“The guy was a conservative Christian,” says Jack, “because it suited his larcenous make-up. These people are always quoting Luke 19: ‘Occupy till I come.’ In other words, Jesus is on his way, business as usual, never mind this conservation baloney.”
As part of a Walpurgisnacht of rollbacks and deregulation, executed in tandem with Anne Gorsuch at the newly-Reaganized EPA, the plug got pulled on For Spacious Skies. The blinds came down in the office on State Street. No more franking machine, toll-free number, or gorgeous humming Xerox. “He did us in,” says Jack.
So Jack regrouped. “I reduced my scale of living, and it didn’t bother me that much. A lot of people I knew in TV, they needed it — a lot of money, a lot of cars, a lot of wives. They needed it, always in an accumulative state. I was not afflicted with that.”
If he couldn’t be a semi-official lobule of the Department of the Interior, he’d be a roaming avatar to schools: the sky would be brought to the children, blazed into the curriculum. With grants from Polaroid and Bausch & Lomb, Jack designed cloud charts, worksheets, and a 52-page cross-disciplinary activity guide for teachers and home-schoolers. Local TV weathermen were the engine of his campaign, talking up the program up evening newscasts.
It took off. Elementary school-kids across the country started writing in sky journals, composing sky poetry, learning the difference between cumulonimbus and altostratus. A study by the Harvard Graduate School of Education established that children exposed to the For Spacious Skies program averaged a 37 percent improvement in music appreciation and a 13 percent improvement in literary skill. (Jack will hit you with these numbers at the slightest provocation.)
It was For Spacious Skies: The Glory Years. In 1986 the American Meteorological Society bestowed upon Jack its Award for Outstanding Services to Meteorology. The $6 activity guides, meanwhile, were flying out the door in the tens of thousands: an endorsement from Family Circle magazine in 1988 netted Jack “a freakin’ blizzard of cash.” A year later he got another visit from the fundamentalists, but this time it was benign: the house magazine of James Dobson’s Focus on the Family ran a highly complimentary feature, noting that among the applications of Jack’s activity guide are “handwriting and Bible study.”
“I got eight- or 9000 orders out of that,” says Jack. “But then a lot of these people start calling me up, asking, ‘Where’s Jesus in all this? You don’t mention him at all.’ So I quoted Romans 1 at them: ‘For the invisible things of Him from the creation of the world are clearly seen, being understood by the things that are made.’ . . . That seemed to settle them down.”
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SKY CANDY Can you identify the clouds? Answers at the end of the article.
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Over the rainbow
“Ever seen a sun dog?” Nope. “The technical name for it is a parhelion. Like a piece of a rainbow, usually in a cirrus cloud. In New England, without trying hard you should be able to see about 30 of them a year. It’s virtually a litmus test for sky-awareness.”
Oh, dear. Apparently I don’t pass the test.
A week or so after meeting Jack, I make myself available to the sky. On a bench on lower Harvard Street, I offer it the surface of my occluded brain. Protein particles sail across my retinas as I squint up into a totally unclassifiable afternoon — gray doom over the Allston basin, bursts of wild blue taunting the top of Corey Hill. A half-assed rain is falling, sufficient to darken the road and cause the wheels of passing cars to make vicious noises of imprecation. I apprehend that the Earth is under philosophical siege from the sky — that the great clouds, with their dishevelment and their preposterous levity, are an assault upon our laden, controlling world. And then I compliment myself upon the depth of these reflections and take a slurp of my coffee. I think I could get into this.
In 2008, things have slowed down a touch for Jack. He no longer hotfoots it around the country. He’ll go on a radio show from time to time, he continues to lobby persons of influence, and he keeps a weather-eye open, but a new generation of educators has proved less susceptible to his ethereal agitations. The expected victory has eluded him.
“My idea was simply this: that here’s this canopy, this nonstop evanescent extravaganza, it’s there. All you have to do is be steered to it, and the moment you’re opened up to it, it’ll be simple as pie, it’ll catch on, it’ll be contagious, and television is gonna lead the way to it. What happens is: it doesn’t work out!”
Not that Jack will ever stop, or give any thought to stopping. He was always a one-man band. “Life’s a drag if you ain’t got a gig,” he says. “And the more meritorious that gig is, the less insipid your life will be.”
