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From his early boyhood, Ray always wanted to have a job of some kind, although he did not have to work. At times this was embarrassing to the comfortably situated Jenkins family. One crisis came when Grandfather John Canada Jenkins, a revenuer known to his friends as "Can," came to Tellico Plains with his second bride. Widowed in middle age, Can had written to seven matrimonial agencies, had wooed and won a mail-order bride from Kentucky, and planned to bring her to Tellico Plains on the Sunday morning ,train. At the time, Ray was running a shoeshine stand in the town square where Can and his bride would surely pass in the surrey on the way from the station. Ray was ordered to take that day off because Can didn't want his bride to know she had married a man whose grandson shined shoes. The boy didn't want to give up a whole day's profits, so he worked until he heard the train whistle, then folded up his stand and hid around the corner. After Can and his bride passed, Ray went back to work.
A few years later, when Ray was spending his summers working in a lumberyard in Tellico Plains, one of his co-workers was another lanky Monroe County boy named Estes Kefauver. Estes was a lumber handler, hoisting it into freight cars. Ray was a grader, checking lumber as it was piled in the cars. Says Tennessee's Senator Kefauver: "I was always kind of envious of him. He could stay in the boxcar where it was cool; I had to stay out in the sun."
Before the McCarthy v. Army hearings, Jenkins' most important connection with the military was a stint in the Army on the Mexican border in 1916, another stint in the Navy during World War I. He thought about becoming a professional baseball pitcher (he had a wicked spit-ball), but he kept his eye on the law. Always a top scholar, he passed the bar examinations a year before he finished at the University of Tennessee's law school. One of his first jobs in a law office, like the assignment that brought him onto the national scene, had to do with an investigation. He was an older attorney's leg man in the investigation of mismanagement at the Knoxville General Hospital. Result of the investigation: a thorough shake-up at the hospital.
Roar & Croon. Around the courthouses of East Tennessee, Jenkins soon became known as a great trial lawyer. Although he makes most of his income ($60,000 last year) from civil suits, his Tennessee fame has come from criminal cases. In his 34 years of practice, he has been on one side or the other (usually the defense) in some 600 homicide cases. There was hardly a murder or rape case in Knoxville in the past 20 years without Ray Jenkins on one side or the other.