Jack Carey: My Longest And Best Friend 3/4/16
I met Jack Carey in 1969. I had written a book on Chemistry, Energy, and the Environment and had sent it out to a number of publishers. Most wanted to publish it. I got a phone call from Jack Carey saying that he wanted to visit me at a rural college in North Carolina where I was teaching and talk to me about publishing my book with Wadsworth Publishing Company, which I had never heard of.Jack: As I write these words, I have tears of sadness. But I also have tears of joy over our rare and incredible friendship. If there is an afterlife and we meet again, I am sure you will have an idea for another book and we will be off and running again.
I met Jack Carey in 1969. I had written a book on Chemistry, Energy, and the Environment and had sent it out to a number of publishers. Most wanted to publish it. I got a phone call from Jack Carey saying that he wanted to visit me at a rural college in North Carolina where I was teaching and talk to me about publishing my book with Wadsworth Publishing Company, which I had never heard of.Jack: As I write these words, I have tears of sadness. But I also have tears of joy over our rare and incredible friendship. If there is an afterlife and we meet again, I am sure you will have an idea for another book and we will be off and running again.
He arrived, sick as a dog, and persuaded me to publish my book with Wadsworth with him as editor. That was the beginning of more than 40 years of friendship and working together that has resulted in me writing and the company publishing 65 college textbooks (including multiple editions) most of them introductory textbooks on environmental science. It changed his life and my life and together we changed the world and developed a wonderful lifelong friendship.
Jack and I are intensely passionate about what we do. He was dedicated to publishing outstanding textbooks and I wanted to write them. In the early 1970s the first environmental science courses were being taught. But no one had figured out what instructors wanted in an environmental science textbook.
In true form, Jack sent out questionnaires to all of the environmental instructors he could find. Then we spent 2 days in a hotel room going over hundreds of responses. Because environmental science is an interdisciplinary field that combines chemistry, biology, physics, economics, politics and ethics, we learned that teachers wanted us to include every thing in an environmental science textbook. To solve this problem, we came up with the idea of having a core of chapters presenting the scientific essentials that allowed instructors to use any of the book’s chapters in essentially any order.
In 1975, the first edition of Living in the Environment was published and immediately took over the marketplace. From then on I have wanted to change the world by educating people about how the earth works, how we are degrading our own life-support system, and how we can live more sustainably, Since then that book and 2 smaller versions of it have been the most widely used introductory environmental science textbooks in the United States and the world. In October 2016, the 19th edition of Living in the Environment will be published.
Every time I finished a book Jack had an idea for another type of book. Jack is an incredibly persuasive and persistent person. Sometimes I gave him various reasons for not doing a book and he would respond with 20 reasons why I should. Then the next day he would call me and say something like: “Here is the 24th reason why you should write this book” and I ended up writing the book.
Here is something you may not know about Jack. He invented the modern pull along behind you suitcase. He was on the road selling books several months a year and wanted the perfect traveling suitcase. Over the years I watched as he had someone build him increasingly better versions of a compact small mobile suitcase. I guess he should have patented it. An airline pilot saw him rolling his suitcase toward a plane and copied it, patented it, and probably made millions.
Over the years, I got to know and follow the lives of his two wonderful children. I also got to know Cecie, a wonderful wife and companion and an incredibly talented writer of biology textbooks (I have always wanted to write half as well as she does.).
I love you,
— Ty
2 comments:
Ty, I know how much Jack cherished you, and we both understood full well the astonishing force for change that your collaboration represented. I also know that, as abiding friends, you helped each other through some difficult times. Thank you for that. And thank you for writing your tribute when you did. A few days before Jack left us, I read it to him. He listened intently and his breathing became so calm I almost cried. You gave him an unbearably touching gift. He no longer could breathe well enough to speak clearly, but he managed to whisper that he loves you back. I thought you should know. — Cecie
I well remember that fateful day when Jack signed Ty Miller to his first book. Pete Cokinos and I were enjoying a well deserved holiday on Rehoboth Beach when I received an urgent call from my land lady telling me to call Jack in the office. When I called, his EA told me Jack was on his way to North Carolina to sign an author and that I needed to meet him at the airport the following morning. Knowing that the "Prime Directive" at Wadsworth was that signing an author took priority over everything else, I canceled my holiday and drove home. When I met Jack at the airport, he had a bad case of hives (from some strawberries he had eaten, I believe) and was as miserable as any human I had ever seen. He had to take his shirt off as we drove the 100 miles to Saint Andrews Presbyterian College, a school I had never heard of, let alone visited. When we arrived, Jack was able to put his shirt on, but he fidgeted and scratched the entire time he tried to convince Ty to sign with Wadsworth, a publisher he did not know, that had virtually no textbooks in his field, but did have the strangest acting editor (as well as the most perplexed sales representative) he had ever seen. After a couple of hours, though, Jack was able to convince Ty that Wadsworth was the right publisher for him, or maybe he just wanted to get us out of his office so he could have some peace. Whichever, Jack "closed the sale" and the rest is history. That was probably the strangest (and most successful) book signing in Jack's colorful history.
Thanks, Jack, for that day and for your friendship.
Charlie Delmar
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