Jim McDonough
I returned to Villanova and graduated in 1960 and then went to graduate school at the University of Toronto to study philosophy. I lived in a student cooperative my first year, and began questioning U.S. policy, especially the Vietnam War and nuclear testing. . In the summer of 1961, I hitched hiked south with the intention of working as a farmer laborer in Louisiana. As I entered the South, I came face-to-face with racial segregation. By the time I reached, New Orleans, I had decided to volunteer as a Freedom Rider. I was with the third group to go to Jackson Mississippi to integrate the waiting room of the bus station, during a summer when we filled the jails. I spent two months in jail, mostly at Parchman State prison.
After finishing at University of Toronto where I received a master’s degree in philosophy, I returned to New York where I worked as a social worker and lived on the lower East Side. I got married to a woman from Bayport. At about this time, I was drafted to serve in the army. I had already re-registered as a conscientious objector. I went to the Whitehall Stree process center, but at the end of the day-long in-take procedure was told to go home—they didn’t want me. Soon after, I found a job as a reporter on a newspaper in Dover, N.J. where I remained for two years. From Dover, I applied for a job in the San Juan Star, San Juan, Puerto Rico. I got the job, among other things because I knew Spanish from my year in Spain. My wife and I moved to Puerto Rico in 1967 where I stayed for the next 18 years. Within two months of arriving, my son, Adam, was born.
I was a reporter at the San Juan for seven years, where I worked myself up to being an investigative reporter and columnist. I won several recognitions for my reporting from the San Juan Overseas Press Club and the Puerto Rico Conservation Trust (for a series I did on private property encroachment of a public right-of-way along the city’s beach front). I was physically carried off the beach (through the hotel lobby) of the Caribe Hilton for a “sit-in” on the hotel’s beach to protest that hotel’s alleged appropriation of the beach-front public easement. Also during this period, I wrote the “Puerto Rico Slang Dictionary,” where proved to be a very popular.
I resigned from the Star to become an aide to Governor Rafael Hernández Colón, where I served in La Fortaleza for a year and a half before we lost the election. I then co-founded a weekly newspaper (Prensa Libre), which closed after six months, founded a regional yellow page directory (Orange Book), which collapsed after two years, and worked as the press secretary for the leading opposition candidate for mayor of San Juan. We we lost the election by 30,000 votes, which was a drumming.
In Puerto Rico, I began to see more clearly the imperialistic ambitions of the United States. The United State took Puerto Rico from Spain in 1898 as part of plan to become a global imperial power a la England, France and Germany.
I got divorced in San Juan, and remarried a year later to a woman from Pereira, Colombia, who was in Puerto Rico studying for a master’s degree in public health education. We have two girls, Marcela and Alejandra Manuela. Marcela is now an attorney and currently living in Puerto Rico soon. Manuela, after two years in the Peace Corps in Panama, is now at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, studying for a master’s degree in health education. My son Adam is in the relocation business in San Juan. He is married and has two of his own children, plus a child from his wife by a former marriage.
I came to Washington area in 1985 after having worked on the political campaign of Jaime Fuster, who ran and won the Puerto Rico delegate seat (non-voting) in the U.S. House of Representatives. I worked on the Hill for about six months before moving to the Office of Puerto Rico in Washington, where I stayed for another year-and a half before being riffed. I then started a newsletter-- Puerto Rico Report from Washington--on events and decisions in Washington that affect the Island, which I published monthly until June of this year. During this time, I stayed home to write the newsletter and my wife went out to work. I became the chief caregiver of my daughters—what a great experience. In 1998 along with a fellow Puerto Rican and a Cuban, I founded the Hispanic Chamber of Commerce of Montgomery County, becoming its executive director. Later became the executive director of the Maryland Business Foundation, and head of its procurement program. I also founded the annual Minority Legislative Breakfast, which brings together the three major minority groups in Montgomery County: the African Americans, the Asian Americans and the Hispanic Americans at an annual breakfast to present their legislative program to their elected officials. I left that job in December 2004. I am now working part-time as a Spanish interpreter and translator.
Three years ago after Manuela left for college, we moved from Bethesda to Washington, D.C. We are now live in a co-housing community. Co-housing is intentional community, which is self-managed. We share a common house, common meals (at least once a week) and other activities. About 75 people live in the community. My job is taking care of the physical plant, i.e., handyman. Coincidently, Larilee Baty my Huntington neighbor and our classmate, is now living in a co-housing community in Vermont. I keep in touch with Anton Lignell, who lives in Berkeley, CA. Also, several years ago we had an informal get together here in Washington with Mary Anne Brush, Billy King and Ted Mastrianni.