From Apple Orchards to the New Hampshire Institute of Politics
Joseph Jean '53 was so determined to go to Saint Anselm College that he worked for three years after high school to earn enough money to help support his parents and pay the annual tuition of $360.

He tried to compress his studies into three years to reduce the cost, but a single, required course forced him to graduate in four years. He earned a degree in math, summa cum laude, and was also elected to Delta Epsilon Sigma, the National Honor Society of Catholic Colleges.

Since his graduation, Joseph Jean has maintained an active and generous relationship with the college, starting with $5 annual donations in the earliest years. The Jean Building, which houses the bookstore, is named after him. And he has named Saint Anselm College the primary beneficiary of his living trust.

Following graduation, he went into the Army, serving with the Presidential Honor Guard of the U.S. Army’s Third Infantry Regiment stationed in Washington, D.C. After his active duty ended, he began a distinguished career at the RAND Corporation, in Santa Monica, Calif., serving as a research engineer on weapons systems analysis and evaluation. He earned continually increasing responsibilities as a senior member of the technical staff at MITRE Corp., in Burlington, Mass., General Electric Corp., and GTE (now General Dynamics Corp. and Verizon Corp.), where he worked 17 years before retiring in 1987.

Work kept him on the road, taking him as far away as Vietnam a week after the Tet Offensive in 1968. He traveled so much that he sometimes paid taxes in two states, but he fit in graduate work at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Northeastern University, and the University of Southern California.

Throughout his work, study and travels, he kept contact with his Manchester roots. Today, he lives in the neighborhood in which he grew up, and is a familiar face on the Saint Anselm campus.

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