Let me start off by thanking everyone for all the kind thoughts and well-wishes as “Operation Burger Dog” unfolded. I really do believe that positive energy and effort can and does create more positive energy and this is yet another example…
I also believe that not everything happens randomly, and even in this comparatively small effort, there were elements that could just not be explained by anything other than fate or divine intervention of some sort. Indeed maybe it was all of Jack’s running buddies from the Club, who have unfortunately long since passed on, that somehow guided the weekend from their vantage point, making sure that their buddy got taken care of on his last go-round out there…Maybe it was something or someone else, too.
By way of a not-brief bio, Jack was born in 1923, and moved to Oakland back in the early 50’s, where he met my future father-in-law and other eventual life-long friends at the University Club by Lake Merritt, a gathering place for post-war era men, trying to find their way in business in the Bay Area. He and my father-in-law eventually bought a boat and had Slip #1 in the St. Francis Yacht Club by Crissy Field down in Marina for many years, and it was a hub of “extracurricular activity” for much of that time. Rumor has it that, back in the old Rat Pack-like days of late 50’s/early 60’s San Francisco, many a party-goer would come from one side of the boat while the previous party-goer would leave by the other side of the boat, if you know what I mean…
Eventually, real life got in the way, and many of the running buddies found wives, careers, other hobbies and moved away from the City, but Jack stayed true to San Francisco all the way through.
While he had his chances to marry and start his own family, it never quite worked out that way, and he settled into his routine of Giants games, 49ers games and his work as an aluminum salesman for Kaiser, which he did until the late-1980s. The entire state of California was his territory and he must have logged hundreds of thousands of miles in his big Chevys or Buicks (always American-made cars, and usually GM!) over the years. He re-kindled his passion for golf, from his early days growing up in Rochester, NY and playing Oak Hill, CC of Rochester and the like, by joining the Olympic Club in the late 1950s. He played to a 4 HCP until as late as his 60th birthday, and was still in the low double-digits into his early 70s. He proudly displayed his hole-in-one plaque from #3 on the Lake, which was his favorite of his aces, because he could actually see it go in! He hated the par 3s on the back because you could never see the greens. He never went back to the Old Course because it was too brown, but loved going to the old-guard clubs of the Northeast, because “you could smell how good the turf was!”. He knew the yardages to the center of the greens from every tree on the Lake, and almost every tree on the Ocean, at least until the multiple recent renovations there in the last two decades.
His home for much of his time at the Olympic Club was a broad stretch of turf below the massive parking lot, over much of what is now the end of the first fairway/green of the Ocean Course, I believe. He would take his shag bag and his transistor radio down there and whack iron after iron, with that simple low draw, back and forth on that lawn, listening to Lon Simmons and then Hank Greenwald broadcast Giants games on KNBR. His best friends at the Olympic Club always seemed to be working folks, the caddies, the guys in the bag room, the “broads” (term used affectionately) at the grills, and many of the younger pros—maybe he just always seemed a bit more comfortable with them because he grew up like so many of them. Whatever the case may have been, Jack was a member at the Olympic Club up until two years ago, when the State of California finally realized what the rest of knew many years before, that Jack’s time behind the wheel had come to an end…Those last few years at the club I may have been one of the few people he allowed to play with him out there, or that he would take out onto the course, as I think it just bugged him that he couldn’t play like he used to…always proud of his game, to a fault, and he still is perhaps the last guy I’ve seen trying to play a 2-iron at age 80!
His prowess on the links opened up a lot of doors for him, but he was always proudest of getting to play in the Kaiser International Open several times in the late 60’s/early 70’s. He has framed pictures of himself with Arnold Palmer, Billy Casper and others, and his proudest memento was a framed scorecard from a Kaiser Pro-Am, when he played with Arnie and Jack’s ball counted on more separate holes than his hero’s did. Of course, back in those days, you were either an Palmer guy, or a Nicklaus guy, and Jack loved Arnie and did not care for that other Jack at all, no siree…