Life After Death

About the Book

About the Author

Like the thousands of others whose high school graduation occurred in 1941, Don Mumford hardly got into college before he enlisted, after exacting the promise that he would at least be allowed to finish the semester. The U.S. Army kept its promise. He finished the semester and was inducted quickly and trained to be a cryptographic technician before being dispatched to the South Pacific. He participated in assault landings at Hollandia, New Guinea, and Leyte and Mindoro Islands in the Philippines. After the war he returned to Geneva College and to his sweetheart who had written him a letter a day for almost three years. They were married in 1946.

After college he continued on to Graduate School at the University of Pittsburgh before beginning a high school teaching career at Salem, Ohio, and then back to his alma mater, Beaver Falls (PA) high school. In the mid-fifties he was invited to teach evening classes at Geneva which began his career in higher education. In 1962 he moved his family to New Jersey where he assumed a post at the then Glassboro State College (now Rowan University) where he worked in administration and taught history until his retirement in 1985. He was named Professor Emeritus that year.

Writing has been his avocation for at least thirty-five years, yet his only published work was an account of President Ronald Reagan’s visit to Glassboro to address the high school graduating class of 1985. This he co-authored with his wife, Catherine McCurdy Mumford.

His other works are meticulously preserved in notebooks and filing cabinets but he has warned his son and daughter that they will need to hire a truck to haul all of it to the city dump once he is gone.