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His last name was a second thought. “Maki” seemed more Japanese than “McGilvrey” though he later found out that Maki is a common Finnish surname, too. Jack was a nisei, a person born in North America whose parents were immigrants from Japan. His adoptive American parents, of Scottish descent, gave him the name Jack McGilvrey, raising him in San Francisco in the early 1900s. When Jack eventually married his wife, another nisei, he ditched his adopted surname and chose “Maki” at the suggestion of his father-in-law. They liked the way it sounded, more Japanese, like his new bride.
Just a glimpse into the multi-cultural world of Jack Maki. I was lucky to meet Jack in person in 2002, when he was embarking on a memoir project. Perhaps because he was the first client and author I worked with, or because his gentle and taciturn nature reminded me so much of my father, Jack remains vividly in my heart. At the age of 97, he passed away in 2006, just two years after finishing Voyage Through the Twentieth Century.
As a youth, Jack excelled in English in school and aimed to be a journalist. But his college advisor, with blatant prejudice of the 1930s, told him: “You won’t get a job with those looks…” and Jack dutifully switched majors to history, eventually earning a Ph.D. in political science.
World War II was just beginning when he met and married his wife. As Japanese-Americans living on the West Coast, the couple narrowly escaped internment largely due to the fact that he took a position with the U.S. government in Washington, D.C. When the war ended, Jack was then sent to Japan as part of the reconstruction effort, returning to his parents’ homeland as an American citizen and government employee.
Back in the States, Jack would go on to enjoy a long, tenured professorship at the University of Massachusetts–Amherst. He and his wife raised their family in a one-story, Japanese-style home near a pond. Jack always spoke tenderly of his family members and had unflagging praise for his wife. But his memoir doesn’t focus on her, or their children. One has to read between the lines to learn about them. And this was a great first lesson for me as an editor: In memoir writing, people don’t necessarily want to talk/write about what I, personally, might want to hear about. I am not a ghostwriter, so I followed Jack’s lead in covering the minute details of his academic life and his career. That is who he was, and his legacy is his book, in his words.
I did find out that his late wife loved gardening and plant identification. Jack gave me a book she’d co-authored about the trees of our region, which I still have. Trees in Amherst was published in 1975 by the Garden Club of Amherst. It was through Jack and his wife’s book that I learned about the strong connections between Japan and our local university, UMass–Amherst, in its early days. According to the introduction:
President William Smith Clark, third president of Massachusetts Agricultural College, later to become the University of Massachusetts, was perhaps most responsible for stimulating interest in unusual ornamental trees. His introduction of new species from Japan was one of his most important horticultural contributions to Amherst. In 1876, President Clark was invited by the Japanese government to help establish an agricultural college in Sapporo, on the island of Hokkaido. He modeled it on Massachusetts Agricultural College. During his eight months in Hokkaido, he sent back many kinds of seeds and seedlings of unusual trees which had attracted his attention in Japan. Many were planted on the college grounds or were distributed to interested individuals. Some fine examples are still standing both in the Town and on the campus.
On the front cover of Trees in Amherst is a photograph of white pines as seen on the campus of Amherst College—these majestic trees were “survivors of the 1938 hurricane,” states the caption. And I think of Jack Maki as a strong, enduring tree—his roots reaching back to Japan, his trunk solidly American, his branches extending outward, with soft green leaves waving like tiny flags in the breeze.
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