Remembering Jack Schaefer
And the advice he gave writers
Back in the mid-1980s I had a management job at a bookstore in Santa Fe, New Mexico. I’ve worked in numerous bookstores across several states but working at that Santa Fe bookstore was one of my favorite bookstore jobs. While the pay was meager there was one particular perk of this particular bookstore and that is that it was in downtown Santa Fe and a lot of celebrities shopped there. A lot.
My favorite celebrity customer was Jack Schaefer who authored over 25 books. It was always exciting to meet successful authors. Jack Schaefer is best known for his first novel, Shane, which was published in 1949 and sold several million copies and was later made into a movie. That book has been credited with helping to start the ‘American western novel’ genre. (Nowadays it is being marketed as a teen/young adult novel.)
At the time I was working at that bookstore Mr. Schaefer was in his eighties. He would come into the store with his wife. She would then pass him off to us and then go do her shopping. An hour or so later she would come back to collect him and take him home. It was almost like we were babysitting him.
Oh, but how delightful that was! We would bring a chair from the back room out to the front of the store for him to sit in and then he would proceed to tell stories for…
