Today's Featured Biography

 
Carlton Hastings, Jr.

After leaving George S. Gardiner, I entered Louisiana State University in Baton Rouge. Though I declared electrical engineering as my major, early in my sophomore year, I walked from the physics building to the liberal arts building and changed majors. I had not understood anything presented in my calculus I class during the second semester of my freshman year because I had spent most of my time with the sophomore English class and had not studied calculus nearly enough. Therefore, I changed my major to English.

In 1965, I completed my B.A. in English at LSU and entered graduate school at The University of Texas at Austin after attending a summer session at the Shakespeare Institute in Stratford-upon-Avon in Warwickshire, England, a session sponsored by the University of Birmingham, England.

At the end of the second semester (1966), I worked as a roustabout on an offshore drilling rig in the Gulf of Mexico. When I ended my last shift that summer, I returned home and planned to return to UT (The Univ. of Texas). But I was offered a job teaching English at Jones County Junior College and decided I would benefit from the experience and then return to UT after a year's break.

After an interesting and often exciting experience at JCJC that first year, I assumed I would return to UT. But then I saw a car that I simply had to have: a British-made Austin-Healy 3000 convertible. I bought it and returned to JCJC for another year . However, after totaling that car on Hwy. 84, I returned to UT in 1968 and continued to work on my M.A. in English. Since I had to have a minor, I chose English history, courses requiring a great deal of reading. I took the two history courses the first semester and then began working on my thesis ("A Comparison and Contrast of Shakespeare's Treatment of Love in Romeo and Juliet and Anthony and Cleopatra) in January 1969. I think I spent about a year working on that project because I like to read so much. I received my M.A. in 1970.

After teaching for 9 months at Memphis State University beginning in 1970, I worked as a salesman for Proctor & Gamble for the summer. Then I taught for 9 months at the University of Southern Mississippi. During that time, I met and married a woman from Hattiesburg whose family operated a truck line so I changed jobs.

For the next 9 years, I was a sales/public relations representative for that truck line and for another truck line in Jackson, MS, By that time my wife and I had two daughters.

From Jackson, I moved to Shreveport, working with various trucking and transportation companies until my retirement.

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