Jerry K. Cline

Author Jerry Cline is an adoptee with unusual pre-natal beginnings. After living for decades with no knowledge of his ancestry, in 2001 he found his past and discovered that he is a first generation link to the American Old West of the 19th century. His birthfather was a notable lawman in Texas and New Mexico from 1880 to 1911 and his birthmother was a pioneering secondary school teacher in Louisiana. This book details the very fascinating and personal story of how the author unearthed that and other information about his biological history, including the convoluted story of how his birthparents came to meet and how he owes his existence to an aborted 1869 Comanche raid in central Texas.

Jerry K. Cline was adopted in 1939 at the age of three months. His foster parents were a high-spirited couple from the Oklahoma Indian Territory who had made their way to East Texas during the oil boom of the 1930’s. The family of three moved to Southern Illinois in 1942, where Jerry did most of his growing up. He subsequently became an applied mathematician with degrees from Southern Illinois University – Carbondale and a Ph.D. from Purdue University. Professionally, he worked in the aerospace industry for nearly thirty years with McDonnell Douglas Corporation (now The Boeing Company) on various space and defense-related programs. He developed mathematical models related to the design of the Space Shuttle, Tomahawk Cruise Missile, the Viking Mars Lander and the atmospheric probe of the Galileo Mission to Jupiter. He retired in 1996 as head of Boeing’s Operations Analysis Department.

In academia, Dr. Cline held appointments in the adjunct faculty of Washington University in St. Louis from 1967 to 2004. During that time, he taught evening classes in various advanced mathematics courses. He has authored several technical papers.

In 2001, aided by a cooperative adoption agency, his wife, and an expert genealogist, the author began what turned out to be an exciting and successful quest for his birthparents and knowledge of how he came to be. He was 62 years old at the time. The search itself, the surprising identities of his birthparents, the heartwarming face-to-face meetings with new-found blood relatives and several years of research inspired this book. In "Born and Raised", Jerry shares the details of his dramatic search and weaves a fascinating composite of the histories of his birthparents, his adoptive parents, their families, plus related events and personalities from America's past. Thanks to two books written long ago, one by his renouned lawman birthfather, and the other by his birthfather's older sister, Jerry is able to provide a graphic and authentic glimpse into what life was like on America's frontier in the mid 19th century. In a sense then, "Born and Raised" completes a trilogy, and is a classic tale of nature and nurture. That the stories in it are true makes the book all the more remarkable and appealing.

This is Dr. Cline’s first book. It contains no mathematics and there will be no test at the end.