A Life of Adventure, Art, and Coming Home
Jack Dell was born May 28, 1948, in Springfield, Massachusetts, the son of a Pearl Harbor survivor who served as a Chief Petty Officer in the United States Navy. He grew up in Rockland County, New York, the second of five brothers. His mother, Laurel Jean Dell, grew up in an orphanage in Yonkers, loved poetry and singing, and is the person this book is dedicated to.
In My Mother’s Arms 1949 …“Two Ears and Open Eyes”…
Coaches’ Photo First String 1964
From Varsity Letterman to Self-Made Entrepreneur
After playing high school football in Rockland County, New York, Jack started as a sophomore on the Cortland State University football team and won his college varsity letter. As an undergraduate, he majored in English with minors in Philosophy and Communications. He attended graduate school in Albany and soon became disenchanted, leaving on his own terms and eventually began selling mutual funds door to door; later recruiting, hiring, and training other young men and women into the brokerage business. He continued with all of his outside interests, and as time passed, he became more and more involved with other entrepreneurial ventures that would take several books to account for properly.
From the Gridiron to the World on His Own Terms
Jack Dell with his wife Laura Dell and their dog Rosie.
Along the way, he managed world champion fighters. He owned racehorses and a major stake in a riverboat gaming company. He developed raw land. He fished the Bahamas and the Caribbean—St. Thomas, Tortola, the southern out-islands. He studied Teilhard de Chardin, Napoleon Hill, Han Fei Tzu, Carlos Castaneda, Thoreau Schopenhauer, and scores of others; page by page, underlining sentences and making notes in the columns. He spent hundreds of days on the water and alone in the woods of the Eastern Shore, the forests of northern New Mexico, and the rolling hills of Missouri.
Jack Dell and his family.
A Lifetime of Art, Music, and Storytelling
As long as he can remember, Jack has been drawing, sketching, and doodling with pencils and crayons. In 1977, he bought a book called Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain and started painting—pastels, chalk, and colored pencil. He never stopped. In the 1990s, he assembled a serious collection of American illustration art and edited Visions of Adventure: N.C. Wyeth and the Brandywine Artists, published by Watson-Guptill.
In 2016, Jack bought a guitar and learned the basics in St Augustine, FL. He moved to Nashville and began taking serious vocal lessons from Judy Rodman. He has since recorded three albums (Jack O Hearts and Jack O Hearts 2), and most recently Coming Home Jack Dell, his newest album featuring five original songs based on poems in the book. All are available on Spotify and Apple Music.
Coming Home is his first book of poetry. It has been fifty years in the making.
He lives with his wife, Laura. They have been together since 1992 and spend most of their time between their home outside of Nashville and their farm in Northern Missouri.