IRSC at 60
LEADERSHIP
Ed Massey met his wife, Jo, at a community dance in Laurel, Miss. “I looked
across the room and saw Jo and asked her to dance, and we’ve been dancing
47
called. “I looked across the room and saw Jo and asked her to
dance, and we’ve been dancing ever since.”
The couple will celebrate their 54th wedding anniversary
soon. When they renewed their vows while celebrating their
50th anniversary, they danced to Anne Murray’s Could I Have
This Dance, which was featured in the 1980 film, Urban Cowboy.
He had always been a good student, but once he married
Jo in his senior year at Millsaps and had their first daughter,
Michelle, he took a more determined course.
Massey said that having a wife and a child so young was
“probably the best thing that ever happened to me” because
“it was time to grow up. It was time to get serious about
something and I had something to get serious about. My
grades improved. My desire to be more successful improved.”
After graduating from college, Massey taught and coached
football for two years at his high school alma mater in Laurel.
One day he came home and told Jo he wanted more and that
the best path was to go to graduate school, which meant a
move to Hattiesburg and the University of Southern Mississippi,
where a second child, Kimberly, was born, making it
four people living in graduate student housing. A son, Paul,
later joined the family while Massey taught biology at IRCC.
At the time, the couple figured that the federal dollars supporting
NASA would, after the moon landings, shift to fund
ocean research. That would mean a pick of jobs for someone
with a doctorate in biology with an emphasis on marine
biology, which Massey eventually earned. He says he is still
a little surprised that funding for ocean research never really
became a federal priority.
So, there were fewer jobs for a marine biologist than the
couple had figured. There were some jobs with oil companies
ever since.” They’ve been married 54 years.
and there were some federal positions. But one of them
was in the U.S. Virgin Islands, which was a scary place after
eight people were killed in a politically motivated shooting in
September 1972. And there was a job in New Orleans, which
the couple thought would be a great place to have fun but not
one to begin a career.
During his time as a graduate student, Massey’s primary
mentor and advising faculty member was fond of drinking
during school nights. Consequently, that professor would
often call on him to teach early morning biology classes for
undergrads. It turned out, Massey said, that he liked working
with students and that he had a knack for it. >>
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