Jack Hunter: A Study in Contradictions

Jack Hunter’s life is a study in contradictions, some interesting, some bizarre, some outright preposterous.

It began with his refusal to stay dead when the doctor gave him up as stillborn.

Then, over the subsequent 86 years:

He ignored schoolbooks and classes as boring and mostly irrelevant but graduated with honors from high school and college.

In college he was no athlete, preferring to be a frat-house lounge lizard, yet was awarded a varsity letter for his management of the school’s renowned track team.

He was too impatient to take music lessons but taught himself and paid for much of his higher education by playing piano in a professional dance orchestra.

He hated regimentation but enlisted in the Army after Pearl Harbor and was eventually decorated for his achievements as an officer in the subsequent shoot-out.

He abhors violence and deviousness but led a counterintelligence team that rounded up and imprisoned 2,000 high-level German Nazi seditionists.

He wrote a novel which leading publishers first disdained as unpublishable but later went on to sell a million copies and become a major movie that still plays today — more than 40 years later — on TV, VCR, and DVD screens worldwide.

He always liked to sketch and paint airplanes and trains and boats, and his first canvases were the margins of his schoolbooks. In his 60s, he remembered the fun of all that and decided to revisit it. After teaching himself from “How-To” books, he became a successful aviation artist — despite his colorblindness, which requires him to use only paints and inks and pastels whose colors are clearly labeled.

He has had 16 novels published and has at least three more on the planning board. One, entitled The Ace, is now nearing completion. A broad-scale view of the human cost of America’s effort in 1917-18 to build and field an air force from scratch after the declaration of war with Imperial Germany, it’s a multi-tiered story that weaves together the lives of a troubled young fighter ace in France, an Army major serving as a consultant to Congress, an unscrupulous Senator, and a beautiful Philadelphia Main Line heiress. Hunter says, “It takes these people, stirs them in the heat of heroic sacrifice, high-level corruption, slam-bang aerial combat, and unrequited love, then serves up a spread unlike anything ever done in World War I literature. A labor of love, it is, to be sure — but a love which I hope is not unrequited.”

Meanwhile, he manages to find time for his music, his painting, and this web site, whose blog, he says, brings him the greatest of an author’s rewards: the satisfaction of writing what he wants to write, when he wants to write it, and for whom he wants to write. Moreover, his blog is open to submissions by his readers — from cranky old geezers like himself to the young, fresh, and aspiring.

Says he, “There are a lot of great people out there who’d love to share vignettes of their life experiences with responsible new friends. Here’s their chance.”