Jack Fritz’s memoir—A Lifetime Adventure—is aptly titled. After reading it, you’ll come away wondering how one man could have packed so much living into eight-plus decades.
From growing up on the shores of Lake Michigan to living the majority of his life on the shores of Puget Sound, Jack checked all the boxes of a life well-lived—including the pretty wife and two kids that are an essential part of the fabled “American Dream.”
After a Huck Finn kind of boyhood, that included learning to hunt (animals and fowl, as well as pretty maidens), he went to college and was on the football team, until a concussion ended his playing career. After college, his love of the water led him to enlist in the U.S. Navy, which afforded him his first chance to see the world—and he and his buddies took full advantage of the opportunity in the various ports of call.
After mustering out of the Navy, he—like so many other veterans at the time—went to work for the Boeing Company in Seattle, where he applied his education and training in Industrial Engineering in ways that saved the company millions and led to a variety of jobs in the personnel and training fields—from the Washington state capital of Olympia to the oil fields of Alaska, with a side trip to Saudi Arabia.
While working at Boeing, Jack met one Jill Johnson on a ski outing at Stevens Pass. They shared a chairlift ride and—in the words of the fairy tale—“Jack and Jill went up the hill…”—and on to a lifetime of further adventure—together.
They took trips to Scandinavia to trace their roots, trips to many mountain resorts to fulfill their mutual love of skiing, and—in the later years—annual “snowbird” trips to their Winter home in SaddleBrooke, AZ. There, they both became champion senior swimmers and enjoyed cycling in the nearby hills—but neither interfered with their obligatory daily Happy Hour, either together or with their friends.
Jack even shares a couple of health scares he had in later life—all of which he’d recovered from as he penned his page-turning assembly of recollections at the ripe old age of 87.
This is one man’s memoir, and it’s also an inspirational handbook on how to live life to the fullest.
