John Samuel Graves III started his career as a teacher. Though he left that profession, he enjoys educating people about music, art and history.
Graves, 79, has created three websites -- one about his music, writing and editing projects, one about his family's history and one dedicated to his musical compositions. He also manages a digital newsletter for the Amateur Musicians League, a private group of about 20 musicians who alternate meeting for performances in members' homes.
Graves, who lives in Little Rock with his wife, R.S. "Sandra" Perry, and their three dogs, completed a bachelor's degree in English and secondary education from the University of Arkansas, Fayetteville in 1966. He taught in Bentonville and Fayetteville, and later in a school for perceptually handicapped children in Denver.
He left the education field and got involved in carpentry and then in the home construction business, and he worked his way up to managing a roof and floor truss plant in Tucson, Ariz.
"I did always have an interest in building, even as a child," he says. "I would collect little sticks and things and try to put things together. I remember my grandfather coming by one time and laughing at me trying to build a little house out of some little sticks I found."
He spent a few years working for an architect, he says, and got involved in custom home designs. He did some home design work for friends in Pine Bluff.
"I have a mechanical knack," he says. "I can fix or do lots of things. Music is very similar. It has a lot to do with architecture, for instance, and language."
His mother, he says, wrote poetry. After her death he edited and published her work, setting some to music. He also collected and arranged musical compositions written by his cousin, Luke Peeples, who died in the 1980s.
Graves moved to Little Rock following his retirement in 1996.
In 2010, he earned a bachelor's degree in music composition and theory at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock.
He recently finished a 382-page book called "The Testimony of the Infant Children, the Untold Story," chronicling his parents' marital discord, divorce and child custody battle.
"I was kidnapped by my father," Graves says.
In the book, Graves cites affidavits from people who saw his father and another man snatch Graves and his twin and younger brothers as they walked home from school in 1951.
"They had the two boys' arms twisted, dragged them to the cab, and threw them into the backseat," one read. "They drove away as fast as they could as a crowd was gathering then and the boys were screaming and fighting to get out ..."
Graves spent his first nine years in Bluffton, S.C., a small town in the state's Lowcountry Region, before his mother left his father and took Graves and his brothers to Philadelphia, where her family lived.
His father tried to visit the children in Philadelphia without telling their mother, but school authorities turned him away.
"He had come all that way and not really had a visit with us," Graves says. "So he came up for a second time, also without announcing it, and just took us like a full-blooded South Carolina Southern boy would do when his wife was dissing him."
While their parents and the courts dealt with custody issues, the boys reconnected with relatives in Bluffton, where their great-grandfather had been mayor. They fished, hunted, rode horses and swam and they took a trip to Hilton Head Island, S.C.
Graves says his father, who ran the family's seafood business, had a couple of fatal flaws, the worst of which was drinking.
"It cost him everything he had," Graves says. "My father lost control for quite a few years and we didn't have much contact with him until probably early college years."
Graves says writing the book was both therapeutic and traumatic.
"It brought back that horrible sense of loss," he says. "It came out relatively against my father and for both of us, during our testimony ... we had to answer those questions with our father standing right there looking at us."
The court records he sifted through to write his book highlighted some of the cultural differences between the people of Philadelphia and Bluffton.
"My mother was a Yankee, my father was a Southerner," he says. "The judge who finally got the case in South Carolina made some terrible statements about racial issues. One of the reasons he thought we should stay down there is because we would not be going to integrated schools and that was one of the things that the Pennsylvania judge jumped on."
Graves' mother eventually remarried, and her husband was a physicist who took a job at the University of Arkansas, Fayetteville and moved the family to Arkansas. Graves' father died while Graves was in college there.
In the afterword of his book, Graves wrote, "Even though my brothers and I may never fully come to terms with what happened to us in 1951, we have lived into our late 70s and survived some of our own domestic disasters."
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