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John Algeo was born in 1930 in St. Louis, Missouri, and lived there for the
first ten years of his life, with brief periods in Texas and California. At the
start of World War II, his family moved to Miami, Florida, where he grew up.
During his high school and early college days, he worked at the Miami Public
Library. His college education at the University of Miami was interrupted by
military service during the Korean War.In the military, after basic training at Fort Jackson, South Carolina, Algeo worked in the post library there until he was transferred to the library of the Fort Bragg School for Psychological Warfare, North Carolina. From there he shipped overseas to Korea, where he worked in personnel offices, first at a station hospital in Taegu, but most of the time at the headquarters of the United Nations Armistice Commission in Munsan-ni. He returned to the U.S. with the rank of Sergeant, was honorably discharged, and completed his undergraduate education with a major in English, receiving the degree of Bachelor of Education, cum laude, in 1955.
Algeo pursued graduate work in English philology and Anglo-Saxon language and literature at the University of Florida in Gainesville, where he met his future wife, Adele, who was a graduate student in anthropology-archeology. They met in courses they both took in Old English (Anglo-Saxon) and married in 1958; and she has worked with him in all his later activities. They have a son and daughter, both now university professors in geology and geography, respectively. Algeo's first full-time college teaching was at Florida State University in Tallahassee. After two years, he returned to the University of Florida, where he rose through the academic ranks to full professor and Assistant Dean of the Graduate School.
In 1971, the Algeo family moved to Athens, Georgia, where John served as Director of the Program in Linguistics, Head of the English Department, and Alumni Foundation Distinguished Professor of English. He took early retirement from the university in 1994 to accept the Presidency (or General Secretaryship) of the Theosophical Society in America.
Algeo is listed in seven biographical directories, including the Dictionary of International Biography and Who’s Who in the World.
e-mail:
jtalgeo@yahoo.com