I was born and raised in a small town in a valley on the high plains of western North Dakota

I was born and raised in a small town in valley on the high plains of western North Dakota. General George Custer and 7th Cavalry marched by our valley from Fort Abraham Lincoln on their way to the battle of the Little Big Horn. We have a table topped hill, which are called buttes, south of our town that is named Custer's Look Out.
	The Badlands of North Dakota lie in the southwestern part of the state along the Little Missouri River.
	On top of it you can see for fifty miles over the undulating prairie. About sixty miles to the west in the rugged Badland's Theodore Roosevelt had a ranch in the 1890's. Today there is a national park there and a tourist town called Medora.
Dr. Kearnes and his wife Eva, visiting Roosevelt's Log Cabin

The Northern Pacific Railroad went from Chicago to Seattle and it cut through the southern part of North Dakota. And it the 1880's it was promoting settlements along the line. A large number of German immigrants had gathered in Chicago who were looking for free land in the west. They were associated with the German Evangelical Church on 25th Street and Wentworth Avenue. Their pastor the Reverend Kling was sympathetic with the aspirations of these people and the Northern Pacific Railroad Company approached him to organize a society to facilitate the settlement of these homesteaders in one of the planned towns along the railroad. At a meeting in the church in the fall of 1884 with fifty or sixty in attendance, it was decided to settle a new colony in a valley in western North Dakota. A Reverend Kock who had visited the valley, proposed that the new town be named Hebron, because it reminded him of the biblical Hebron in Palestine. That is how it got is name, an its first settlers in the spring of 1885.

My great grandfather was recruited in Germany by a Rev. Frederick Ewald who was part of this German colonization society which had promoted the settlement of Hebron. Rev. Ewald's announcement in the church newspaper described Hebron as an excellent place for farming with account's of cabbages growing as large as bushel baskets, onions weighing 1and 1/2 lbs each, 5lb. potatoes, beets 2 ft long, turnips weighing 27 lbs, and grass 3 feet high. This was a great place to farm, and the government would also give you 160 acres of free land. To my great grandfather Wenz Ding this seemed like a small dukedom. And since he had fought and also lost his health in the Franco-German war, he decided that it would be a better place to bring up his children, so they would not have to go to war. So the whole clan came and homesteaded on farms south of Hebron.

My other grandfather John Kearnes, for whom I am named, had a more mysterious history. According to family legend Grandpa Kearnes was orphaned while he was very young. His father was a Irish sea captain, and his ship went down. He ended up in an orphanage in New York City with his sister Mary. When he became a teenager he decided to go west to work on the Northern Pacific Railroad. He lost track of his sister. And somehow he ended up near Hebron. One day in a restaurant he spotted a pretty waitress, they fell in love, and decided to farm south of Hebron, which turned out to be next to the Ding farm.

One day my father came riding on a roan (red) horse to my mothers place. Mom really liked that horse, and I guess Dad gave her a ride, the short of it is they married and started their own family on a farm west of Hebron. I was born on the day the United States declared war on Japan along with my twin brother. The shock of World War II and being the father of twins was too much for Dad.

I graduated from the Hebron High School in 1960. Then I went to Union College in Lincoln, Nebraska for a B.A. in History in 1965. I then studied at Andrews University at Berrien Springs Michigan and earned a Masters of Arts in History in 1966. Here one of my professors inspired me to study political science. I was interested in religion and politics. And since a friend of mine had been accepted to the University of Utah, I decided to apply there. I graduated with a Ph. D. in political science in 1972. I did my dissertation on Utah Electoral Politics during the New Deal. It traced the development of a more secular and liberal political culture in that state.

It has been my privilege to teach at several colleges and universities before coming to Armstrong Atlantic State University in 1987. What I have enjoyed about my work here is the opportunity to develop and use new approaches to learning which includes a self paced personalized system of instruction (PSI), and now also to teach courses over the internet. My teaching philosophy is to design learning experiences for students so that they become proactive learners. I am their guide by their side, not a sage on the stage.