Early Life
Hoffman was born in South Amboy, New Jersey to Frank Hoffman and Ada Crawford Thom. His mother was the daughter of the painter James Crawford Thom and the granddaughter of Scottish sculptor James Thom. Hoffman also had two ancestors who were soldiers in the American Revolutionary War. His father's side of the family were among some of the early settlers in New Amsterdam, now known as New York, and they originated in Sweden; Hoffman's father's family were the descendents of Dutch nobility.
He attended public schools and graduated from South Amboy High School in 1913. He worked with a local newspaper until enlisting on July 25, 1917 as a private in the Third Regiment of the New Jersey Infantry, where he was subsequently promoted to the rank of captain. After World War I, Hoffman returned to South Amboy and became an executive with the South Amboy Trust Company. He would later became the bank's president, a position he would hold until 1942.
Read more about this topic: Harold G. Hoffman
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“Many a woman shudders ... at the terrible eclipse of those intellectual powers which in early life seemed prophetic of usefulness and happiness, hence the army of martyrs among our married and unmarried women who, not having cultivated a taste for science, art or literature, form a corps of nervous patients who make fortunes for agreeable physicians ...”
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