Deceased July 19, 2005

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 In Memory

Only recently did the College receive word that Jim had died in July of 2005, apparently at a retirement community south of Washington, D.C., where he had been living for several years. His wife of 56 years, Kathryn Winthrop Cole Michener, had died August 22, 1996, a day short of Jim’s 79th birthday. Jim was born in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, in 1917 and graduated from Harrisburg Academy before matriculating at Amherst where he was a member of Beta Theta Pi and an English major. He ran middle distances in track as well as cross-country. He was a member of the Outing Club and the Speakers’ Club.

Shortly after graduating from Amherst, Jim was a marine, an officer candidate (USMC Platoon Leaders) U.S. Marine Corps. He attained the rank of lieutenant on August 16, 1941, and was a member of the 3rd Marine Division. He was in all the World War II campaigns in the Central and South Pacific: Guadacanal, Bougainville, the recapture of Guam, Iwo Jima. In 1948, he integrated into the regular Marine Corps. He served a year in Korea, returning with the 3rd Battalion, 7th Regiment as commanding officer to Camp Pendleton, California, when the First Marine Division was returned to the Continent in April 1955. Due to glaucoma, Jim retired from military service as a lieutenant colonel on July 1, 1955.

Jim earned a master's degree in personnel management from George Washington University in Washington in 1955, and from 1962 to 1964, he served as director of Person DC. He taught social studies at public schools in Fairfax County, Virginia, from 1964 to the time of his retirement in 1983 but continued his avocations of golf, fishing, and hiking while continuing to be active in the local Lions Club, Masonic Lodge, and serving as a deacon in the Trinity Presbyterian Church.

A proud moment:  As commanding officer, Officers’ Candidate School, he commissioned 859 U.S. Marine lieutenants of the “10th Special Basic Class” on one day, September 7, 1951. This record number of commissioning for one day has never been duplicated nor is likely to be in the foreseeable future.

Henry B. Prickitt ’41

Comment:

Patrick Sullivan: I was one of Mr. Michener’s first students when he began teaching seventh grade in 1964 at Henry Thoreau Intermediate School (now Middle School), in Vienna, Virginia. The yearbook from that year can be found here: https://archive.org/details/walden1965henr.

Mr. Michener taught a three-class-period package called “ESG”, which stood for English, Social Studies, and Guidance; one class in the morning, one in the afternoon. Those of us entering seventh grade were coming out of a single-teacher format, and this seemed to be a way of gently transitioning us to a more high school-like format with different teachers for each subject.

In any case, we were in Mr. Michener’s charge for homeroom and for half the school day, and the format and Mr. Michener’s talent for teaching seventh graders turned out to be perfectly suited to each other. On the first day, he announced to us that just as we were starting at a new school, he was starting on his third career, that being teaching. He brought a positive energy level to his class that I had never seen before, building confidence in his students and keeping us on our toes without creating fear. He often spoke warmly of the Marine Corps and of his alma mater, Amherst College, and there may be students of his who moved on to one or the other, or, like him, both. Having the same name as the more famous best-selling author, he joked about how their signatures were the same.

A combination of no-nonsense but humorously-encouraging teacher, mentor, and life coach, Mr. Michener was my most important teacher during the K-12 years and even beyond. For the first time ever, I looked forward to going to school and felt that I could make something of myself. I would have liked to have told him that while he was still living. In any case, being retired now from a gratifying career as an engineer and international negotiator, I am happy to have an opportunity to mention it now. The world needs more James A. Micheners, and Amherst College must be given credit for playing an important part in his education.