the good in life and people. His final article and between-the-lines self-written epitaph, capturing in a few thousand words much of the essence of the State of Texas, written by a man who knew his life would soon end, has some incredibly lonesome, haunting images and lines I’ll make an effort to find. I also love old magazines, and have been working my way through the whole of Life, online. Respectfully yours, Doug Lee
September 16, 2011 @ 3:46 pm
Thank you, Doug, for your profile of a great writer.