ABOUT ME
Jimmy Ray Lewis was born in the tiny town of Stella, Missouri, in 1939. He grew up on a dairy farm between Stella and two other equally small towns – Wheaton, population just under 400, and Rocky Comfort, home to about 250 residents.
​
He learned to drive an old Ford tractor when he was eight, standing up to push the clutch and brake pedals. In 1951, after he had finished the sixth grade at a one-room country school called Oshkosh, he began the last six of his K-12 years at Wheaton, where he played basketball and baseball. He spent a lot of time milking cows, bucking hay bales and listening to old-timers spinning yarns about their early lives.
​
At the Church of Christ in Rocky Comfort, which was only 2 ½ miles from Wheaton, Jimmy learned that being polite was the surest way to coax people to tell their best stories. But there wasn’t much money in telling stories around a potbellied stove, so he decided to become a journalist so he could get paid for it.
​
After two years of college, Jimmy ran out of money, joined the Navy and served four years as a Navy journalist – 27 months aboard ship and 14 months as a staff writer for the Navy’s All Hands magazine, with the rest of the time spent either in boot camp or in transit barracks polishing the decks as he waited for orders. He finished a journalism degree at the University of Missouri after the Navy, followed by a year as a reporter for the St. Louis Globe-Democrat.
​
A long career as a copy editor and reporter for the Sacramento Union and the Sacramento Bee followed, with a two-year stint in Washington, D.C., working on Capitol Hill for Rep. James Jones of Oklahoma, Sens. Hubert Humphrey of Minnesota and Stuart Symington of Missouri sandwiched between the work for the two Sacramento newspapers.
​
Jimmy closed out his career by working for California Assembly Speaker Willie Brown, for the State Building & Construction Trades Council of California and for the California State Treasurer.
​
Jimmy summed up his career by saying, “I started out in life by shoveling real BS on the farm, and then shoveled political BS for most of my adult life. In Listening to the Jar Flies I am delighted to share with you a little of what I learned when I was shoveling some of that earlier stuff as a kid.”
