Michael Jones:
CLASS OF 1975
Monta Vista High SchoolClass of 1975
Cupertino, CA
Michael's Story
Workplace
The summer between my Junior and Senior Monta Vista years, I worked for the City of Cupertino Parks and Recreation Department as a Parks Leader. After graduation, I did a second year with the Parks and Recreation before leaving for Sacramento State to begin my university study. The following summer, after my parents had moved to the north-end of Sunnyvale to be close to my Dad's office, I was unemployed. I read my way through the summer of '77.
In August, I transferred as a sophomore to Sonoma State College and took a job waiting tables and doing dishes in the dorm cafe. Life in Sonoma was worse than Sacramento, so after one term I returned to Cupertino and took a job building wooden rockers and stocking shelves at Pier One Imports.
The next month, I landed a job as a busboy at a local restaurant. The managers were cokeheads, so after three days I quit and moved to Nature's Own Health Foods in Valco Fashion Mall. I held this job for four months. My next job as a page with the Cupertino Library ran another four months.
I transferred again, this time to the University of California, Berkeley, entering as a Junior (I'd picked up credits at De Anza College in the interim). Another stretch of unemployment. During my senior year at UCB, I lived on a slice of pizza a day while struggling with the course-load.
I quit and went back to work, this time with the City of Sunnyvale Public Library as a circulation clerk. I joined to the City of San Jose Typing Pool the following year, and enrolled at San Jose State. Working full-time as a clerk, I was introduced to computer systems by the Private Development and Planning Departments, later switching to Micro-processing and Data Entry.
My 10-key skills sharpened, I was charged with keeping City fuel and oil accounts in the General Services Department. I loved the modified swing-shift hours, working 2pm to 10:30pm with a half hour off for dinner. I 'moonlighted' days tutoring English while finishing up a BA at SJSU.
In 1984, I moved to Vienna, Austria, to study German and teach English. The following winter, I began subbing junior and high school with the American International School in Vienna.
I returned for a summer stint with my old Department at the City of San Jose before moving on to graduate school at The Claremont Graduate School (CGS), in far-eastern Los Angeles County. The following years, I became a research assistant, then a research associate at CGS; teaching assistant and finally, visiting instructor at Pomona College. Inbetween times, I taught English at Pitzer College, in the Program in American College English, acted as a driver for the Pomona College and Claremont University presidents, and supervised the University Library on weekend evenings.
One summer, I did payroll as a Kelly Temp. My final job in Claremont was as coordinator of the University Audio-Visual Department.
Money was short throughout. I never turned down a job offer.
In 1992, I accepted a job as Visiting Lecturer in Government at Masaryk University in Brno, Czech Republic (see Military for a sketch of why).
In 1996, I co-organized an international meeting for the Slovak Rivers Network and Danube Environmental Forum.
Back in Sunnyvale, I landed a sales job as Educational Technology Specialist with a Dot-bomb company that went bust in 1998, then switched to community organizing, first for Silicon Valley Toxics Coalition and Sierra Club, before accepting the state director's position at Clear Water Fund/Clean Water Action in San Francisco in early 2003.
In December of that year, while speaking at a side event to the World Summit on the Information Society, I was recruited to join the secretariat of the United Nations Economic Commission for Europe in Geneva. In January 2004, I became a UN Environmental Affairs Officer.
For five years, I managed the Aarhus Clearinghouse for Environmental Democracy, a global web portal. I served with the secretariat of the ...Expand for more
UNECE Convention on Access to Information, Public Participation in Decision-making and Access to Justice in Environmental Matters, better known as the Aarhus Convention after the city where the treaty was adopted in 1998.
In December 2009, I joined the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) in Geneva to work for the secretariats of the Rotterdam and Stockholm Conventions as their Public Information Officer.
Military
My family has a longstanding tradition of military service. The first Jones to land in America had served as a lieutenant in Oliver Cromwell's Puritan Army. Two of my ancestors later fought in the American Revolutionary War. For centuries, soldiering went hand-in-hand with homesteading, farming and public service.
My Grandfather had been too young to enlist in U.S. Army during the First World War. He envied his older brother who had shipped over to France. Grandpa Jones signed up for service in World War II, although over the age of 40 at the time. He was stationed in the South Pacific where he built aircraft runways.
My father attended Reserve Officer Training Corps (ROTC) during college and entered the Army as a second lieutenant in the mid-1950s. He resigned as a captain in the Army Reserve in 1961.
My mother's brother had studied and graduated from the U.S. Naval Academy at Annapolis and was made a second lieutenant in the Navy. A first cousin of mine nearest to me in age graduated from the U.S. Military Academy at West Point and eventually rose to the rank of Major. He served in Kosovo, Kuwait and Iraq, the latter during the First Gulf War.
My sister's oldest son joined the Marines straight out of High School and was twice sent into combat in Iraq. He later had some hard words to say about the command he served under there.
An earlier war, in Vietnam, had defined much of my generation's perception of the American military, but had little influence over my family's view of military service. When the time came in 1975 for me to sign up for the military draft in the waning days of the Indochina War, President Ford postposed and then cancelled the draft. The War was over and I went to college and eventually graduate school.
In 1991, early in my chosen career as a college teacher, I was offered the chance to teach in Bulgaria for Civic Education Project, an academic exchange program backed by Georges Soros' Open Society Fund and partially funded by the U.S. Aid for International Development (USAID), with the goal of teaching democracy to post-communist societies in Central and Eastern Europe. Civic Education Project billed itself as an academic Peace Corps. I signed up.
The Bulgarian academic appointment never materialized. I was instead first offered a post at the University of Bucharest, Romania. Believing Bucharest a rough place to raise a young child (our daughter was only five years old at the time), I swapped positions with another lecturer set to teach in Timisoara, in the Banat region of Western Romanian, along the Serbia border.
In the event, my appointment to the Polytechnique Institute was blocked by the Rector, who didn't want a western political scientist on campus. No one at this school wants to study politics, I was told, we only want to learn economics. This although Timisoara had been the scene of the first public protests against the Communist dictatorship less than two years earlier, which precipitated the overthrow of the government.
In the meantime, war broke out between neighboring Serbia and Croatia in Bosnia. The Serbian border was closed.
I was eventually placed with the Faculty of Philosophy at Masaryk University, in Brno, Czechoslovakia, as a visiting lecturer. We arrived in late August 1992, four months before the Czechoslovak Federal Republic broke in two during the "Velvet Revolution" to become today's independent Czech Republic and Slovak Republic.
I taught for three years at Masaryk University. My life service would never be a military one.
Register for Free to view all details!
Yearbooks
Register for Free to view all yearbooks!
Reunions
Register for Free to view all events!
Photos
