David,      Dan,                Jack

I was born on 26 October 1943 in Corpus Christi, Texas.

My parents were Woodrow Arley Ryan (26 February 1916 - 23 January 2001) and Ruth Marie (Eidmann) Ryan (24 May 1924 -
31 October 2007). My father was serving in the United States Navy at the Naval Base in Corpus Christi during World War II. My mother went to Texas from Ohio to be married. After my birth we stayed in Corpus Christi until the war ended and my parents returned to northeastern Ohio near Akron.

We lived for a while near MacDonaldsville, then in East
Liberty. My parents bought a house near Greensburg where
we lived until I was in the ninth grade. After that we moved to Atwater, about 20 miles east of Akron.

My brother Dan Morgan Ryan was born 25 March 1945 and my brother David Allen Ryan was born 30 April 1949.

After graduating from Atwater High School in 1961 I attended the
College of Pharmacy of the University of Cincinnati, Cincinnati,
Ohio from 1961 - 1966.

After Graduation I entered the Department of Biochemistry of the
University of Miami, Coral Gables, Florida. While in Graduate
School I met and subsequently married Janet Link Norton of West
Haven, Connecticut. Janet was a student in the Department of
Cellular and Molecular Biology and the Department of Biochemistry.
We were married on 13 July 1968. We completed our work and had our defense of dissertations within a week of each other.

While in Miami I witnessed the arrival of some of the lunar material from the first manned flight to the moon.  If you'd like to read about this and see some pictures, click HERE.

After this we moved to Tucson, Arizona, where we lived for about three years. Janet worked first with Dr. Milos Chvapil and then with Dr. Marcus. I worked as a freelance photojournalist and then as a postdoctoral fellow with Dr. Gordon Tollin at the University of Arizona Department of Chemistry.

We left Tucson for a chemistry teaching job for me at El Paso Community College in El Paso, Texas. I had a full time teaching position. Jan worked part time tutoring science and math, then full time teaching chemistry. Our first son, Clint Eric Ryan, was born 15 September 1977.

We moved to El Dorado, Arkansas, during the summer of 1978. I had a job teaching chemistry and physics at Southern Arkansas University - El Dorado. Our second son, Scott Arthur Ryan was born 6 June 1981.

Janet and I retired from teaching at South Arkansas Community College at the end of the Spring Semester in 2010. We would both recommend retirement to anyone able to do it!

My hobbies include photography and Z scale model trains. I'm trying to find an agent to help me publish a science fiction novel, "Silver Threads," and have begun work on two others, "The Centaurian Bud Vase" and "Beyond the Windward Sea." I'm also writing some science fiction short stories.

Someone told Janet that I should have a picture of me as an adult. Click here to see a grown up Jack Ryan.