Page 35 - Senior Link Magazine Fall 2023 - Online Magazine

Dr. Jim Goss The Storyteller’s
he mission of Senior Link
magazine has always
Tbeen to mine the treasure
of the best stories on the South
Plains. Discovering Jim Goss is
like hitting the motherlode. He
is a storyteller’s storyteller, and
at 89, his anecdotes still flow as
profusely and beautifully as the
Klamath River Falls where he
grew up on a ranch in Southern
Oregon.
Jim Goss once wrote, “We are
storytellers, we Indians. And the
measure of the truth of a story is
the degree to which it helps the
teller and the tellee.” He hails
from a rich ancestry of Cherokee
and Shoshone native Americans
and French, Basque, and Irish
immigrant Americans, and he
is a direct result of America’s
westward expansion along the
Oregon Trail. Jim credits his
parents and grandparents with
instilling in him the curiosity
to learn and the virtue to
appreciate his own story.
Story
by Jane Bromley
His curiosity to Germany where he spent
was birthed on the rest of his service stationed
hunting trips at Frankfurt with top secret
with his Shoshone clearance, dressed in civilian
grandfather and clothes, and surveilling the
his storytelling Russians. He lived at the top
skills as editor of of the Wasserküppe in a lodge
his high school built for Hitler’s glider pilots.
newspaper, but His mission was to intercept
not long after and record Russian radio
leaving home, transmissions.
his own story
began to unfold. WWII had only been over for
The former a few years, but he found the
dyslexic stutterer Germans very receptive. In fact,
first pursued he bought a Porsche and drove
journalism and all over western Europe during
drama at the his time off. The young man was
University of fascinated by the diversity in the
people he met and the friends he
Oregon, then geology and made, and his interest in other
geological engineering at the cultures was ignited. Jim credits
University of Arizona. the U.S. Air Force for launching
As the Korean War neared its his career in anthropology—"the
end in 1953, he returned to science of humans.”
Oregon to enlist in the Air Force.
That’s when things really got After a front-row seat to the
interesting. He was sworn in Jan. Hungarian Revolution and
11, 1954, and sent to Lackland the Suez Crisis, Jim’s military
AFB in San Antonio. Aptitude service ended in 1958, and he
returned to the
tests revealed
the young man University of Oregon
on the G.I. Bill. He
was a suitable earned his B.A. in
candidate Anthropology and
for Russian in 1960, received a
language National Defense
school, and he Education Act
was promptly (NDEA) fellowship to
sent to work on his masters
Syracuse, NY, at the University of
for immersion Chicago. He signed
in the Russian an oath to pursue a
culture and career in teaching,
language. and the storyteller
In a year’s immediately began
time, he was following his
shipped off
Lubbock Senior Link 35