Читать книгу Sunward I've Climbed - Hermann Hagedorn - Страница 3

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It has been possible to tell the story of this youth, so exceptional in his gifts, so typical of thousands of his contemporaries in his conflicting aims and inner turmoil, only because his father and mother, the Reverend John Gillespie Magee and Mrs. Magee, of Washington, D.C., were not only willing to have the story honestly told, but, from their memories of their son and the letters he wrote from Rugby, themselves provided the illuminating details. Except as otherwise indicated, the letters in the fourth section, “The Flier,” are all addressed to them.

Mr. Hugh Lyon, headmaster of Rugby School in England, has, in his discriminating account of young John’s years at the great English school, provided not only colorful detail but the basic outlines of the picture; and Mr. J. V. Hitchcock, headmaster of St. Clare School, Walmer, Kent, has told movingly of John’s earlier schooling. Mr. Geoffrey Sergeant, of Trinity College, Cambridge, now of South Africa, has written, as only he could, of the high peak of John’s boyhood.

Other friends, notably Mr. Lawrence Viles, of New York, Mr. Robert Dawson, of North Carolina, Mr. Warner Gookin, of Oak Bluffs, Massachusetts, Mr. Francis H. Bangs, of Litchfield, Connecticut, Mrs. Wilson Plumer Mills, Mrs. W. P. Roberts, and the Reverend and Mrs. J. C. Thomson, of Nanking and New York, the Reverend R. Brooke Stabler, Mr. Paul Child, Mrs. Marion Meigs Hyde, Mr. Max Stein, and Dean Sears of the Avon School, Avon, Connecticut, have contributed illuminating reminiscences or helped the author in other ways. To them all, and not least to Miss Ruth Lachman, who typed the successive drafts of the book, he offers his thanks.

H. H.