Waldo Huntley Heinrichs
Waldo Huntley Heinrichs was born in 1891 in Ongole, India, to Baptist missionaries. He lived at the Baptist Home for Missionaries Children at 1136 Centre St, Newton Centre while his parents remained in India. He received his education at the Mason School in Newton Centre as did many children of Baptist missionaries at that time. He attended Newton High School and later graduated from Denison University. He fought in the 95 Aero Squadron, the same squadron as Quentin Roosevelt.
Heinrichs' service record shows why he came to be known as the “luckiest man in the war” in WWI.
Dorothy Peterson and Waldo Huntley Heinrichs ,
He was also the subject of a book: First to the Front by Charles Smalley (1999).
After Heinrichs’s recovery from the wounds he received in WWI, he married Dorothy Peterson of Hawaii, a Wellesley College graduate in 1919, and earned an MA in History from Columbia in 1926. He then returned to Calcutta and Lahore in India in 1931, serving as YMCA Secretary.
He was made Secretary General of the YMCA in Jerusalem in 1932 where the $1M, 152-foot Jerusalem International YMCA building was being built. The project was meant to encourage and support understanding between Jews, Christians and Muslims in then-Mandate Palestine, particularly in the area of sports. An effort to create a Palestine Olympic Committee in 1934 in anticipation of the 1936 Olympic Games in Berlin was undermined by pro-Nazi factions infiltrating the YMCA. Heinrichs resisted and exposed these factions. As a result, he was ultimately replaced.
He returned to the US and began teaching at Middlebury College.
Jerusalem International YMCA building.
By 1939 after a trip to Czechoslovakia he became convinced that Germany was intent on full domination of free peoples and argued for financial support for those countries such as Britain in the Lend-Lease Act of 1941. He was strongly criticized by isolationists and conservative parties in Vermont. He taught at Middlebury until his retirement in 1956.
He died following surgery at 67 years at a hospital in Burlington VT.
Waldo Huntley Heinrichs’ war record, as detailed in the FBCN archives.
