I’ve just recently learned that my old friend, Jack Le Sueur, retired from the North Carolina Arts Council last December after thirty-five years’ service. Thinking about Jack brings back a flood of memories of a life I no longer have—of friends and places, sights and sounds: shaking hands with Jimmy Carter in the town park in Southern Pines, a copy of T. S. Eliot’s poems I bought in the Intimate Bookshop on Franklin Street in Chapel Hill when there was still such a place, the smell of woodsmoke at the Malcolm Blue Farm in Aberdeen, and the fireplace poker Jerry Darnell made me at his forge there one day. So many details, flakes of being floating on a river that never stops running.

Many of those memories include Jack. We met in 1974, some time in the fall, I think—though it’s been too many years to be sure. I got a call one day from a young man who had just taken a job with the arts council in Raleigh, and he wanted to come and see me. In a few days he showed up at the Campbell House in Southern Pines where I was housed as Executive Director of The Sandhills Arts Council (now the Arts Council of Moore County). We drove around the county all day together, getting to know one another and looking the place over. I had been on the job only about a year at that time. But I knew enough to take Jack to Jugtown, then operating as a nonprofit under the tutelage of the late Nancy Sweezy. I think I remember that we watched as interns unloaded one of the pottery’s big groundhog kilns.

And I’m sure I must have remembered to introduce Jack to board members and any community leaders I could find. I must have taken him to see Sam Ragan in his office at The Pilot, where he hid out behind a three-foot-tall pile of manuscripts that took up the front of his desk and banged away on the old Underwood he used to do his writing. But my memory of that day with Jack is mostly a recollection of country roads—Moore County is a beautiful place—and of pleasant conversation with a soft-spoken young man who was ten years younger than I but already an ex navy officer and a graduate of Duke, where I had studied for a PhD I never managed to get.

In his years at the North Carolina Arts Council Jack had many jobs. In those early days his job title was Community Coordinator. Jack, and later Fred Schultz, traveled the state as liaisons with local arts groups of all sorts. It was a natural step for Jack to become the administrator of the Arts Council’s signature Grassroots Arts Program, a program that’s been much copied around the country and a source of public funds for arts efforts large and small that continues to this day. But to me Jack was the North Carolina Arts Council, its face and its true soul, the embodiment of bureaucracy with a heart, something I guess I still believe is possible. Jack had a wonderful way of striking a balance between being my friend and advocate, which he mostly was, and sometimes being my boss. There was no pretense in him, no self-importance. He was always just Jack.

Hardly a month went by that we didn’t talk on the phone, sometimes just because he’d call to check in and see how I was. We’d meet at least four or five times a year at meetings and workshops, my favorite of which was a meeting of us professionals at the Quail Roost Conference Center, usually around Christmas time every year. We’d sit around a big seminar table and hear reports and instruction from peers during the day, and we’d party in the evenings. I remember one good poker game when I think I won ten dollars. I’m sure there were other communities of culture around the country like the one I was part of in North Carolina in the 1970s, but I was privileged to be part of that one. Thinking of Jack still takes me back to a time before the culture wars ruined so much of life for us, albeit I’ve not seen him these last twelve years. It was like Kristofferson’s great song; we were advocates for everything good we knew.

And so I’m moved to learn of Jack’s retirement and wish him godspeed in whatever future he travels. Jack is a fine musician. We used to spell one another at meetings singing and leading singing. He and his wife, Pattie, began performing together before they got married and have continued to do so over the years. They have a lovely CD that includes a wedding song, “Two Paths.” I hope Jack’s future holds lots of opportunities to perform and that I get to hear him and Pattie again before I go somewhere else. Here they are in a little video medley from a few years back that I found posted on the net. Jack’s “Administrator Blues” reminds me of a meeting in Denver when a couple hundred of us listened to Jack sing one evening and there were lots of lighters in the air at the close. I also especially like the Kate Campbell song that’s last in the video, and Pattie’s take on it, speaking of things the culture wars have ruined for us.