High School Memories

My family moved from Santa Monica to San Marino in the summer of 1959, and I started at SMHS as a sophomore.  In those days, I had no discernable talent for much of anything.  I remember Helen McLaren, our careers counsellor, struggling to find something in her manual of occupations to which I might be suited.  Much later, as it turned out, the most useful class I had at SMHS was senior English with John Ryan, who taught us how to spot missing or misplaced apostrophes and hyphens from 1,000 yards. 

Into Academia

While doing a biology degree at USC in the mid-60s and filling in my programme with a general education requirement, I enrolled for a course taught by Dr Sally Falk Moore, who later became Dean of the Graduate School at Harvard.  Sally’s subject was social anthropology in the British style. It emphasized the social structures of peoples who lived in exotic parts of the world, and going to these places to collect information about them. It was fascinating stuff. I warmed to the subject immediately. 

Becoming a social anthropologist in the British style naturally took me to England to do a Ph.D.  One thing led to another, and I have lived in Britain ever since.  Along the way, I met and married Caroline Bingham Jones, an English girl, in 1968.  We are still married.  We have two sons, both have whom now have sons of their own.  We moved around the British Isles from England to Scotland, Ireland and Wales, and as my research fieldwork during the summers took us to obscure parts of Scandinavia and North America.

Being an academic involved a lot of writing, and by the time I retired as an emeritus professor in 2006 after 40 years of teaching and research, I had written or edited twelve books. The one of which I am proudest is Irish America (Oxford University Press, 1999).

Caroline and I are now retired, and live in a very pretty part of Sussex on England’s south coast.  Both of us are volunteers at a local museum on the site of a famous Battle of Britain RAF fighter station at Tangmere (www.tangmere-museum.org.uk) near Chichester. 

Caroline does artefact conservation, and I look after the archives and edit the museum’s magazine.  At the moment, I am just finishing off the manuscript of another book, this one about the life and times of Tangmere.