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 and/or education:
“They circumcised women, little girls, in Jesus’s time. Did he know? Did the subject anger or embarrass him? Did the early church erase the record? Jesus himself was circumcised; perhaps he thought only the cutting done to him was done to women, and therefore, since he survived, it was all right.”
—Alice Walker (b. 1944)
“I think that any woman who sets goals for herself and takes her own life seriously and moves to achieve the goals that she wants as a person in her own right is a feminist.”
—Frances Kuehn (b. 1943)
“Major [William] McKinley visited me. He is on a stumping tour.... I criticized the bloody-shirt course of the canvass. It seems to me to be bad “politics,” and of no use.... It is a stale issue. An increasing number of people are interested in good relations with the South.... Two ways are open to succeed in the South: 1. A division of the white voters. 2. Education of the ignorant. Bloody-shirt utterances prevent division.”
—Rutherford Birchard Hayes (1822–1893)