Jack pulls a cigar from a newly opened package and chomps on the end.
Nineteen Forty-seven was the first year I chewed on a cigar,”he comments, sticking it in his mouth. “I was rough-necking in the Elk Basin oil field up near Powell, Wyoming. On Sunday afternoons we played baseball and I was catching a game when someone stuck one in my mouth. I chewed on it until the 6th inning when I got a bit sick. He takes the cigar out of his mouth; looks at it for a moment then sticks it back in. First time ever, he repeats. Playing ball that summer was the best time I ever had, Jack recollects. One Sunday we traveled over 200 miles and I caught one baseball game at Powell and two softball games at Thermopolis. By that third game, I wasn’t rallying the team much at all.
He laughs, loudly and long. In fact hardly five minutes goes by during our three hour conversation that Jack Redden, “retired” geologist, doesn’t laugh long and hard and loud. He calls himself a maverick and that he is, an independent thinker who does things his way. Throughout this interview he took my questions wherever he wanted to go with them eventually meandering back to the answer.
I had come to visit with Jack to ask about the culmination of the last twenty-five years of his life—a 5×4 foot digital geologic map of the Black Hills–but two hours went by before we ever got to that subject. Instead I listened as Jack gave me a stream-of-consciousness journey through his life interjected with laughs and verbal asides like You get me?, and I’ll go you one further…, and I have been very fortunate, and Oh, I didn’t finish my story…and, acknowledging my lack of geologic knowledge, Do you know…you probably don’t…
(Read the rest of this story in Spring ‘09 FACES)
