Events on the ground, however, were taking a dark turn. The Reagan years had begun, and the new secretary of the interior was James Gaius Watt, a man memorably described by one of his opponents as having “all the political skills and public-relations sense of a boa constrictor.” Watt was a personal friend of Jesus Christ and a hardboiled fuck-up-the-Earther, genuinely apocalyptic in his commitment to corporate spoliation: his fondest vision, oft-declared, was that, by the turn of the century, every inch of the country’s 80 million acres of virgin wilderness would have been opened up to drilling and mining.
“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.”
