jimt1@netscape.com

I was born in Coahoma, Mississippi, in 1941, the son of a sharecropper. As a child and teenager I worked on cotton plantations, chopping and picking cotton. He attended Hull Jr. High School from primary through the ninth grade. I attended one year at Agricultural High School near Clarksdale, Miss., and later earned my GED. I served in the United States Army as a rocket specialist in Germany and with the Big Red One in Fort Riley, Kansas. I was honorably discharged in September 1963. After leaving the service I worked for a number of Fortune 500 companies in marketing and sales. I received Bachelor's and Master's Degrees from the University of Wisconsin-Madison and earned a Certificate for Urban Execcutives from the Sloan School of Management at the Massacusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, Mass. In 1973 I took a job in Madison, Wis. city government as a manpower planner with the mayor's office. I was later appointed the first assistant mayor in the city's history, and held a number of different positions in municipal government before starting my own medical transcription business in the early 1980s. I later opened the first African-American art gallery and custom framing shop in the city of Madison. In 1996 he moved to Milwaukee to partner with his daughter, Dr. Pamela Thomas-King, M.D. and her husband, Dr. George Penn King II, M.D. to open the first black and female owned multi-disciplinary chronic pain management and treatment center in the metropolitan Milwaukee area. In 2002, our family bought a 9,000 square foot building in north Milwaukee, which now houses the clinic and a new ambulatory surgery center. Now semi-retired, my wife and I live in Brown Deer, Wis., a suburb of Milwaukee, and have a winter home in a gated community in Orlando, Fla. I now spend my time traveling, enjoying the family, and writing about issues facing the black community.