KEVIN L. GRAY: In my own right or should I say write, I earned a degree in Creative Nonfiction through Antioch University. My thesis has been turned into Waking Up in the Studebaker, a story about surviving the 60s, and the newly published On the Strand, my surviving high school and on into college in the early 1970s. I prefer writing nonfiction and have written many columns for the Miami County Republic newspaper in Paola, Kansas for about 20 years and recently having retired from teaching became a journalist for the three Miami County, Kansas, newspapers. MY FATHER: 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. I found as many as 200 poems written by my father between 1936 and 1941 in his youth. He had never shown them to me. I published them as To the Prairie and to God. They were good and should be shared with the world.           

Dad published several poems in The Collegio at what was then Kansas State Teachers College in Pittsburg, Kansas. One poem, Kansas Prelude, was published in The Aerend: A Kansas Quarterly at Fort Hays Kansas State College in Spring 1940. As for me, Harold's son, I received a Masters Literary Awards Honorable Mention from the Center Press in Encino, California - 1995 for a short nonfiction piece entitled The Fillmore East: Four Pilgrimages to Rock 'n Roll's Mecca.

I would also say having been a 30 year teaching veteran in high school English/journalism is acheivement enough,but I still had to write.