User:Mangoe/Dudley Wolfe

Dudley Wolfe (1896–1939) was an American sailboat racer and mountaineer. He disappeared in the disastrous 1939 attempt to climb K2.

Early life
Wolfe was named after his father Dudley Wolfe, Sr., a British coffee merchant who married Mabel Smith, heiress to a huge silver mining fortune, in 1892. They had four children, with Dudley Junior being the second oldest. Wolfe Senior died in 1908, and his widow was soon remarried to Joseph Baldrige, uncle to Howard M. Baldrige, future congressman from Nebraska, and the family moved from New York to Connecticut.

The three brothers struggled academically, and Dudley failed to graduate either from the Pomfret School or from Phillips Academy. He the attempted to enlist in the the army, but was turned down due to his eyesight. He instead joined the Réserve Mallet, a World War I Franco-American transport unit; later he drove an ambulance on the Italian front, and finally joined the French Foreign Legion In October 1918, just a month before the armistice.

Upon hist return from Europe he took up competitive sailing, and under pressure from his maternal grandfather, changed his name to Smith, but shortly reverted to his birth name. He enrolled in Harvard in 1925 and graduated in 1929.