Early Life and Education
Geoffrey Hewings was born in Wales into a family where successive generations had worked in the coal mines near Cwmbran. He grew up in post-war London, attending high school there and spending several weeks each summer with his grandparents in Wales. His passion for football (soccer) was such that he became the youngest qualified referee in England at the age of 16. He also spent vacation time in Scotland, working as a grouse beater (although often directing the birds away from the folks who were there to shoot them) and helping in the preservation of the endangered osprey. His parents and sisters emigrated to Canada in 1958, but he remained behind to in London to finish high school. Before going to university, he took a year off, working in a bookstore in Fleet Street and spending almost all that he earned attending symphony concerts and opera two to three times each week. After graduating from the University of Birmingham, he moved to Seattle to attend the University of Washington where he obtained his MA and PhD. While there, he also worked as an announcer and Seattle Symphony reviewer on KRAB-FM, a community-owned radio station. For the last three years in Seattle, he commuted from Bainbridge Island to the campus by ferry on an ancient Vespa motorcycle.
In 1968, Geoffrey taught summer school at the University of Massachusetts Amherst where he first met Adrianna; they were married in 1970 in England during an 18-month tenure at the University of Kent in Canterbury. In 1971, they emigrated to Canada where Geoffrey taught at the University of Toronto; in 1974, Adrianna and Geoffrey adopted her children, John, Matthew and Aaron and later that year moved to Urbana where he was appointed to the University of Illinois.
Read more about this topic: Geoffrey Hewings
Famous quotes containing the words early life, early, life and/or education:
“... goodness is of a modest nature, easily discouraged, and when much elbowed in early life by unabashed vices, is apt to retire into extreme privacy, so that it is more easily believed in by those who construct a selfish old gentleman theoretically, than by those who form the narrower judgments based on his personal acquaintance.”
—George Eliot [Mary Ann (or Marian)
“When lilacs last in the dooryard bloomed
And the great star early drooped in the western sky in the night,
I mourned, and yet shall mourn with ever-returning spring.
Ever-returning spring, trinity sure to me you bring,
Lilac blooming perennial and drooping star in the west,
And thought of him I love.”
—Walt Whitman (1819–1892)
“The great passion in a man’s life may not be for women or men or wealth or toys or fame, or even for his children, but for his masculinity, and at any point in his life he may be tempted to throw over the things for which he regularly lays down his life for the sake of that masculinity. He may keep this passion secret from women, and he may even deny it to himself, but the other boys know it about themselves and the wiser ones know it about the rest of us as well.”
—Frank Pittman (20th century)
“She gave high counsels. It was the privilege of certain boys to have this immeasurably high standard indicated to their childhood; a blessing which nothing else in education could supply.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)