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Today's Featured Biography
David Edwin Jones
1 July 2007
I am posting this heavily bowdlerized bio here because Lynn Grubb commanded me to.
Within eleven days of graduating Stow, I found myself standing in line for eight hours at Fort Knox, Kentucky, a most memorable beginning of six months’ active duty. From then until now, I have not stood in line; I’m either first or last. The Army is an excellent educator. When I was released in early December, I went home and sat around for several months waiting for someone to give me orders. Absent that, I found a job in heavy construction, building a sewer for Ashland, Ohio, until fall of ’59 when I entered KSU.
In December of 1960, Emily Winslow and I were married, stayed in Kent for another year, then headed for the West Coast, for Los Angeles where tuition was 1/10 of that at Kent, rent was half, wages nearly double, and certain beaches open 365/24.
By an unknown mystery of fecundation and gestation, 1963 brought us our first son, David, followed in ’65 by Brian, and in ’67 by Cheryl. With the B.A. and a year of graduate studies in hand, we went to Manhattan for a vacation that lasted six months, during which time the task of babysitting two toddlers on the sidewalks of the Lower East Side just couldn’t quite measure up in Emily’s imagination to the green, green grass of home, so back to Ohio we drove. Because no one in Kent wanted to trade used clothing or books for room and board, I went back to work in construction, saving for the completion of graduate school.
Paradise regained at last, I lined my walls at home with books and began studies at Kent in September ’68, with a teaching fellowship, and completed them in August ’73, with a doctorate in modern British literature, dissertation on the aesthetic theory of James Joyce, showing the Aristotelian and Thomistic basis of Joyce’s theory. The shooting of the students tore down the walls of paradise, introducing chaos and old night. Following that, student enrollments dropped off radically, paralleled by a diminution in the hiring of college instructors. I taught part-time at The University of Akron and was offered a full-time position by KSU. However, by that time we had decided to take our chances in California again, where as I counted there were over sixty-five colleges and universities within an hour’s commute of Los Angeles Civic Center.
Shortly after arriving in Los Angeles, I was offered a handful of positions, including one at Pepperdine and at Pasadena City College, and part-time at UCLA, but chose Los Angeles Valley College, home to 28,000 students at that time, because it was one block from my house and I had accrued enough driving time for several lifetimes. The following year I received a Fellowship In Residence at The University of Massachusetts, Amherst from the National Endowment for the Humanities, during which year I published a book, a rhetoric, with Random House, and several scholarly articles to add to those in hand. I have been listed in the "Directory of American Scholars," seventh edition; the "International Who’s Who in Education," second edition; and the "Dictionary of International Biography," 1984.
By fall of 1981, our domestic differences were resolved with a Judgment of Dissolution, form 1290 of the Judicial Council of California, which to this day I find far more sophisticated than a mere divorce. I remarried in South Lake Tahoe, 20 March ’87, which was terminated 11 November ’97, by authority of the same sophisticated form that had worked so well sixteen years earlier. Having been beckoned by the Sirens’ song of retirement since I was about twenty-one, I finally succumbed four years ago to begin a new chapter of hunting and fishing, here and in Mexico, for whatever I can catch.
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