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Jim Lutzweiler found the ideal Christmas present for himself recently far from its London origins.

It’s an artifact from an organization people associate with Christmas: the Salvation Army. In the early 1900s, the organization saved and sobered up Lutzweiler’s grandfather, Thomas Dalius, making Jim Lutzweiler’s birth possible in 1946.

A Jamestown writer, singer, songwriter and archivist for the Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary in Wake County, Lutzweiler obtained on Nov. 20 a handwritten letter by William Booth, dated Dec. 28, 1881, on Salvation Army stationery.

Booth, later helped by his wife, Catherine, started preaching in the London slums in 1865. That led to his founding the Salvation Army in 1878, with him as general. The letter was to Capt. Rodney “Gipsy” Smith, assigning him to a new mission in England.

Later, after Booth booted Smith from the army, Smith became an acclaimed independent crusader and singer. The falling out with Booth was over a gold watch an admirer of Smith’s work presented him.

When Booth learned of the watch, his blue army hat hit the ceiling; army members were  forbidden from receiving gifts.

“I think that incident is representative of how the Salvation Army has conducted business,” Lutzweiler says. “They have been givers rather than takers.”

Lutzweiler is a Salvation Army child. His grandfather, Thomas Dalius was a  homeless drunk until he came upon a Salvation Army band on a Philadelphia street corner.  He was smitten by the gospel and by a beautiful tambourine player in the band, Louise Hoffman.

The two married and had a family. Dalius wrote songs, played guitar and often performed with his wife. Later, he  would take his little daughter — Lutzweiler’s future mother, Margaret Dalius — “to the slum district where he stood her on a chair and sang duets with her, telling those down and out that their lives could be redeemed, as his had been,” Jim Lutzweiler says.

Margaret also became a Salvation Army soldier. She later married a Baptist minister, Adam Lutzweiler, who played the marimba. His wife learned the instrument and they played at revivals and in churches.

Three or four years ago, Jim Lutzweiler wrote a song, “Gingerbread and Jesus,” in honor of his late mother who, he says, always made Christmas so special.

He sings that and other songs while strumming his grandfather’s 1937 Gibson guitar, or while entertaining friends before a bonfire in his backyard.

A line from “Gingerbread” goes: “She’ll give us gingerbread and Jesus, make everything to please us.”

Lutzweiler was at the University of Arkansas microfilming for the seminary the papers of former U.S. Rep. Brooks Hays,  a one-time Southern Baptist Convention  president. He detoured to tiny Van Buren, Ark., where a collector owned the William Booth letter.

Lutzweiler traded a personal copy of the Hays microfilm for it.

Lutzweiler considers Booth, Rodney “Gipsy” Smith, Dwight Moody, Billy Sunday and Billy Graham as the best evangelists of the past 150 years.

Smith’s name has faded, but he enjoyed fame during his lifetime. He appeared in Winston-Salem in 1932. Smith was a novelty “and he had a good voice and could draw a crowd,” Lutzweiler says.

The William Booth letter enters Lutzweiler’s wildly eclectic autograph collection. It includes signatures of Smith,  Moody, Sunday and Graham. He hopes to find the late ragtime great, Scott Joplin’s autograph.

He also wants that of modern-day actress Sandra Bullock.

Because she attended East Carolina University?

No, Lutzweiler says, “I like the way she looks.”

Contact Jim Schlosser at 601-9879 or beale1@clearwire.net