JPHS Meeting July 21st
On a Burning Deck: Migration from Graves County to Akron, Ohio
Tom Jones, Author, New Braunfels, Texas
Saturday, July 21, 2018 at 10:30 am
Purchase Area Development District Office,
1002 Medical Center Circle, Mayfield, Kentucky
Join us for what promises to be an interesting meeting! Officers for 2018-19 will be officially elected and duly installed prior to the guest speaker, Tom Jones, taking the floor.
“I am excited that we are hosting Tom Jones at our July meeting because his work on the Graves County-Akron connection is remarkably good history,” JPHS President Dr. Bill Mulligan said. “While we think of the United States as a nation of immigrants, and it is, internal migrations have also been an important part of our history. Some of these are well known and well studied, while others are little known, but equally important. At the heart of his books are oral history interviews and pictures from Graves County, Kentucky where unstable tobacco and other farm prices hit people hard. On a Burning Deck tells this story well using the words of the people who lived it. But, Jones puts their words in a rich context due to his extensive research in other sources and the literature. The story he tells is that of the ordinary man and woman struggling to support their family and build a future in hard economic times. The interviews provide rich detail about how larger historic events shaped the lives of real people. This is good history, but also a compelling story, well told.”
Tom Jones worked within the advertising industry in San Antonio, Texas for twenty years as a nationally award-wining copywriter. Ten of these years were at his own firm, Flying Terrier Creative Company, which was named after a stray dog with a broken tail that he adopted off the street. That dog’s name was Waldo, which inspired his first book, Waldo Maccabees, In the Footsteps of Christ—a fictionalized narrative of the ministry of Christ as seen through the eyes of His dog. Following the publication of Waldo Maccabees, Tom completed the two-volume non-fiction work On A Burning Deck, An Oral History of The Great Migration, which is based on over 50 hours of previously unpublished oral histories of his grandparents and dozens of family photos. Tom lives in New Braunfels, Texas, with his wife, Steffanie.
