David V. Mitchell - Life

Life

Mitchell was born in San Francisco, California, to Herbert Houston Mitchell (1902–1984) and Edith Vokes Mitchell (1906–1975). Herbert Mitchell was vice president and a minority partner in the San Francisco printing company Kennedy-ten Bosch. Mitchell’s mother, whose maiden name was Edith Alfred Vokes, was an immigrant from Canada. Both his parents were Christian scientists, and his mother for several years sold advertising for The Christian Science Monitor.

When Mitchell, an only child, was three, the family moved to Berkeley, where he attended Berkeley High School. He spent his last three semesters in St. Louis, where he graduated in 1961 from Principia Upper School.

In 1965, Mitchell earned a bachelor’s degree in English from Stanford University where his father had graduated in 1924. While still an undergraduate, Mitchell married Linda Foor in 1965, but the marriage lasted only a year. In 1967, Mitchell received a master’s degree in Communications from Stanford.

After teaching a semester at Marvel Academy in Rye, New York, Mitchell left in December 1967 to marry Catherine “Cathy” Casto, whom he had met in graduate school. The couple relocated to Leesburg, Florida, where he taught Speech and Literature at Leesburg. Leesburg in the spring of 1968 was still segregated, and Mitchell joined efforts to register black voters.

From September 1968 to June 1970, Mitchell taught English, world literature, and journalism at Upper Iowa College in Fayette, Iowa. He also was the faculty advisor to the student newspaper, The Collegian, and the black student union, The Brotherhood.

From June to December 1970, Mitchell was the city hall reporter for the daily newspaper in Council Bluffs, Iowa, The Nonpareil. From 1971 to 1973, Mitchell covered Tuolumne County government for the daily newspaper in Sonora, California, The Union Democrat. From 1973 to 1975, Mitchell edited the weekly Sebastopol Times in Sonoma County, California, and his wife Cathy was the paper’s feature editor.