Henry James Young (1908-1995)
Henry James Young (friends jokingly put a comma between the middle and last names) was born February 16, 1908, in York, Pennsylvania. His family were comfortably placed; in passing he sometimes mentioned a German maid. Orphaned in his teens, he lived for four years at an orphanage in York before entering Franklin and Marshall College. After a varied career, Young in 1957 joined the history department at Dickinson College in Carlisle, Pennsylvania.
At Franklin and Marshall, Young majored in history, but he continued his study of the ancient classics he had begun in high school. He was especially fond of Greek, although his command of Latin was such that his marginalia were often in that language. Young also studied German, having some familiarity with it from home, and Italian. He was president of the college's Goethean Literary Society, the subject of his first book.
When he was twenty, a summer research project took Young to the State Library in Harrisburg. The friend who had promised to drive Young back to York never arrived, so, fortified with a bowl of baked beans at the Alva restaurant, Young proceeded to walk home, across the Susquehanna and down the old Susquehanna Trail, arriving at dawn.