My great friend, Jack Woodruff, died not long ago. I have wrestled unsuccessfully with that sad fact for a while. It is hard to describe what he meant to me but I owe it to him, and all who knew him, to try.
Jack appeared in my life in 1971, my junior year at UC-Riverside. He was a shy, curly blond kid from Big Bear Lake. I was sharing a house with five other students. We needed a sixth roommate to occupy the smallest, crappiest room in the house. Jack turned out to be the guy. The rent perfectly fit his small, crappy budget.
That was a financial theme in his life. Jack was not a child of privilege. He never knew his real parents. He worked his way through college. When we were rooming together in Riverside, he often came home late, dog-tired and splattered with marinara sauce, the result of six hours a night washing dishes at a “family-style” Italian restaurant. For those unfamiliar with the term, “family-style Italian” means a ton of dirty dishes and lousy pay. Later, he got his teaching credential while driving a street sweeper five nights a week on the graveyard shift.
He always complained but he never quit.
The year that we met, Jack and my future wife, Barbara, (along with her three roommates, including Jack’s future wife, Viki) bailed my ass out of an emergency $300 tow truck bill. Jack’s contribution was $220, every cent of his monthly allowance for food, tuition, and rent. I paid them all back the next day but I admonished Jack.
“That was your food and rent, man!” I said. “What were you thinking?”
“I figured you were good for the money.”
There are lots of people who will loan you money but a guy who will loan you everything he has when you need it…well, that’s a friend for life.
Even then, I never realized how intertwined our lives would become. Jack married Victoria Ruth Allen not long after I married Barb, a rare parlay of two sets of college roommates. Their children were born within weeks of ours, girls all around, gorgeous girls. During the holidays, our two young families always headed up into the Santa Cruz Mountains to hack down a couple of unsuspecting Christmas trees. Somehow, the trees never saw us coming.
One time, six of us—two sets of parents plus Rebecca and Katie—went to dinner at Pedro’s Restaurant in Santa Clara. It was a big splurge for us in those days. The two tiny girls proceeded to destroy the table, dunking bread in water glasses, performing chemistry experiments with table drinks, food fights. I mean, destroy, like miniature Visigoths. But we let them sack Pedro’s anyway because they did so quietly. For the precious, single hour of uninterrupted conversation, we young parents left the largest gratuity in the history of Silicon Valley. Several busboys retired on that tip. It was worth every penny.
Barb and I miss that dinner.
Jack and I loved sports, and drinking together, and being Dads, old school. Few people know this but we were also committed scholars. In college, after a few beers, Jack and I developed the economic theory of “The Stupid Factor.” Why, we posited, is every budget, every project in human history routinely cock-eyed no matter how many experts are involved? Because no one ever accounts for the mysterious “stupid factor,” the one moment of idiocy no one ever figures will happen because everyone thinks they know more than they do and no one wants to look stupid.
I admit our thinking was a little circular, like the bottom of a Coors beer can. Jack wanted to write up “The Stupid Factor” as a joint Ph.D. dissertation in economics. (I would do the writing and he would do the thinking.) I declined because I was committed to my own dissertation on “Farting as a Plot Device in English Literature.”
For some reason, neither Jack nor I were granted our doctorates.
Jack worked many years as a compliance officer for several brokerage houses in San Francisco and Denver. A compliance officer is a traffic cop for stock traders. Truly ironic, a guy grinding out every dime he got, keeping track of fast money guys in the go-go 1980’s and 90’s. Nobody paid any attention to compliance officers until everything fell apart. Then it was guys like Jack who had to answer questions from the SEC.
Jack led a life he hadn’t bargained for. Viki’s death at 40 blindsided all of us, shocked everyone but Jack most of all. He was still learning to be a Dad and then, suddenly, he had to be the Mom, too. I think it was too much for him. He made a lot of mistakes as a Dad, which he would have admitted. He was lost for a long time.
He eventually left Fremont and headed north to Redding where Rebecca, his older daughter, lived. I think he saw an opportunity to be a Dad again, a Granddad. A chance to be a better Dad, really, an opportunity to make amends.
That was the plotline of Jack’s life: A guy without a family, builds a family, then loses his family (and himself,) then tries to find his family again.
He was as much a part of my family as anybody. We held a birthday party for my Mother in a mezzanine suite at the Oakland Coliseum. Jack was there. We held a 100th birthday celebration for my mother-in-law, Agnes. Jack was there. He was there every time, in search of family. Fortunately, his search included my family and me.
We had a good run, more than half a century as friends. Not many can claim such an honor. The last time I saw Jack we were gunning down defenseless paper targets at a shooting range in Boulder City, Nevada. (Hey, the targets had it coming.) Jack had only one functional eye yet he still outshot me, center target practically every time. For that insult, I made him buy tacos and beer at lunch. Typical Jack: He paid the tab cheerfully even though he had won.
Jack knew his wife for too short a time. He worried that his daughters would never really know him. He had to scramble all his life financially. Somehow, through it all, he managed to be a good guy and a standup friend. I will miss him profoundly.
In this life, every one of us needs all the standup guys we can get.