|
Harold and Kevin Gray
Harold
L. Gray left rural West Salem, Illinois in 1938 to attend college at Kansas State Teacher's College in Pittsburg, Kansas.
After graduation, he taught high school business courses for one year before joining the Navy. During World War II, he had
been stationed at a Navy hospital in French Morocco and San Francisco. After the war and marriage to Margaret Orr of Anthony,
Kansas, he earned a master's degree from New York University in accounting, management and industrial safety/driver's education,
as well as having been involved in a special personnel management/labor and wage economics study at Cornell University. He
began but did not finish a divinity degree.
He also taught business related courses at what was known as Packard Junior
College in lower Manhattan, while hawking hot dogs on the beaches at Fire Island during the summers and taking care of the
hot dog company's books at night. He became a professor at Hartwick College in Oneonta, New York, followed by a move to Richmond,
Virginia in 1955, where he worked in a variety of businesses as an accountant, bookkeeper and office manager until his retirement
and return to Kansas in 1986. His happiest work had been with the Religious Work Foundation, better known as the Chaplain
Service of Virginia as their Office Manager. His passions had been his family, service as a lay minister, the Boy Scouts (Cub
Master and Scout Leader and Chaplain), and taking cross country trips by car.
Kevin Gray, a 30-year English/journalism
teaching veteran, left the classroom behind in May 2007 to pursue new interests, such as publishing this volume of his father's
poetry and to venture into his own writing projects. He has also contributed guest columns to the Miami County Republic in
Paola, Kansas since 1989. He earned a master's degree in Creative Nonfiction from Antioch University in Yellow Springs, Ohio,
in 2000.
|
