This is the man who saw it all. He has been everywhere, and he has tried it all.

He sits down to enjoy his morning coffee at Starbucks after a life full of adventures.

“I’ve lived many lives,” says Harold Knox, an 87-year-old English professor who has been teaching at City College for 46 years.

“I stumbled into everything,” Knox says. “Everything was accidental, and I was very lucky.”

Knox “stumbled” into many things before he became an English professor at City College. He was a journalist, a traveler, and an U.S. Navy seaman.

He joined City College in 1967 and has been teaching here ever since.

“I like the whole atmosphere,” says Knox, who still has the motivation to teach. “Students teach you as much as you teach them. It keeps your brain younger, and it also gets me out of the house.”

Knox also has had time to fly and travel around the world during his teaching career.

“I’ve visited 60 countries,” says Knox, which include Antarctica, Palestine, Turkey, and many others. He has an adventurous story about each one.

“He is a Renaissance man,” says Armand Vattuone, one of Knox’s friends who meets him and others at the Starbucks near City College on a weekly basis. “He is an inspiration to seniors.”

A long healthy life full of surprises and “accidents” is what got Knox to the place he is today.

As a young man of 17, Knox had no plans other than joining the Navy and serving his country, considering that World War II had just erupted. After he enlisted, the first “accident” happened

that changed his life.

Thinking he was going to see fighting action in the Navy, Knox qualified for officer training for the U.S. Naval Air Corps and spent most of his military career in college in Michigan. After he served in the Navy, Knox entered the university thinking he’d become a doctor, but that changed when his campus newspaper wrote something offensive about the Southerners.

“I wrote back a joking letter in bad English,” laughs Knox, a native of Tennessee who used a country accent and bad grammar in the letter to make the newspaper staff feel guilty for offending a Southern reader. “The school sponsor called me up and wanted me to join the campus paper staff.”
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It was there that Knox fell in love, and there was no way out. He fell in love with English, ended up getting a bachelor’s degree, and later on a master’s in journalism.

“I couldn’t quite get it out of my blood,” says Knox, as he describes his addiction to working for the newspaper United Press International in Atlanta.

While in Georgia, Knox was required to cover the state Legislature in Jackson, Miss., where another “accident” happened and opened doors for him.

“I saw one of the senators going from desk to desk, and I said, ‘What is he doing?’” says Knox. “Turns out he was passing a commendation for me as a reporter to let me stay in Jackson.”

It was one lucky incident that led to the next for Knox.

During the period when Knox was in Mississippi, he got his own daily column working for the Tupelo Journal. He describes it as “the most enjoyable and least paid” job he has ever had, but he loved it. He got to write about anything he pleased. And as before, one adventure led to another for Knox.

While visiting a former professor in Michigan, Knox talked about teaching as a career, saying that he thought he would never go into the teaching field.

That’s when his professor told him, “I got you a teaching job at Michigan State University. Would you take it?’”

That is when his career started as an English professor.

“I never intended to be a teacher,” says Knox. “I realized, ‘Hey, I like this.’” And so he has been at it for half a century.

“I hope I am half as mentally alert when I am his age,” says another one of Knox’s coffee buddies, Richard Kellough. “He has a good sense of humor.”

And that sense of humor follows him to the classroom.

Chris Sharpe, a student in Knox’s English class at City College, says, “He cares about how we do in class.”

Knox didn’t just experience a couple of adventures. His whole life was an adventure.