Biography
Born November of 1935 in Chicago, I lived on the southwest side (1857 S. Avers) and attended William Penn grade school until early in my 7th grade. That year my parents moved 65 miles south to a cottage in a Czech community on the Kankakee River three miles south of Wilmington on Route 66 (My family was 100% Czech on both sides). Our cottage was next to my grandfather’s. I had an enjoyable childhood: city life during the school year and summers in the country.
From being one among 1,000+ students at William Penn in Chicago, I then was the only student in the 7th grade at a one-room schoolhouse with about fifteen students. I’m at the extreme left.
A C-student in Chicago, I earned A grades at Moulton School, convincing my father that the rural school was inferior to my city school. I rode a bus to attend Wilmington High School with 200 other students.
A $50 scholarship paid for my attendance at Illinois State Normal University to study Industrial Arts. I soon switched to study Social Science (ISNU had no individual disciplines within the social sciences). A professor advised me to apply to graduate study—I had no idea there was such a thing—and I got a research assistantship to study political science at Indiana University.
I began IU in the fall of 1957, soon afterward the Soviets launched Sputnik. Although Sputnik meant little to my study of state and local politics, its launch meant a great deal to Ann Mozolak, a graduate of Hunter College in New York. Ann came to Indiana University in the fall of 1960 to study Russian. We were engaged in December and married in a Slovak-English ceremony in New York on September 2, 1961. We left the next day for Evanston and faculty housing across from the Orrington.
I was to begin teaching at Northwestern in less than three weeks. Within days, Loyola University called to ask Ann to begin teaching introductory Russian. She started teaching two weeks before I did and taught for four years before getting pregnant and losing her job. Later, Ann began a new career in charge of Social Science Data Services at Vogelback Computing Center. She later moved to the University Library, retiring in 2006 after more than 25 years at Northwestern.
I retired from teaching in 2002 but kept an office in the political science department until 2013, when we moved permanently to the Twin Cities, Minnesota, near both our daughters. Susan Janda has an M.A. in Viola from Northwestern and plays viola with the Minnesota Opera. Kathryn Janda has a Ph.D. from Berkeley and works remotely as Principal Research Fellow in Environment, Energy & Resources at University College London.
I still do research and write books. In 2022, Columbia University Press will publish The Republican Evolution: From Governing Party to Anti-Government Party, 1860-2020. In 2023, Cengage Learning will update the 15th edition of The Challenge of Democracy: American Government in Global Politics.