Lifetime Adventure

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.