Andrew Warren was born in Kansas City, Kansas, in 1956. He spent the next 18 years of his life in Mission, in the older suburbs of Northeast Johnson County. He graduated from Shawnee Mission North High School in May 1975. The next day he left for a 9 week trip backpacking around Australia.
Upon his return, he attended Johnson County Community College for one year (which he describes as the second smartest thing he ever did) and moved to graduate from the University of Kansas in 1979 with honors in Political Science and Geography.
He drifted for a few years after that, working as a yacht rigger on Galveston Bay and cleaning up a concrete plant in Merriam, Kansas, every night. Money earned from being covered in sweat and concrete dust (which set-up when ever he cooled off) went to help pay for law school.
He began studying at Washburn University Law School in January 1983. He hated law school and was constantly depressed, but loved his part time job with the Public Defender in Topeka. By the narrowest margin, he received his Juris Doctorate in December 1985, and went to work for the Public Defender.
A promotion to Deputy District Defender in Olathe, Kansas, followed where he was promptly made to serve as Acting District Defender. The job in Olathe was constant and usually heated legal combat as the judges and bar were extremely hostile to the new Public Defender office. But, he survived, somehow without ever being held in contempt of court.
In 1991, he was promoted as the first Public Defender for Western Kansas, in Garden City. He quickly learned to like – a lot – Western Kansas and its people. After short stints there and with the Appellate Defender in Topeka he joined the firm of Patton, Kerbs, and Hess in Dodge City. Although he greatly respected and enjoyed his co-workers at Patton, Kerbs, and Hess, one of those life changing events occurred.
During a visit to Custer National Battlefield in South Dakota, he experienced a fire bell in the night and clearly saw what he had suppressed since taking a U.S. History class at KU. American History was his passion. He took a number of classes at Dodge City Community College and by correspondence to prepare for application to graduate school at Fort Hays State University.
In the graduate history program at FHSU he flourish, did as well as can be done and was admitted to Phi Kappa Phi, of which he is extremely proud. He is, perhaps excessively, proud of his academic record at FHSU and of FHSU itself. He tells anybody who will listen that it is the best college of university he has attended, and refers to it as a “Jeffersonian-Jacksonian institution.”
Since 2006 he has taught Criminal Justice at Western New Mexico University. In March of this year, he received a dual appointment as Professor of Criminal Justice and History at WNMU and relishes the opportunities the history appointment affords. He is working harder then he has ever working refreshing the great quantity of knowledge has lost since leaving FHSU and creating new online history classes.
He is greatly honored to be invited to address the Phi Kappa Phi chapter at Fort Hays State University, has no earthly idea what he will say, and wants everyone to know that renting academic regalia is cheaper than buying a new suit.
