Getting To Know Jack

At 16, when I started working at Jack’s music store, I didn’t really know Jack all that well other than to note that he was a divorced, forty-something, musician friend of my mother’s who owned a couple of stores in the area.

A professional organist himself, Jack set up a brisk business selling organs to churches, supper clubs, lounges and private homes. This was the ’60’s and it wasn’t all that unusual to find a Wurlitzer, Lowery or Hammond sitting in someone’s living room, although it was a bit unusual to actually see someone playing it.

It was as if putting this musical furniture in one’s home gave the illusion that its owner had talent.

Although this was Jack’s primary money maker, he also sold every other variety of instrument or music technology of the day. I spent a decent amount of my ‘in-store’ time playing the guitars and keyboards and, somehow, this lack of actual work never seemed to bother Jack all that much. Maybe he saw me as the music store shill, creating ambiance for all who would be interested in buying an instrument. Maybe he just appreciated my interest in music, who knows?

One of my early duties was going out on organ deliveries with Jack. We’d strap the organ onto a rolling dolly and wrestle it into the van and stabilize it with wheel chocks. Then we’d head off to some unknown physical challenge down the road. I learned something about Jack by going on these runs because a good many of his character quirks came out while driving.

Jack had the demeanor of a ferret, with little or no patience for anything that got in his way. Even when he wasn’t in a hurry, he looked to be; an illusion of motion that was probably his inner anxiety so desperate to get out that it became visible. Jack was purpose driven, talked fast and seemed, at all times, on the verge of a nervous explosion. So hopping in the van with him was like going on the roller coaster at Six Flags.

With the native frustrations that are a part of the driving experience, Jack was an intense madman behind the wheel and, as far as I could figure, everybody in his line of sight was a potential roadblock needing to be outmaneuvered. He yelled at other drivers, talked to himself about other drivers and wherever he was going it was never going to be fast enough.

Get the hell out of the way, asshole, people are waiting for this organ!

I just sat there in the passenger seat, using my inner-calming voice to weather the Jack storm until we arrived at our destination and then he would jump out of the van, whip open the doors and have the organ halfway out of the truck before I even had one foot on the ground. He reacted like a paramedic at an accident scene, and all of this just to make sure that somebody got their organ 5 minutes faster than originally estimated.

I wasn’t a slacker, I just looked like one standing next to the whirling dervish named Jack. I would have loved to be in the doctor’s office when the nurse read his blood pressure: “Oh Lord, 166 over 100! Everybody clear the building, he’s gonna blow!”

Even when he’d move the organs, I felt like he was one false step away from a massive coronary. Once, delivering to a home on a hill in an affluent neighborhood, we had to move an organ up an unbelievable number of steps to get to the front door. Parking at the bottom of the steep, winding ascent was like staring up at the most treacherous ski run in Vail, Colorado. It took 4 of us to pull it off and by the time we’d finally reached the top, Jack was wheezing and his face was beet red. “Look out, he’s gonna blow!!”

He was manic, intense and, to all his friends, a very sweet person.

My mother had every intention of pushing me away from my interest in music, based simply upon her own experiences with marrying two musicians and dating another, but it was Jack who talked her out of it with a little bit of logic.

He had listened to me playing his store instruments long enough to realize that I had a natural ability and, to him, it would be musical blasphemy to blunt that talent. Besides, he explained, I would find a way despite her efforts. Of course, he was right and she relaxed her objections and began to help me.

But back to the damned organs, as I often thought of them. Jack began to sell so many of them that he had me, the newly licensed teenager, doing some of the deliveries on my own. There were times when he had a gig or another delivery and I had to get the thing there myself.

Those organs and I did not get along and I could never quite get the wheel chocks situated properly so danger was always lurking behind my back. If I had to stop short, there was a decent chance that the organ was going to move. If it merely moved and smacked into the back of the driver’s seat, that was acceptable. But the other possibility was that the thing would come crashing over sideways and I’d have a Hammond shipwreck on my hands, searching for survivors, hoping that there was no permanent damage.

There were times when, BOOM, that organ would land sideways on the truck bed and the only solace I gained from that was at least it was now stable. Jack just had no efficient way of locking the beast down to the floor of the van so that wouldn’t happen and so every trip by myself was an anxious trek, wondering when the wrong turn would send it careening into the back of my head. My real fear was that it wouldn’t play when I got to the delivery point but they must have made those things tough because only once did I show up with an organ that was DOA and was forced to admit to Jack that it had taken a slight tumble in transit.

Even when I knew he was angry about it, he always had a gentle hand with me and never once chained me to the back of a Wurlitzer like he might have dreamed of doing. He was a friend to me and a friend to my mother, the likes of which I don’t believe she ever had again in non-husband form.

He was there for you if you had a problem or needed help, and it was the ultimate irony that he died because he didn’t ask for any himself.

Nobody had really seen him for a week or two and all that friends knew was that he was lying low in his apartment trying to recover from a nasty cold. Sadly, the ‘cold’ was pneumonia, and by deciding to ‘ride it out’ on his own rather than seeking help, he ended up succumbing to something that was eminently survivable with the right medical attention.

I believe he was 49 when he died, and it was the loss of a sincerely good human being.

It’s not much of a consolation for his early exit but I have personally memorialized Jack by carrying on some of his traditions: I’ve worked as a professional musician all my life, I’ve got a temperamental back from lifting loads of equipment for all these years, I’m kind to animals and children, sometimes I’m an impatient banshee behind the steering wheel and I’ve had pneumonia…twice.

So, here’s to you Jack. We hardly knew ye.

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