Michael Speas Jennings

Michael Speas Jennings

July 23, 1946 - July 24, 2023

Michael Jennings - dad, husband, journalist, traveler, teacher, author, preferred human of most dogs - was one of a kind.

Tall, a bit rumpled, with a deep North Carolina accent, Mike could take any tidbit of history or politics or sports trivia and run with it for a solid half-hour in long, looping, convoluted sentences. For a true introvert, that man could talk. And listen too. The intellect and caring he brought to those conversations - never in a hurry, to his editors' chagrin; curious about the life stories and lineage of everyone he met - meant that Mike quietly built deep relationships that often grew stronger over the decades. He wasn't flashy. He had zero fashion sense. His character ran compassionate and true.

Although he was deeply hopeful that his next fishing trip to the Outer Banks was right around the corner, Mike left us in the early morning of July 24, one day after his 77th birthday. In his last days he was surrounded by family and love, and a couple of dogs. Mike always had a dog, whom he entranced by placing his big hand silently on the pup's head while he read the New Yorker or New York Times at the kitchen table.

Michael Speas Jennings was born on July 23, 1946, in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, growing up on a small family farm whose geography and history deeply shaped his psyche. As a young boy, he lived on the farm with his piano-playing mother, Martha Louise, and his maternal grandmother. His name then was Michael Johnson. When Mike was four, his mother married Woodrow Jennings, another schoolteacher, who legally adopted Mike.

About his biological father, Mike knew very little - until, as a journalist, in the pre-Internet age, he went hunting for a man with the most mundane name of Robert Johnson - writing a series of newspaper stories about "The Search for My Father," which won Mike a Best Newspaper Writing Award from the American Society of Newspaper Editors.

Mike graduated from the University of North Carolina (following a detour to the University of Jamestown in North Dakota, where he decided he would become a football star, but mostly ended up messing up his knee), later earned a master's in English from the University of Virginia, and completed the coursework for a doctorate at Duke University, before leaving to work as a reporter when he ran out of money.

Along the way, facing the draft for the Vietnam War, Mike enrolled in the Air Force, serving two years teaching English to Vietnamese pilots in Nha Trang and two more doing military reconnaissance in Germany. That global experience cultivated in him a life-long love of travel: he lived in Saudi Arabia, had dear friends in Italy and Ireland, and made his last international trip with his daughter Cara to Vietnam, Cambodia and Thailand. Mike was excellent with a stick shift on the wrong side of the road.

Professionally, Mike worked as a journalist for newspapers in North Carolina, Virginia, and Alabama, at The Courier-Journal in Louisville, The Sunday Challenger in northern Kentucky, and - perhaps his favorite of them all - as editor of the Hibbing Daily Tribune in northern Minnesota. In graduate school, he taught at North Carolina State University and Duke; following retirement, he taught at Indiana University Southeast and Bellarmine University. For several years, he served as communications director for the Kentucky Cabinet for Families and Children, until the political winds shifted and a Republican got elected governor.

What he loved best was being a husband and dad - specifically, a girl dad. Nearly every weekend, he took his daughters to some sporting event - usually women's sports. The soundtrack of our children's childhoods was Mike sitting in a hard chair in the hallway between their bedrooms, night after night, reading aloud from some classic children's book, including all seven Harry Potter books, twice. It goes without saying that he did all the accents and animal sounds.

In retirement, Mike returned to writing fiction, his love from graduate school. He published a novel, Ave Antonina, and a collection of short stories, Like A Wary Blessing, and was at work on a second novel - roughly based on some of his North Carolina relatives' Civil War experiences - at the time of his death.

Preceded in death by his parents and brother, John Thomas Jennings, Mike's survivors include his wife, Leslie Scanlon; daughters, Catherine Shea Jennings and Cara Jennings; sister-in-law, Kerin Scanlon; first cousin, Peggy Carswell; half-brother Dennis Johnson, nieces and nephews Daphne Jennings, John T. Jennings, Jessica Jennings, and Jeremy Jennings, and his new pup Huck.

Memorial service Saturday, Sept. 23 at 11 AM (ET) at St. Paul United Methodist Church, 2000 Douglass Blvd., Louisville, KY 40205, with Rev. Jill Duffield and Rev. Jana Blazek officiating. Visitation will be from 9:30 AM until the service begins; a reception will be held at the church immediately following the service. Parking information here: https://www.stpaulchurchky.org/parking/

Service will be livestreamed via Zoom at

https://us02web.zoom.us/j/87938617616?pwd=bjVma3dadENrd3Y3RUl0cWVwbkJXQT09

In lieu of flowers, please make a donation in Mike's name to Kentucky Refugee Ministries (where he volunteered), or World Central Kitchen (involved in responding to crises all over the world).