JURRETTA JORDAN HECKSCHER has been my wife since December 29, 1985. She became the most important person in my life on September 21, 1974. A Summa Cum Laude, Phi Beta Kappa graduate of Harvard University (1979), she attended Oxford University (University College) on a Marshall Scholarship, where she received an M. Litt. degree. She received her Ph.D. in American Studies at George Washington University on May 21, 2000 (just in time for it to be a wonderful 54th birthday present for me on May 23): the title of her dissertation was "All the Mazes of the Dance": Black Dancing, Culture, and Identity in the Greater Chesapeake World from the Early Eighteenth Century to the Civil War. SHE RECEIVED THE "RALPH HENRY GABRIEL PRIZE" FOR THE BEST DISSERTATION IN AMERICAN STUDIES IN 2000 from the American Studies Association at its 2000 annual meeting in Detroit in October, 2000. Her dissertation is currently being considered for publication by a major academic press. Trained as a ballet dancer, she is a published dance critic (including work for the Washington Post), award-winning cultural history scholar, terrific editor (a function she fulfilled for American Memory at the Library of Congress, and for whose application thereof I am sometimes the grateful recipient), extremely resourceful in finding information (she is now an on-line reference librarian at the Library of Congress), wonderful cat mother, eldest of 5 children (one of whom is married to an FBI agent, so behave yourselves) and exceedingly tolerant of her very difficult spouse.
Her father, now a naturalist, taught mathematics at Swarthmore College for a good number of years. As a recipient of National Science Foundation and Fulbright awards, he resided in Cambridge England and the Netherlands, respectively. As Jurretta was already born, so did she. Her mother, besides giving birth to and helping raise Jurretta and her 4 siblings, is quite well read in Christian Spirituality, and has a Masters degree in Marriage and Family Therapy.
Jurretta has lived in Massachusetts (born there, attended Harvard), New Jersey (when her father taught at Rutgers), Pennsylvania (graduated from the Shipley School in 1974), England (see above, also while attending Oxford), the Netherlands (see above), and since 1982 in Arlington Virginia (gee, that's where I live too!). She has traveled widely, both with her family, on her own, and even with me. Among the places she has been are Dominica (a wonderful island in the Caribbean), Venezuela, France, Germany, Greece, Switzerland, Russia (while it was still the Soviet Union), England and Tahiti (yes, that is where we took our honeymoon - French Polynesia, also staying on the islands of Bora-Bora and Moorea).
The reason for the strong color on the background of this page is that I'm green with envy: she is such a wonderful person: brilliant, good-looking, lots of friends, very talented, and even animals and small children (she has nieces and nephews) adore her. I do sometimes question her judgment in men, but
I'M NOT COMPLAINING.