Jim Meuninck's BioMy mother never accepted or recognized failure in her children. If a dog bit off my nose, she would push me in front of a mirror and say, “Jim, you look better without a nose.” We learned to recognize the impossible and discover the doable. Mom taught us to be bold and adventurous with one caveat. When I had a date and walked out the door, she would holler, “Keep your pants zipped, brother!” ...And I almost always did.When a kid, I had numerous jobs: paperboy (too much bookkeeping and scary customers), Soda Jerk (my face covered with poison ivy, dripping calamine lotion on Sharon Birtwhistle's ice cream cone); Grocery Sacker (carrying five heavy sacks for a thirteen-cent tip, if I was lucky); Yardwork (getting paid with a handshake while watching the other kids play); City Park Director (sounds important) you sit on a picnic table and hand out balls for nine hours. The best of those jobs paid 75 cents an hour. So, no thank you to the soda jerking, grocery sacking, waste hauling, paper tossing, and park directing jobs. After college graduation I became a science teacher. I taught in four countries at all levels, grade school through college. In 1987 I meshed my teaching, writing, and filmmaking skills and started a corporation producing special interest videos: edible wild plants; medicinal plants, mushrooms; survival skills, and the like. I am currently writing wild plant and wild mushroom fieldguides for Falcon Guides, a Rowman and Littlefield Imprint. My, memoir, The Angel and the Athiest is a poignant and humorous read exposing my ineptness and exploits as a first year science teacher in a school transitioning from white to black students.Read more about this authorRead less about this author