So that students, or others, who may wish to know something of my personal background and interests can easily obtain that information, I have listed below some pertinent materials in: Biographical sketch || Hobbies.
My full name is James Frederick Willis. The middle name has been passed along for several generations from a Spanish ancestor, Manual Texido, my great-great grandfather, who settled in New York City in 1802 and who named his son Frederic. I was born in Heber Springs, Arkansas, July 4, 1945. Having a birthday on the4th of July always made for extra excitement in my childhood.
While my immediate family was small with only a mother, father, and a sister, I had large, extended families from both parents. My father, William F. Willis, had three siblings and lots of cousins. My mother, Rachel Louise Wood, had ten bothers and sisters. Most siblings moved away from Arkansas, most often to California, during the Great Depression or in the Second World War. But the parents (my grand parents) remained in Heber Springs, and there were large family reunions in the 1950s as I grew up. The town of Heber Springs itself sponsored an annual "Reunion" each August, which had begun around 1900 as an "Old Soldier's Reunion" for Civil War veterans, but which over time became the occasion at which lots of "Arkies" who had left the area in the depression returned home to a carnival in Spring Park.
This ten-acre park on the east side of town had a collection of mineral springs whose water were reputed to have medicinal value. My grandfather, Robert G. Willis, had during the 1930s worked for a company that shipped that water via rail across the United States to people who sought its curative powers. In truth, much of the water had a terrible smell, from its mineral content. The worst was "black sulphur," as it was called. A delight of my childhood was to take unsuspecting visitors to introduce them to the "curing waters" and to see their facial expressions when they put cup to lip and first smelled the odor. "Black sulphur" water smelled like rotten eggs.
I had an ordinary childhood for a son of working class parents in a small mountain town in Arkansas. I spent part of summers often on a farmat Wilburn with an uncle. I carried water from the well, since the house had no indoor plumbing, took a bath in a number three wash tub, drank unpasterized cows's milk, and had loads of fun. I began work at an early age. When I was twelve I shined shoes and took on a paper route, throwing copies of the Arkansas Democrat newspaper afternoons after school. At fourteen I worked in a ice plant and at fifteen at a butcher shop. I worked each afternoon and all day on Saturday at a Piggly Wiggly store for fifty cents an hour until I graduated from high school in 1963.
I attended Southern State College (now Southern Arkansas University) in Magnolia, Arkansas, from1963 to 1967, thanks to the generosity of a scholarship from a local Magnolia businessman and loans available due to the National Defense Education Act. I was awarded a Woodrow Wilson Fellowship upon graduation which I took to Duke University.
I entered Duke University in September 1967 and received an M.A. in history in August1968. One professor there, Dr. Richard A. Watson, told me he did not believe any graduate student at Duke in history had ever completed a master's so quickly. My incentive was the Vietnam War. In 1968 draft deferments for graduate studies were ended. I believed at the time that I had two alternatives: one was to go to Canada, the other was to secure a teaching position. I was determined not to enter the armed forces and become part of the Vietnam War, which I thought was terribly wrong. Teaching deferments from the draft were still available, if local draft boards would accept them. Mine did. I began teaching, as a consequence, much earlier than I originally intended, expecting to have the Ph.D. in hand before I hit the classroom. I began as an instructor of history at Little Rock University in the fall of 1968. The next year I moved to my alma mater in Magnolia where I taught for two years. In 1971, then at twenty-six, an age when the draft no longer sought to induct persons, I returned to graduate studies at Duke University. I was able to do so thanks to financial support provided by Southern State College, then seeking to upgrade its faculty to more Ph.D.s and providing aid to several young teachers on condition they would return to the college upon completion of the Ph.D. degree.
I returned to SSC in the fall of 1974 and have taught here, now SAU, ever since. I met my wife, Dr. Rebecca L. Willis, here when she came that same year to teach chemistry. We were married in 1977 and in1985 were blessed with a son, Robert F. Willis. My professional career at this school is largely covered in my curriculum vitae found on my professional homepage.
I have several non-professional interests,which might be called hobbies, although I don't pursue any of them with the dedication of a true hobbyist. First is listening to shortwave radio broadcasts from around the world, an interest I inherited from my father. I recall once as a six-year old listening with him to a English-language program from Radio Moscow in 1951 about allegations the United States was using germ warfare in Korea. This introduction to international politics and propaganda was a useful lesson. About the age of eleven, a local county librarian gave me a discarded volume when I was ill at home of the complete stories of Sherlock Holmes by Sir Authur Conan Doyle. Ever since I have read and re-read those marvelous tales. Over the years I have collected other Holmesian material. As a thirteen-year old I began to inhabit the local "pool hall" in my hometown, smoking cigarettes and shooting pool for hours on end, an act of youthful rebellion, but a serious one in a town in which my local Baptist minister challenged female members of the congregation on downtown streets about wearing "peddle-pusher shorts" in public places. I still shoot pool but gave up cigarettes some years ago. To those seeking information about these interests, I recommend these web links:
Internet Guide to International Broadcasting