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October 19, 2016
Mountain Grove, Missouri goes to Washington, DC: J. Dan Hull, Jr.
My grandfather was born in 1900. He died in 1988. I still miss him. He grew up in the Ozarks in a town called Mountain Grove and, at a very young age, started taking degrees at the University of Missouri, Chicago and Yale. In my family in the 1920s, going to college would have been a very big deal, and granddad was the first in his branch to do that. He was of the sixth American generation of a family of German farmers who arrived in Philadelphia in the early 1700s and started out life Lancaster, Pennsylvania. They later moved to Middlebrook, Virginia where they would stay for 100 years. They moved to southern Missouri, where he would grow up, in the 1850s. My grandfather was at heart a schoolteacher. He also managed people, authored books and eventually became a government official in the Eisenhower and Kennedy administrations. He traveled extensively in his HEW position. He taught me things no one else in my family could teach. And he gave me the Great Books. This giving started after he had finished his career in Washington, D.C., and had returned to Springfield, Missouri. Most were written centuries ago, and lived in his library long before I was born. He seemed to love Cicero's known works as much as any of his books. Now, I have all those volumes. They are, to me, like parts of him--and like very old friends of his in my care who've finally agreed to live with me indefinitely.
*from past posts
J. Dan Hull II in 1933
Posted by JD Hull at 12:50 PM | Comments (0)