About Me

Written by Jim McGrath Saturday, 26 January 2008 00:19

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I was born in Roxbury, Massachusetts, which is part of the city of Boston.  I graduated from Roxbury Memorial High School, and briefly attended the Joseph P. Kennedy Memorial School of Education, intending to teach romance languages, Spanish and French, at Boston College.  After deciding that teaching school was not for me, I dropped out after one semester, and since that was the Vietnam War period, I was promptly drafted into the U.S. Army, where I served for two years.  After release from service, I settled in Washington, D.C., since I had long considered myself a political junkie, and wanted to be near the action.  I started out doing fund-raising for a national health agency.  After a few years of that, I went to work for the House Judiciary Committee, managing one of their subcommittees.  After four years of that I become a communications consultant with the Washington law firm of Cohn & Marks.  And finally, I crowned my career by becoming an analyst in American National Government at the Congressional Research Service (CRS), Library of congress, where I served for 25 years, until recently retiring.

At the grass-roots level, in addition to TENAC, I was involved in a host of District public service activities.  I did tutoring at Junior Village, a then foster home institution for orphan kids.  I was very active in something called the Residential Action Coalition (RAC) for about 6-7 years.  RAC specialized in historic preservation, one of my great loves.  I also was chairman of the Citizens Coalition Against the Proposed Brookings Office Building, a four-year battle to save row housing on the 1700 block of P. Street, NW, which was one of the few times preservationists won a big one, against a fat cat like Brookings.  I also organized and was chairman of the Dupont Circle Festival of Music & Gardens, which for 8 years, staged an annual garden-tour musicale to raise money for causes ranging from gun-control to fighting homelessness.  Finally, and most recently I was chairman of the Save Our Sholl’s Cafeteria (SOS) Committee, a valiant 3-year fight, which regrettably did not succeed.  Needless to say, several of these activities overlapped with my TENAC work.   Enough already, if you want or need more, I will supply it.  

Academically, I have a B.A. in English and Social Studies from American University and a M.A. in English and Comparative Literature from Georgetown University.  As an undergraduate, my social studies minor consisted of several political science and government courses.

I have published fairly extensively, including a host of CRS, Library of Congress studies, one whimsical comedy, The President’s Cat.  The Washington Post has published several of my pieces as well.  All of this is available upon request.