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Thanks, Jack: Memories of Growing up in the 1940s & ’50s – Under
The Watchful Eye of a Guardian Angel
A rain-soaked highway; a crash; a seventeen-year-old’s brain addled by the shock of seeing the car he’d only owned for hours – in flames. Light on the trees above gave form to a smiling face, which he suddenly recognizes: the image of his long-dead older brother. Why, he asks himself, is he still alive?
If you seek verifiable proof of real-life miracles, you need look no further than this book. The story is, in a word, astounding.
Thanks, Jack: In Need of a Miracle (322 pp., tpb, $19.95) revisits vivid memories of a World War II and mid-twentieth-century New England childhood; colorful memories of a boy who grew up in a large family that could supply few material resources beyond the basics.
Johnnie Rose grew up in small-town America, in the shadow of an older brother, Jack, who had died at the age of twelve. Their mother, who blamed herself for her elder son’s untimely death, found solace when Jack returned to her in a vision to tell her that God was sending her another child to take his place. Johnnie was born two years from the day Jack died. Literally – two years, to the day and to the minute.
Jack had made a pact with God to never again let his mother suffer the loss of a child, and had assumed the job of keeping Johnnie alive long enough to reach maturity. This was no easy assignment. From getting his little brother out of relatively minor scrapes, to engineering a miraculous escape from a burning car, Jack never once let his mother – or his brother – down.
Author Jack Rose finally outgrew his childhood nickname of Johnnie and claimed the name of Jack that his mother would never permit to be uttered in her presence. It wasn’t until an early morning in 1959 (when he learned that he and his wife had barely escaped being buried alive along with others who had been camping at a particular spot they’d passed up in Yellowstone), that he finally had to acknowledge that something absolutely inexplicable was going on in his life. He had the foresight to start a hand-written list, which forty-five years later became the basis for this book.
The many items on this long list, made this book only cover the first seventeen years of Johnnie’s life. Other mind-boggling events include:
* A fall out of a tree house at the age of seven. When his mother realized that he’d managed to impale one hand on a nail; her immediate reaction was, “Oh my God, you tried to crucify yourself!”
* The Robert Frost moment – kids swinging on thirty-foot-tall birch trees. If Johnnie’s buddy Bogie just hadn’t kicked that beehive, Jack could have taken the afternoon off. But Bogie’s toe connected squarely with the hive, and Jack had to come to the rescue, saving Johnnie from a return trip to the top – where the bees were waiting for him.
* The time Johnnie tried spear fishing – for a squirrel. Jack tried to warn him, but Johnnie had to try spearing the animal, which was safely up a tree as it was. The spear went up – and came back to earth, nearly killing the author.
* Not to mention a Boy Scout camp and a dive off an off-limits bridge; and an unnoticed concrete wall, lurking just beneath the water. There was no justification for how Johnnie escaped that time.
Jack Rose hails from Springfield, Massachusetts. He married at an early age and moved to California to chase his dream of becoming a mechanical engineer. Following another dream, he later returned to northern New England to restore an old farm. He now enjoys living with his wife in the White Mountains of northern New Hampshire.
Some of us might long to encounter but a single miracle in a lifetime. But for those fortunate few among us, people like Johnnie, miracles have become a frequent occurrence.
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