Sublime

Levi Hunt had survived Special Forces training, which made SEALs’ Hell Week look like a tweens’ summer camp. He’d lived through multiple tours of Afghanistan when it seemed that everyone and his aunt was trying to kill him in wildly inventive ways.

This Hanov, a man of about forty, with a worn face and a lifeless expression, was beginning to age noticeably, but was still handsome and attractive to women.

Howe took perverse pride in his appearance, claiming to be one of the four ugliest men in New York. “Children take one look at me on the street and run.”45 A fellow reporter once called him a “medieval gnome,” and Howe accepted the designation with delight. For most people, Louis Howe was an acquired taste. But he was blessed with superabundant ene

Flagler had grown up poor, the son of a Presbyterian minister with a parish in northwestern New York State. Young Henry was only fourteen when the family’s spartan existence prompted him to leave home in 1844 and join his half brother, Dan Harkness, in northern Ohio, for a stint as a salesman in an uncle’s general store.

When he was thirty-two years old, Thomy Lafon was listed in the 1842 city directory as a merchant. His mother was born a free woman in Haiti and had arrived with other migrants post-revolution. Lafon grew wealthy through real estate. The Holy Family nursing home was the result of one of many of his charitable donations made in service of Black peop

But retreat—or surrender—was not in Henry Flagler’s nature. He turned to Meredith’s second-in-command, William J. Krome, the strapping young civil engineer who had led the ill-fated mapping expeditions through the wilds near Cape Sable; without hesitation,

Howe, who loved to bet on the ponies and visit establishments less than genteel, knew much about life that Roosevelt never had the opportunity to learn. Howe shared those experiences and made Franklin more worldly. Frances Perkins once wrote that FDR’s Harvard education was a political handicap.67 In many respects Louis Howe was the antidote.