BIOGRAPHY

Of

George Herman

 

George Adam Herman, Jr., was born April 12, 1928, in Norfolk, Virginia, thereafter referred to as “a day that will live in infancy.”  He attended parochial school in Maryland where he won 7 holy cards and set a national record for having his hands slapped by nuns wielding six-foot rulers.  He attended Mount St. Joseph High School in Irvington, Maryland, winning gold medals in Elocution (1943) and Oratory (1944 or as it is commonly known: “The Art of Eloquent Lying.”  He also took first prize in the news-writing division at the Temple University Press Tournament (1946 over school correspondents from four states by sticking to the now-outmoded policy of putting “what, where, when ,why and how” in the lead paragraph.  He served as school correspondent for the catholic Review diocesan paper (1946), was editor of the Inkpot literary magazine (1945-1946); and feature editor of The Quill newspaper, (1945-1946).  In 1947 he looked up from his writing desk and discovered girls which, as Robert Frost might say, “made all the difference.”

 

George graduated with a Bachelor of Philosophy Degree in January, 1950, from Loyola College in Baltimore, Maryland, prodding his father to inquire, “You can make a living at this?” (He couldn’t)  At Loyola he served as president of the Mask and Rapier Society (1949 and secretary of his senior class (1950).  (Please spare us any amusing variations on “Mask and Rapier.”)

 

 

In the summers of 1947 through 1949, he attended the Boston College School of Expressional Arts in Chestnut Hill, Massachusetts, under the Rector’s Scholarship in playwrighting, which means he sometimes was permitted to eat with the football team.

 

George served in the United States Army from 1950 to 1952 during which he wrote ordnance training films “so bad they are still used today.”  He graduated from Catholic University of America in Washington, D.C. With a Master of Fine Arts Degree in June, 1954.  He has fathered nine children and parented three additional.  To date he has seven grandchildren and counting.  George presently resides in Portland, Oregon, where he shares firs, pines, cedars, cypresses, maples and one magnolia tree with a battalion of squirrels, raccoons and an occasional coyote with whom he enjoys duets on moonlit nights.

 

In April 1994 he was profiled by the Oregonian newspaper as “a moralist who likes a good joke.”  In another profile in Honolulu Magazine, he was described as “a Harlequin who believes in the race itself, rather than how he finishes.”  Several unprintable opinions of Mr. Herman have also been printed in the yellow press.