Today is a landmark for Clay Jenkinson – it’s his 50th birthday. Some of you may have read his most recent book, A Vast and Open Plain, about the Lewis and Clark Expedition.

Jenkinson calls himself a classic Aquarius, and from all the evidence, he’s right. Aquarians are described as inventive, intuitive, unconventional, curious, intellectual – it makes sense when you recall Jenkinson is the driving force behind the popular NPR program, The Jefferson Hour.

“At 15,” Jenkinson says, “I met Mike Jacobs, now the publisher/editor of the Grand Forks Herald. Mike was the reporter for Dickinson Press, I the chief photographer, and he used to pull me out of school a couple of times per week to go out into the Badlands doing newspaper work. THAT was the defining moment of my life.”

Jenkinson was born in Minot; his father was a banker, his mother was a schoolteacher, and he had one sister. “(We) moved around a bit when I was a child,” he says, “but Dickinson was my home for most of it. I was a ham radio operator for many years, and indeed I once spent a long October weekend with some other ham operators at the exact corner of Montana, North Dakota, and South Dakota.”

After Jenkinson graduated from Dickinson High in 1973, he went to the University of Minnesota. From there, he went to Oxford University and was both a Rhodes and a Danforth Scholar.

“I wanted to be a journalist, until I became an English major,” he says. “Then I wanted to be a professor – until Ev Albers of the ND Humanities Council urged me to become a Jefferson pretender. Thereafter, everything has unfolded in its own way.”

One bio about Jenkinson reads, “...thanks to a series of accidents, (he became) a Jefferson scholar, a Lewis and Clark scholar, and a student of the future of rural America. He is one of the most entertaining public speakers in the United States, and his performances are both humorous and enlightening, while maintaining a steady focus on ideas.

Clay is also one of the nation’s leading interpreters of Thomas Jefferson. He has lectured about and portrayed Jefferson in forty-nine states (and) has performed before Supreme Court justices, presidents, eighteen state legislatures, and countless public audiences, as well as appearing on The Today Show, Politically Incorrect, and CNN.”

In 1989, Jenkinson became one of the first winners of the nation’s highest award in the humanities, the Charles Frankel Prize; the National Endowment for the Humanities described Jenkinson as, “A leader in the revival of chautauqua, a forum for public discussion about the ideas and lives of key figures in American history.” Others who have received this award include Ken Burns, Bill Moyers and Charles Kuralt.

Jenkinson is also a senior fellow for the Center for Digital Government, based in California, and is a scholar-in-residence at Lewis & Clark College in Portland, Oregon. And, he continues to write. In fact, his newest book, “Becoming Jefferson’s People” was just released two weeks ago.

As for the future, Clay says the Badlands are beckoning and, in the near future, he would like to move back to North Dakota to focus on the life and legacy of Teddy Roosevelt. Let’s hope it happens. Happy birthday, Mr. Jenkinson!

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