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David 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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