Archives West Finding Aid

Biography of Humphrey Leynse, from the guide to Cage 438:

Humphrey W. Leynse was born on June 22, 1921 in Peking, China. His parents, Reverend James and Anna Groenendyk Leynse, were Dutch Reformed Church Missionaries at the Presbyterian Mission in Peking. As a child, Leynse attended the Peking American School, where he first learned to speak English; previously he spoke only Dutch and Mandarin Chinese, and he remained fluent in these languages throughout his life. He also studied French and Indonesian.

Peking was Leynse's home until age twenty, when he came to the United States to study at Pomona College in Pomona, California. World War II interrupted his education. He served in the U.S. Army and from 1943 to 1945 as a special agent in the Counter Intelligence Corps (CIC) in the Philippines and New Guinea. His duties included teaching the Chinese language, formulating an English-Indonesian dictionary, and engaging in combat duty as an Agent Investigator. During his time as an Agent Investigator then Sergeant Leynse investigated foreign political groups in the Manila area and helped to establish an informant network. The Army awarded him the Bronze Star in 1945.

At the end of the war, Leynse returned to Pomona to complete his studies for a bachelor's degree in liberal arts. From 1949 through 1951 Leynse served as an educational advisor for the United States Department of the Army and as superintendent of an Educational Center in Karlsruhle, Germany. In 1951, Leynse returned to the Pacific (the Marshall Islands) as an administrator of the Department of the Interior. From 1954 to 1957 he again worked for the State Department, investigating those Chinese visa applicants in Hong Kong who sought to emigrate to the United States under the Refugee Relief Act.

Leynse's career in filmmaking began in 1957 as a Motion Picture Officer for the United States Information Service (USIS), first in Djakarta, Indonesia, and later in Seoul, Korea. He made more than fifty documentary films with USIS. It was during his time in Seoul that he met and married Judith L. Light, a journalist who was assigned to Seoul as a Motion Picture Officer.

Despite his successful career with USIS, Leynse tired of governmental bureaucracy and desired to produce his own full-length feature film. In 1966 he resigned his Foreign Service position and began the odyssey that led him, with Judith and their baby son, to the remote island of Ullung-Do, Korea, some 180 miles east of the mainland in the Sea of Japan. For two years he recorded the harsh life of the fishermen and their families on Ullung-Do. His film, Out There, a Lone Island, won Leynse several awards and was featured in various New York venues, including the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Museum of Modern Art, the American Film Festival, and the Ethnological Film Festival at the Museum of Natural History. Leynse made this film and many others under the auspices of Oceania Productions, a company he created in 1951 to produce educational and theatrical films concerning the Far East.

In 1970 Leynse came to Washington State University as an Assistant Professor of Communications. He was promoted to Associate Professor in 1975. Throughout his tenure at Washington State Leynse played an important part developing cinema instruction as part of the Washington State University's mass media curriculum. In addition to his classes on film criticism, scripting, and documentary film, he taught the very popular "Masters of Cinema" course, which grew from an enrollment of thirty-seven students in the fall of 1970 to seven hundred in the spring of 1977. His film experience was also combined with his Asian interests in a course on Asian society as revealed through Asian films. Leynse also helped to produce one of the area's most popular radio programs, "Moviegoers," which was written by students in his film criticism classes.

Leynse became ill in April of 1977. Despite this he was able to complete teaching all of his classes and missed only two weeks of the semester; when at one point he dropped in on one of his classes to see how things were going, he was given a spontaneous standing ovation by the students. Following surgery for a brain tumor, Leynse died on August 20, 1977, at the age of fifty-six.

Biography of James P. Leynse, from the guide to Cage 444:

James P. Leynse was born in Middleburg, Holland, on March 20, 1890. At an early age Leynse showed a talent for rhetoric and had ambitions as a stage actor. His Dutch-Calvanist father challenged him to do more with his life and this eventually led him to the University of Leiden to study for the ministry in the Dutch Reformed Church.

As soon as he was ordained, Leynse elected to serve as a missionary in China. His church did not have any missions in China at that time; but this stopped him only momentarily. He decided to seek affiliation with the Presbyterian Board of Foreign Missions in the United States. The American officials, however, were not satisfied with his education and required him to study for two more years at Princeton University and be ordained once again.

Shortly after he completed his additional studies, his Dutch fiancee, Anna Marie Groenendyk, came to America and they were married on June 21, 1920. They sailed for China in December 1920 and for the next 29 years their home was the Presbyterian Mission in Peking. It was there that their two sons, Humphrey and Waldo, were born.

Leynse's first three years in China were spent learning to read and speak Mandarin Chinese at the College of Chinese studies. At this time Peking was noted for its poverty, beggars, and disease. One of Leynse's first jobs was the organization of kitchens which served free millet porridge to thousands of the hungry. Leynse soon realized, however, that he was only treating a symptom of the problem. Therefore, he wrote to Holland and asked his sister Francina Leynse for help. She arrived in 1930 and for 15 years helped to establish and run an industrial center where homeless women and children could learn a skill.

With the Japanese invasion and subsequent occupation of China, larger problems loomed for the Leynses. At first the Japanese permitted Leynse to continue the Peking Poor Relief Committee. Even though other foreigners were being evacuated the Leynses stayed on in the hopes that the Japanese would continue to overlook them. Late in 1941, they travelled to Japan in order to secure passage to America for their younger son, Waldo. While in Japan they were placed under house arrest and confined for a year and a half. With the aid of Japanese friends they were released and returned to China only to be recaptured and held at the British Embassy in Peking for the remainder of World War II.

During his captivity, Leynse was considerably weakened by bouts with typhoid fever and "sprue" (a disease of the liver and intestines brought on by malnutrition). Despite this ill health he stayed on in China after the Japanese surrender to reorganize and reopen the mission kitchens and hospital.

In 1946 "sprue" attacked him again and he became almost bedridden. Owing to his long service and poor health the mission retired him in 1949. Upon his retirement, Leynse settled in Claremont, California where he began to write.