Joleene Maddox Snider (Jo) is a native Texan. In a state that increasingly populated by non-Texans that is a rarity these days. Her family goes back to back to the 1890s in the North Texas area west of Fort Worth. She attended Mary Carroll High School in Corpus Christi and then Del Mar College for her first two years. After requiring her poor parents to drive her all over the state of Texas to visit colleges and universities, she ended up at what was then named Southwest Texas State University, now Texas State University in San Marcos.
She started out as a journalism major. By her senior year she had taken a number of course in her minor field in the English Department but not one journalism course. It was like shopping. A trip looking for a pair of basic jeans ends up in nice dresses, linens or cookware before you realize it. What the History Department offered in the way of courses was so much more interesting and out the door went the shopping for the basic jeans offered in journalism. The late Everett Swinney pulled Joleene aside at registration in her senior year and suggested that a student with 24 hours of history and no course work in her major probably needed to reexamine her major field of study. As well as I can recall his comment was, “Joleene I think you are a history major.”
Joleene completed her B. A. with majors in History and English and a minor in Political Science in 1967 and then her M. A. in History with a minor in English in 1969. She then attended University of Texas in Austin three different times to work on her Ph.D. Family responsibilities and opportunities to develop new programs at Southwest Texas lured her away the last time in 1992 before finishing her doctorate.
She taught for several community colleges with her longest tenure at Austin Community College. In 1990 Joleene joined the faculty of the Department of History at Southwest Texas State University, now Texas State University, where her career developed. She specialized in the use of technology in the large classrooms and took the Department into the large teaching theaters between 1990 and 2000.
While she retired officially in 2001, Joleene stays in contact with the History Department at Texas State. Besides her research and writing, she quilts, fishes at her home on North Padre Island in Corpus Christi, teaches classes for senior citizens in both San Marcos and the University of Texas