A Caring Colonel
Jack's family has been in America since 1623, naming one of their sons John for just about as long. Dad would be John, his son would be Jack, his son's son would be John, and so on. His roots are about as deep as can be in America. His branch of the family settled in Tenefly, New Jersey, where he grew up.
“A wonderful small town with small town ways. When I was a little boy, merchants put their rocking chairs out in the street. It was very social, everybody knew everybody, which was very good and sometimes a bit of a pain.
It was very informal, very friendly. At that time my father loved to fish and I didn’t so when he’d fish I’d set my bicycle down in the diner. They knew who I was, they would serve me a burger and french fries and then my parents would pay for it next time they saw them. That sort of thing, nobody locked their doors, nobody ever took the keys out of their car everyone trusted everyone. If we had a key to the house it was news to me. We would go away on vacation in Vermont in the summer and just leave the house. Nobody worried about it. It’s very different from today. Not many places I know of where you’d be willing to do the same things.”
The little bit of friction Jack remembers of his time growing up in Tenefly grew out of his family and community not being as open as he would have liked with other people outside the community.
“The values I learned growing up were strong basic ones: doing good for other people, honesty, integrity. But I think my parents and the older generation of my family were not as accepting of others as I would have liked them to be. I wouldn’t call them bigots but they never made any move to try to integrate any others, whatever that means, others, into our family. That was not uncommon in that period in time, the late 1940s and 1950s. But I didn’t like it because they weren’t the values that I had created for myself over the years. I became very close friends with kids that had just moved in on Long Island. These were kids with other religions and ethnicities, and they became my lifelong friends. In one case, their parents became like second parents to me.
That was probably the main thing. Politically there wasn’t much disagreement. My father’s attitude was “disagree with everything” and “paralyzed government is good government.” I’d say inclusion was the only thing we disagreed on but they never disapproved of my friendships, they were very accepting people. They just felt like what they had was enough. There was no reason to add more people into their life. And that ended up being exclusionary but there was no malice about it that I could see.”
This feeling that people deserve to be actively included became a defining part of that narrative of Jack's life. When he graduated high school, he went to one year of college where he enjoyed partying more than his classes. He recalled, "the college felt that it was a good idea for me to take some time off, permanently." From there he and his friends joined the army reserve and served active duty in Fort Knox Kentucky.
“Active duty for me was a very interesting experience because it’s an exposure to a very diverse environment. Coming out of a town like Tenefly, it was very interesting to get a look at different socioeconomic backgrounds in young adults.”
When he came out of active duty he went to Officer Candidate School and got a commission as a lieutenant and went to a National Guard unit just outside of New York.
“We were about 1000 people, all males at that time, I’d say about 40% African America, 25% Hispanic, and the rest Caucasian. And for the majority of people that came from New York, in particular, came from places like Bedford-Stuyvesant, the South Bronx, Apache City, Jersey City. They were an interesting group to get to know because they weren’t very accepting, in the beginning, of anyone that wasn’t raised in their environment because they didn’t think anyone would understand.
I ended up as the battalion commander of that unit which gave me an opportunity to do some pretty different things. We would cook things for the weekend for lunch, and most of it went to waste but we started bringing it into the Bronx when fires or other problems would make people homeless. We’d go with our cooks in our army trucks, which we weren’t supposed to do, but we covered up the letters so we could get away with it.”
He remembers the beginning of a personal mission in his battalion to promote people from disadvantage as a puzzling case that kicked off a bit of a crusade.
“One young man in particular I thought had a lot of potential. I had him into my office and told him, I think you’ve got a lot of street smarts, I think you’ve got leadership ability, I want to make you an active sergeant. Do a good job for six months and we’ll put you there. He came in for the next 2 drills then he stopped coming in.
So I found the major and we drove over to the ghetto he lived in and I asked him, “why did you stop coming?” And he said, “because I knew that I would fail you and you would not be happy with me.” And I was a bit taken aback, this was an entirely different mindset that I had known. Here was someone that had been told he was a loser since the day he was born. So I took a lot of interest in these guys. We set up training programs specifically for African American and Hispanic NCOs(non-commissioned officers) and we got a number of them through college. We got them into officer candidate school. Of my 6 companies by the time I left, 3 of them were commanded by African Americans and 5 out of 6 First Sergeants were African American or Hispanic. We brought in the unions on Saturday afternoons to train them on civil skills for after their service. And I was surprised to know that about 70% of them didn’t have driver’s licenses, so we gave drivers tests. A number didn’t have high school diplomas, so we brought in GED instructors. That really got me very involved in that community and portion of society and I think that cemented what I feel is a pretty open attitude towards people, unless they’ve shown themselves to be intrinsically bad, which I’ve found to not be common. ”
Jack went from active duty to work for an engineering company in Canada that worked on pressure relief valves. From there he went on to become the general sales manager for Teledyne, Vice President of Sales and Marketing, and finally Executive Director of Sales and Marketing at Teledyne. As a part of the job, he traveled to Brazil, Iran, and all around Europe, to promote and indirectly sell to engineering groups around the world. He retired in 1996 when Teledyne was sold and as he measured his options, he decided to go back to military involvement
“I had been in the military for 34 years and during those years I met a lot of Vietnam vets coming home that carried immense burdens. So I went down to the VA and said what can I do here? They told me I needed to go get an education if I wanted to volunteer there. I had only had a year of college so I went back to school and got my B.A., went to a masters program and in my second year of my masters I started the first year of my PhD. So about 8 years later I went back to the VA and said “how about now?” And they said sure, so for 5 years I was a “non-compensated employee” where I worked with combat vets with PTSD. Which is something I still do now, the VA refers people to me to help them cope and unpack the trauma of war. ”
Jack says when he grew up there wasn't as much self interest in government, so people trusted the government more generally.
““Now you have people more interested in scoring points against the other side than doing right by the country. And I find that disturbing. We have people for whom the good of the country is a secondary issue somehow. Democracy takes compromise and no one wants to compromise anymore. I worry that we’re becoming intolerant people politically. I think a good portion of it too, is money. Politicians too often violate what I like to call their fiduciary duty to their country by accepting and courting as much financial backing as they do. We have a president who promised to break all that down but so far he’s been pretty short on any real alternatives.”
We interviewed Jack's wife Pat, and had a similarly compelling conversation. You can check it out here: Resilience and Reassessment in Santa Fe
