John Sack (24 March 1930 – 27 March 2004) James Stewart Nicholls State University
John Sack was born March 24, 1930, in New York, N.Y., to John Jacob and Tracy Rose (Levy) Sack. At fifteen he began reporting as a stringer for the Mamaroneck (N.Y.) Daily Times at the Boy Scouts of America's Camp Siwanoy in New York; Sack eventually would become an Eagle Scout. He was graduated cum laude by Harvard University in 1951 with a B.A. in English. As an undergraduate at Harvard, Sack was an editor of The Harvard Crimson. From 1949 to 1951 he was the Harvard stringer for both the UP and the Boston Globe. In the summer of 1950 he covered a mountain-climbing expedition on Yerupaja, at the time the highest unclimbed mountain in the Americas, as a correspondent in Peru for United Press. This project provided the material for his first book, The Butcher: The Ascent of Yerupaja (1952). Sack's first full-time reporting job began after he volunteered for the U.S. Army in 1952. Requesting, and receiving, posting to the Far East Command, Sack served as a front-line reporter covering the western front of the Korean War for Stars and Stripes. During that time he also published stories in Harper's and The New Yorker. In 1953 his status as a correspondent ended when he stowed away overnight aboard an American landing ship to interview Chinese prisoners of war and was arrested by the American military police when the ship docked at Pusan, South Korea. As a result, Sack, facing court-martial charges, was reassigned to a mailroom in Tokyo where his job was to hand out postage stamps to Japanese. After a month there, with the Army unable to find a specific violation with which to charge him, Sack was ordered back to Korea as an infantryman. Sack requested a meeting with the Inspector General in Tokyo. Although he received no help from the IG's office, Sack used the one-day delay to find a job with the Voice of the United Nations Command writing radio news for translation into Chinese and Korean. When his Army enlistment expired in 1953, he immediately returned to Korea as a reporter for UP.
Sack continued reporting for UP in Korea, Japan and Taiwan until 1954. From 1954 to 1955 he was a legislative correspondent for UP covering the New York State Senate. By 1953 he had started writing humor for The New Yorker. Over the next eight years he wrote more satire for the magazine than anyone except S.J. Perelman and James Thurber. In 1959, he published Report from Practically Nowhere, a lighthearted account of his tour through 13 of the world's smallest independent nations, including one, located in the same city as the Vatican, so tiny its borders were encompassed by a building about half the size of a football field. Over time, however, he became frustrated with working for The New Yorker, which would not let him address what he felt were socially significant issues. He left the magazine in 1961, but humor, though sometimes black, can be found in most of his later work. After leaving The New Yorker, Sack became a writer/producer for CBS News. In his first year at CBS he worked on Eyewitness, a weekly prime-time program, and in the second year moved to Calendar, a daily daytime show. After spending 1963-64 in graduate school as a CBS Fellow at Columbia University, Sack returned to CBS as a writer/producer/special correspondent, and spent the next two years with the network's documentary unit and the CBS Evening News with Walter Cronkite and serving as CBS bureau chief in Madrid. Though his three earlier books included many of the elements which define New Journalism, Sack came of age as a New Journalist with M (1967)... More Dictionary of Literary Biography: |