The best TV critic, ever

Just a summer intern at the St. Petersburg Times, I didn't really know anybody at the newsroom party I had wandered into that June evening in 1974. I sat down on a couch and the guy at the other end -- I recognized him as a young editor on the copy desk -- extended his hand and said, "Hi, I'm Terry Jackson." I could not possibly have imagined that we would work together at three newspapers; that I would be the best man at his wedding; that I would follow him into the job as the Miami Herald's TV critic; or that, 35 years later, I would be writing his obituary.

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Terry Jackson, a Miami Herald editor who stood 5-foot-2 but seemed larger than life to everybody who knew him, died Tuesday after battling -- a cliché, by the way, that would have been cut from this story if he were editing it -- esophageal cancer for two years.

Jackson lived to be 57 -- about 40 years longer than doctors predicted after he contracted polio at 13 months old and spent a good part of childhood in a full body cast.

The disease left him with one leg the circumference of a broomstick and a contorted back "that twists like 40 miles of mountain road," as Jackson described it. Doctors warned his parents that his life would be short and sedentary.

Instead, it was a big-screen adventure streaked with tabloid thrills. Jackson raced vintage cars at 120 mph, hobnobbed with gangsters, drove 500 miles along a meandering dirt trail through the Alaskan tundra to dip his fingers into the Arctic Ocean, wrote six books and helped win two Pulitzer Prizes.

And every step of the way he sneered at doctors and sob-sister counselors who said he couldn't. "There was no surer way to tick him off than to suggest that he make allowances for his condition -- at any point over the years and especially as the cancer advanced," said former Herald writer Martin Merzer.

Jackson's journalism career, which started 39 years ago with a summer job as a copyboy at the old Fort Lauderdale News, contained two tours at the Herald (which hired him, he liked to say, to fill its "crutch quota''), and ended with him directing day-to-day operations of the Herald's Tropical Life department, was enough to fill two or three résumés.

It included newspaper jobs in St. Petersburg, Naples, Jacksonville, Austin, Tex., and Sacramento, Calif. At the Sacramento Bee, he directed a 1992 series on environmental destruction in the Sierra Nevada mountains that won a Pulitzer for public service; in Miami, during a five-year stint as TV critic, he shared in the Pulitzer awarded to the Herald staff for coverage of the seizure of Elián González.

But it was what he did outside newsrooms that was the stuff of Jacksonian legend. His passion for cars and casinos triggered one perilous caper after another. Covering the 1977 World Series of Poker, he interviewed one gambler who subsequently staked him to a share of a bar. The place was sufficiently adventurous that Jackson took to carrying a gun. Another interview landed him in court as a witness when the gambler was accused of murdering a federal judge.

Jackson's escapades with cars -- rooted, no doubt, in the years he spent in the body cast -- were only marginally less madcap. "When he was just a baby in that cast, he taught himself to roll over and pull himself along the floor with his hands," remembered Kathie Powell, Jackson's sister. "He always wanted to be mobile."

In calmer moments, that translated to writing: Jackson authored six books on cars. In wilder ones, he took a 1965 Mustang GT 350 on the vintage racing circuit, running -- and often winning -- Mittyesque duels with other don't-quit-your-day-job drivers on famous tracks like Daytona, Sebring and Watkins Glen. And writing car columns in Sacramento and Miami, he persuaded manufacturers to lend him test models for ever more improbable odysseys, topped by his 1996 trek to the Arctic on a narrow wilderness road through two mountain ranges.

"Everybody warned us to take a spare windshield because the road was so rough," said Herald editor Marjie Lambert, Jackson's wife of 28 years. "When we told Ford we wanted an extra windshield, they just kind of looked at us." But the trip ended with Jackson, Lambert and the windshield all intact.

Jackson's contempt for all things safe and sane extended into practically every corner of his life, especially eating. He once wrote a lascivious ode to the Double Quarter Pounder with Cheese (‘‘and a side order of Lipitor!'') for the Herald. His newsroom colleagues saluted him Wednesday with an afternoon repast of Oreos and Coca-Cola -- or, as Jackson referred to it, the Breakfast of Champions.

Jackson is survived by his wife; sister Kathie Powell of Reisterstown, Md., and brother Larry Rank of Phoenix. A memorial service is being planned.

Comments

[John]

It seems that in a relatively short amount of years Mr Jackson lived several lifetimes..Rest in Peace Mr Jackson

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