CECIE STARR-CAREY

Jack as a young Acquisitions Editor in the office of Wadsworth Publishing Company, Belmont. 1971

JACK COMPTON CAREY

1939–2016

On March 12, after enduring for three years the insults of an incurable and progressively devastating disease, Jack died in my arms. Everyone who knew him seems to have a Jack Carey story to tell. This is mine. 
— Cecie Starr-Carey

Jack started life being one of a kind and stayed that way for seventy-six years. His dad kept his mom with him as he drove around Oregon selling insurance to farmers out in the fields. She bounced too much over too many rough country roads while pregnant, and on July 7, 1939, she gave birth a month ahead of schedule. Her infant Jack weighed three pounds. Back then, there were no intensive care units, but every hour on the hour, family and friends were there to feed him an ounce of milk through a medicine dropper. Against all odds, in what must have been the first test of his willpower, he made it.

What a family he was born into, one that manifested independent thinking in so many diverse ways. His paternal grandfather Clarence had been a cowhand on the largest ranch in America, one that stretched across Oregon, Utah, and Nevada. He sent his son and daughter off on horses to a little schoolhouse ten miles away and built them a halfway shack to live in during winter, when snow made it harder to get to school on time. Jack’s maternal grandfather James dated Bess Walker, who decided instead to marry Harry Truman, who became the thirty-third President of the United States. James spent the next four years getting degrees in math, chemistry, and physics from the Missouri School of Mines, now the University of Missouri. One afternoon he, the starting quarterback for the football team, laughed at a girl (a girl!) throwing a baseball in front of her sorority house. She furiously took aim and threw it hard enough to knock him down. Smitten, he married her and in time she became Jack’s maternal grandmother. Then there were the infamous fourth cousins, Frank and Jesse James. And world-famous cousins, the Wright Brothers.

By his teens, Jack was happy, popular, and honing the jaw-dropping determination that would make him a legend in publishing. No one sport would do. He had to compete in basketball. In baseball. In track. In cross country. He had to become a tennis champion. Every summer he did what most kids in McMinnville did, hopped on a bus before dawn and headed out to pick strawberries on the vast Willamette Valley farms. It became exceedingly necessary for him to pick more strawberries than anybody else, and by day’s end he alone would be at the far end of the field.

He got it into his head that he wanted to become a doctor, which led from his laidback home town to Dartmouth, where he suddenly found himself competing against New York boys who had been training to become doctors since preschool. He had to study five times as hard to get the same grades. Was he up to it? Of course he was. Upon graduating in 1961 he was accepted into Dartmouth Medical School. War was looming, however. He deferred admission, became an officer candidate in the US Navy, and was assigned to the carrier USS Ranger. His sleeping quarters were near a hydraulic lift that raised and lowered the fighter jets, and throughout his service he felt like he was sleeping inside an asthmatic Moby Dick. He never did see combat. His carrier was part of a fleet in the Gulf of Tonkin when Lyndon Johnson cabled the commanding officers that North Vietnam had launched a torpedo attack and to return fire at will. No one in the fleet actually saw the torpedo and Jack’s commanding officer replied, “Fire at what?”

After completing military service, Jack decided that he no longer had the patience for four years of medical school and five years of internship/residency. A career counselor gave him a personality test, and that is when he discovered he was off the charts in Power of Persuasion. He was about to cross paths with a small publishing company in California. Not long after that, he crossed paths with a willful author who knew, as he did, that it was time to overhaul science education to reflect a major paradigm shift in molecular and evolutionary biology; and his life, and hers, changed forever.