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JACK'S TIMELINE
1946 - Born San Pedro, California, father a longshoreman
1961-1964 - San Pedro High School
1964-1966 - Pomona College, Clarement, loses scholarship after two years and kicked out for marijuana use
1966-1967 - Long Beach State College, English Literature
1968 - Drafted out of graduate school and sent to army radio school. Works in a radar trailer in Thailand, monitoring B-52 raids and dispatching helicopter rescue teams.
1970 - Travels around the world for a year, spends time in Southern Africa.
1971-2 - Long Beach State, Masters in English Literature
1973- Takes work as technical writer at various aerospace companies
1982 - Marries Redondo Beach schoolteacher, Kathy McDonough
1983 - Jack and Kathy buy a small house in Redondo Beach and fix it up.
1986 - Daughter Maeve Mary born
1995 - Following the end of the cold war, his aerospace subsidiary goes out of business, laying him off without benefits.
1996 - A lost year of drinking and drugs; Kathy leaves him.
1997 - Discovers he has a talent for finding missing children, starts to get his life together. Discovers what happened to the missing Senora Beltran in The Concrete River.
1999 - Falls in love with aging movie star Lori Bright right before the great 1999 earthquake, in The Cracked Earth.
2000 - Finds missing boy and rescues him from the great Burbank chemical gas spill, in The Poison Sky.
2001 - Moves in with Marlena Cruz in her small house in Mar Vista. Searches for a missing Vietnamese girl in Orange County and runs afoul of a tormented serial killer, in The Orange Curtain.
2002 - Jack is nearly killed in the new rioting in South Central L.A. and Maeve and a friend rescue him in Streets on Fire.
2003 - Jack hunts for a missing Iranian boy in City of Strangers and is nearly killed stopping a terror bombing in downtown L.A.
2004 - Jack visits his old haunts in San Pedro to help an old friend who is being stalked by an angry Japanese American veteran in Terminal Island. He meets his future significant other, Gloria Ramirez.
2005 - Jack and Gloria hunt a missing Native American girl and get caught up in a dangerous brushfire in Malibu, in Dangerous Games.
2007 - Jack is looking for a missing Korean American girl but gets picked up by Homeland Security and sent by extraordinary rendition to a private military company for waterboarding.
Copyright © John Shannon 2008. All rights reserved.