At the height of his career, Emmy Award-winner Jack Perkins and his wife Mary Jo moved from Los Angeles—population eight million—to a tidal island off the coast in Maine, population zero. Years earlier, in the shadow of Acadia National Park, they had built their solar-powered cabin, heated only by a wood stove. But now they were moving there for good, abandoning the smog of L.A. for the fog of Bar Harbor. Finding Moosewood, Finding God: What Happened When a TV Newsman Abandoned His Career for Life on an Island is Perkins’s gentle spiritual memoir and autobiography, published in March. Perkins will give an author’s talk about the book at the Camden Public Library on Thursday evening, June 13, at 7:00 pm. Sherman’s Books will have books on hand for signing.
The book is the story of the Perkins’s move to an island in Maine, which would turn out to be as spiritual as it was physical; the book intersperses the story of Perkins building and moving to the rustic cabin he dubbed “Moosewood,” with anecdotes from a successful career in journalism that began in Ohio with his coverage of the Sam Sheppard murder trial. In the quiet of the woods, surrounded by water and wildlife, Perkins became aware of God in a way that seemed impossible when he was covering the biggest news stories of our time.
Emmy Award-winner Jack Perkins worked for over forty years in television and radio, including stints as an NBC News correspondent, and most recognizably, as host of the acclaimed A&E series, Biography. Perkins has interviewed some of the most notable celebrities and politicians of our time, and covered some of the most dramatic events of the past century, including the Civil Rights struggle, the Cuban Missile Crisis and the Kennedy Assassination. Once dubbed America’s “most literate correspondent” by the Associated Press, Perkins continues to be as active in his retirement as most people are at the height of their careers. His narration can be heard on videos for Acadia National Park, the Biltmore estate in North Carolina, and the Edison Museum in Ft. Myers, Florida. Jack lives today in Florida with Mary Jo, his wife of fifty-three years.
Perkins gives readers insights into his encounters with a wide range of newsmakers and celebrities, from actor James Cagney to a young Stephen King. He takes readers through not only his spiritual awakening, but also along his interesting career path, including how he landed a job with NBC, working directly under broadcaster David Brinkley and covering big stories like the Civil Rights movement, the Cuban Missile Crisis (Perkins recalls how he was playing cards at Press Secretary Pierre Salinger’s house the night before the nuclear standoff became public knowledge, with Salinger taking phone calls every five minutes), and the Kennedy Assassination, a grim assignment that found him gathering wire reports for David Brinkley to read aloud to a national audience still in shock.
Throughout these dramatic turns of history, Perkins recognizes pangs of something deeper that was stirring within, something that would eventually lead him to build his Maine hermitage and begin his search for God. It was an admittedly strange turnabout for a lifelong agnostic with little interest in the intangible. And yet there was a growing “awareness” of the spiritual that seemed to coincide with the building of Moosewood; “an awareness of some of the simplest realities of our daily lives,” Perkins writes; one that can get lost in the deadlines and telling of others’ tales, when perhaps what Perkins needed most was to discover his own story.
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