Negley Farson

His roving and adventurous spirit found it difficult to adjust itself to collegiate routine and the Spartan code of the physics course, but he took great interest in athletics, in his Freshman year, winning numerals in crew, track and base ball.

To cap the climax, Farson, a winning member of last year's freshman crew and regarded as a sure candidate for the Varsity Eight, has been declared ineligible.

This was only the prelude to a series of events which finally led him one night to pack up his belongings and leave without attempting to finish his course at Penn or at any other university.

His unwillingness to continue long in routine positions is characteristic of his attitude in all the events of his subsequent career at home and abroad.

He was posted to Egypt, where his aeroplane crashed, and his leg was badly damaged - an injury that troubled him for the rest of his life.

In Q3, 1920 in St. Martin, London, Farson married Enid Eveleen née Stoker (known as Eve,[5] 1893-1961),[6] a nurse who had served during World War I.

After a couple of years he moved to British Columbia, Canada, where he lived "part of the floathouse community that existed on Cowichan Lake.

He served in India, Egypt and throughout Europe and went on to become one of the most renowned foreign correspondents of his day, interviewing Gandhi in India, witnessing (January 1932) Gandhi's arrest in Poona, witnessing (July 1934) bankrobber John Dillinger's naked body (in the morgue just after he had been shot down by Hoover's men), and meeting Hitler, who described Farson's blond son, Daniel, as a "good Aryan boy".

During Hitler's rise to power, Farson was in Germany, but by this time he had become an alcoholic, and checked himself into the Clinic of Dr. Bumke.

After discharging himself, Farson went to South West Africa (now Namibia) and spent some time in the wilderness of Etosha Pan before moving to Cape Town.