The Autobiography of James A. Ray

This the long-lost memoir of American educator James Addison Ray (1865-1944), husband of poet Inez Ellis Ray (1890-1968) and 24-year superintendent of early 20th-century Kansas.James A. Ray's autobiography spans from his birth in 1865 in Kenton County, Kentucky, to his logrolling days in the doomed tobacco hills of Adams County, Ohio, to his first teaching assignments near the turn of the 20th century in Marion County, Kansas. The quirky characters shared herein by Prof. Ray run the...
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This the long-lost memoir of American educator James Addison Ray (1865-1944), husband of poet Inez Ellis Ray (1890-1968) and 24-year superintendent of early 20th-century Kansas.James A. Ray's autobiography spans from his birth in 1865 in Kenton County, Kentucky, to his logrolling days in the doomed tobacco hills of Adams County, Ohio, to his first teaching assignments near the turn of the 20th century in Marion County, Kansas. The quirky characters shared herein by Prof. Ray run the gamut from rowdy Republican veterans of the Civil War and colorful European expatriates to carefree midwestern poets and foibled Twainian tycoons, the latter perhaps a bit "fabulated," as Prof. Ray's grandson Jeff would say.A longtime columnist for the Marion County Record, James A. Ray's writing is legible yet prosaic (and at times long-winded) in that jovial style of the early 20th century American public forum, with much of its charm and some of its repellent postbellum racial language, left in so as to not deprive readers of a dimension of the American experience herein described.James A. Ray was laid to rest in Marion's Claney Cemetery, where his headstone reads He loved mankind, an epitaph evident in the words of this, his reminiscence.