James S. Moose Jr. was born on October 3, 1903 in Morrilton, Arkansas, attended Kentucky Military Institute and after graduating from the University of Missouri in 1922 he spent the next five years in Morrilton, Arkansas. In 1928 he successfully passed the Foreign Service entrance examination and was appointed a foreign service officer with U.S. Department of State. His first post was a vice consul to Saloniki, Greece, followed by the assignment at the National School of Living Oriental Languages in Paris where he studied French, Turkish, Arabic, and Amharaic languages. He left Paris in 1933 for Baghdad, Iraq, followed by Tehran, Iran in 1937. He remained in Tehran for five years, and here his first son, James III, was born. In 1942 Moose was assigned to the first American Legation in Saudi Arabia. He remained in Saudi Arabia during World War II after which he was assigned to Iraq again, then to Damascus, Syria as a charge d`affairs. In the late 1940s and early 1950s Moose spent several years traveling around Africa, South Asia, and Europe as a foreign service inspector of U.S. Embassies overseas. In 1952 he was appointed ambassador to Syria, and to Sudan in 1958. Moose retired from the State Department in 1962, taught international relations at the University of Massachusetts for one year, and finally retired to Morrilton, Arkansas in the late 1960s to farm and work as a merchant. James S. Moose, Jr. died in 1989.