Jerry Clark McNeely, educator and dramatist, was born in Cape Girardeau, Missouri, on June 20, 1928. After receiving his B.A. from Southeast Missouri State College, he attended the University of Wisconsin, where he received his M.S. in 1951 and Ph.D. in 1956 in speech. On June 8, 1952 he married Priscilla Grant, and they had three children: Melissa, Joel, and Elizabeth. During the Korean War McNeely was drafted and served in the U.S. Army as an arranger/composer for the 10th Division String Band at Fort Riley, Kansas; he is still an accomplished string bass and trumpet player.
McNeely began his career as an instructor in Speech at Southeast Missouri State College in 1950. In September 1956 he joined the University of Wisconsin Speech faculty as an instructor, receiving a full professorship in 1964. In addition to teaching, in Madison he produced and directed a number of musicals, dramas, and Wisconsin Players productions.
McNeely has also pursued a parallel career in creating and writing for television programming. In 1957 he wrote and sold his first teleplay, The Staring Match, which was shown on Studio One and won the Writers Guild Award as the best one-hour script of the year. Later he collaborated with Daniele Amfitheatrof in adapting the teleplay to an opera. Over sixty of his scripts have been produced on such series as Climax, Twilight Zone, Dr. Kildare, The Eleventh Hour, Mr. Novak, Ironside, The Man from U.N.C.L.E. , The Virginian, and Marcus Welby, M.D. In 1961 his play The Joke and the Valley was produced on Hallmark Hall of Fame and won second place in the Hallmark International Teleplay Competition. He has also done some producing and directing, and has been executive story consultant and co-creator of Owen Marshall: Counsellor at Law and the creator of Lucas Tanner. In July 1975 McNeely resigned from the UW faculty and moved permanently from Madison to California to create and produce a new series, Three for the Road, for MTM Enterprises.
He is a member of the Writers Guild of America, the Speech Association of America, and Beta Theta Pi, the honorary society for speech.
