Keith Jones:
CLASS OF 1963
Clover Park High SchoolClass of 1963
Tacoma, WA
Keith's Story
Dear classmates and friends:
There was nothing special about me in high school. Frightfully skinny and painfully shy, I excelled at nothing-- as reflected by a GPA around 2.7. What's worse, none of the dozen colleges to which I applied accepted me. Panic!! As the fall of 1963 approached I made a last-ditch effort to get into the nearest local college, Pacific Lutheran University. Yes!!!! After freshman year my family moved to Denver and went to work there at the May Department Store as a salesman in budget luggage. The pay was $1.25 an hour and I felt glad to have it. Next thing you know,I was drafted for military service as Viet Nam turned seriously deadly. Fortunately I failed the physical (scenes of Arlo Guthrie in the movie "Alice's Restaurant"), then quickly enrolled at the University of Colorado, graduating in 1968 with a BA in Political Science.
I found a job in St. Louis at McDonnell Douglas Aerospace just when the Gemini and Apollo programs were in the hardware stage. What a great, uplifting experience watching America's first moon landing and knowing I was part of the team that pulled it off. After two years I knew that a non-technical person like me had little future at McDonnell, so on a grand throw of the dice I applied to the Harvard Business School. Still don't know why they accepted me since I was no...Expand for more
t really exceptional in any way.
Boston was a revelation which changed my life. It turned a mid-western hick from the minor leagues into a player in the big leagues of life. I met my wife, a young red-headed nurse, in Boston and ultimately fathered two boys who grew into splendid, educated, and accomplished young men.
My MBA was awarded in 1972 and I began a marketing career at Pepsi-Cola Company in New York that culminated with my early retirement at age 55 from the Colgate Palmolive Company in 2000. Since then I have pursued my true passion for American History and published three books while helping found the first Historical Society in the town of Ridgefield, Connecticut. My boys were all-state soccer players and I was so captured by the game that I became a youth soccer coach for almost ten years. Coaching taught me that unexceptional people like myself could do almost anything if they just worked hard enough at it.
Today I split my time between Manhattan and Tucson, Arizona (polar lifestyle extremes) and spend the days traveling and writing history. Life, despite the recent financial meltdown, is good. Yet, I still think back about Clover Park High and wonder how different things might have been if I had thrown myself into school & social activities instead of staying shyly on the sidelines. C'est la vie.
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