A note from Jim Flint ...
In reading through my father's letters, I wondered about his college roommate and lifelong friend. Through an internet search, I located a listing for Irving Luban, age 94, with references to places he had lived.
The directory included Irving's children, Nina, Michael, and Malva, whose names I remembered from family visits in the late 1960s. A subsequent query brought me to a medical practice in Chicago -- and a photo of Michael Luban which bore a striking resemblance to my own memory of Irving.
Michael responded warmly to my email and shared that his dad was very much alive and doing well in Florida. Nina emailed a day later and attached a few chapters from Irving's book, "Memory Traces: A family's life journey," with permission to share the passages on the "Dear Folks" blog.
The phone rang yesterday with a call from Irving. We talked about the times they spent together at college and on Flint Hill, the visits and letters exchanged with each other, and their endearing bond of friendship over so many years, beginning in the spring of 1937 at Cornell University.
A passage from "Memory Traces"
by Irving Luban, published in 2001
Summer at Flint Hill
The first in our family, and in our Brooklyn neighborhood to go to college, I entered Cornell University, School of Agriculture in 1936, received my B.S. degree in 1940, and was pursuing graduate studies when I was drafted into the United States Army on August 7, 1941, six months before we went to war against Germany and Japan in World War II.
College tuition was free then. But in order to qualify for acceptance, I had to work during my vacation time, four summers and parts of the winter, on a family income-producing farm. My roommate at Cornell was Gilbert Hall Flint, Hall as he was known to his friends. His folks owned a herd of 50 Holstein cows and over 500 acres of mountains, woods, and farmland. It was there that I worked, sweated, enjoyed, and shared their life on the land that had been in their family for over two hundred years. It was called Flint Hill.
I am still in close contact with Hall and Martha, his sister, whose poems about her beloved Flint Hill I possess to this day.
The great gray house on the hill, the family, barns, cows, horses, and the scent of freshly-cut bundles of timothy and clover ... all were real. Now, fifty years later, they are but a dream.
My introduction to a Puritan way of life was not easy. I did not relish awakening at 4:00 a.m. to retrieve fifty head of Holstein cows from distant foggy pastures; sleep-swollen head leaning heavily on the cow’s flank; stripping every ounce of milk by hand from each udder; fifteen- hour days of scorching labor in the fiery fields of hay; meager, very meager meals (dairy farmers were getting less than two cents per quart of milk produced) and learning the art of reading by candlelight.
But we were young and optimistic then. And it did not take long to form a ringingly active group, almost foreign to the enduring solemn farm life and to the indigenous silence of timeless meadows and lonely, distant mountain tops.
There was Catherine, Hall’s older sister, married but still full of zest and plenty of youth. And slim, statuesque, blue-eyed Martha, Hall’s other sister, with windblown, autumn glistening, shoulder-length hair, who was the poet and avid researcher of her family’s ancestry, whose striking poems of life and freedom on her beloved Flint Hill still reside and echo from the files of my extended family.
Actively outgoing, Martha once shamed me into mounting the old gray workhorse. Out of character, the mare suddenly developed a fast trot as it approached the narrow, stony mountain road. My first time on a horse and with no saddle, swaying wildly as I desperately held on to its neck and billowing mane. This did me absolutely no good as horse and I soon parted company. The old gray mare went one way and I went the other. I recall my very secret love for Martha fading as I observed, from my less than elegant prone grassy sprawl, her inelegant, ear to-ear-grin.
Gilbert Hall Flint was born August 14, 1918 and raised on Flint Hill Farm in Amenia, New York. His formal education began in a one-room schoolhouse in Smithfield. He graduated from Amenia High School in 1936 and from the Cornell University College of Agriculture in 1940. He taught high school agriculture from 1940 to 1944, served in the U.S. Army from 1944 to 1946, taught high school agriculture from 1946 to 1963, and finished his career as a school principal from 1963 to 1975.
Gilbert Hall Flint passed away on December 16, 2009. The letters are published in his memory. To view the letters in chronological order, please click a timeline label from the side bar menu, scroll to the bottom, and read up.
Gilbert Hall Flint passed away on December 16, 2009. The letters are published in his memory. To view the letters in chronological order, please click a timeline label from the side bar menu, scroll to the bottom, and read up.