Jack Daumier

(Principled Reporter) - Gabriel Mann  

Jacque “Jack” Darrow Daumier was born in 1904 to Sam Daumier and Dee Harrington (Jack’s middle name given in honor of attorney Clarence Darrow).  Sam was a third generation French-American whose forbearers immigrated to Louisiana in the mid-1800’s, and later moved to Los Angeles. Dee was the only daughter of John Harrington who made and lost a fortune in a Nevada silver mine near Virginia City, and returned to his home state of Idaho. 

Serge met Dee when both silver mine worker and union organizer in Idaho. Four years after their only son Jacque “Jack” was born, Serge left to organize copper mine workers in Arizona.  Dee, shunned in a company mining town for having married a labor radical, moved to San Jose, California, where Serge’s only sister, Sylvia, worked as a nanny and housekeeper for a wealthy retailer. His wife and child saw less and less of Serge because of the sheer difficulty of traveling from Southern Arizona to Northern California, and the fact that his labor radicalism made him a target of the criminal justice system. 

The final time Jack saw his father, Serge arrived unannounced on Jack’s thirteenth birthday with two boxes of classic books as a present.  After his return to Arizona to lead a copper miners’ strike, Serge was murdered by vigilantes hired by mine owners.  Vigilantes had forced striking miners on rail cars and left them in the middle of the Sonoran Desert in Mexico with only the shirts on their backs, then stationed themselves at the city limits to prevent the miners from returning.  Serge was bushwhacked when he did. 

Dee graduated from a teaching college, and taught fourth grade.  Jack, weaned on great literature, excelled at school and graduated at the head of his high school class.  He was accepted at a flagship public university.  Majoring in English, in his junior year, Jack became the editor of the college newspaper. 

Albion Munson, publisher and editor of the Valley Standard, the only newspaper in the sleepy, idyllic, Valley of the Heart’s Delight, met Jack when he was invited to speak to the staff and writers at the college newspaper.  In preparation, Albion read a number of editions, and was struck with the thoroughness of Jack’s reporting and quality of his exposition.  So he could be close to his mother and aunt, when Albion Munson offered him a job as a reporter, Jack accepted.  His mother died of cancer shortly after he returned.  Having neither the time nor interest in maintaining a house, he sold his mother’s home and moved to an apartment in the center of downtown San Jose with his precious book collection. 

Jack inherited his father’s resoluteness, and dogged willingness to adhere to his values and beliefs regardless of the consequences.  Jack’s hard-nosed-ness is balanced by his respect for different points of view imbued by his mother.  Jack resented his father’s absence in both his and his mother’s life, while at the same time being in awe of the degree he went to act upon his core beliefs. Because of his father’s murder, Jack understands first-hand about the terrible consequences about challenging the status-quo, but once he has made up his mind, possesses an absolute absence of fear when facing things that most others do anything to avoid. 

During college, Jack worked blue collar jobs as a hod-carrier and longshoreman, and derived enormous pleasure from the company of the working men.  Physically, as the result, the lean-appearing Jack is a six-foot-one mass of sinewy muscle which surprised more than one man who took umbrage at his blue collar pretensions when he was a college student.  Jack had a number of girlfriends during college but has not fallen in love.  

Although at the time it was highly unusual for a person with a college education to work as a reporter (even in big town newspapers), Jack supports himself by news writing until can complete his first work of fiction.  Jack believes passionately that there are two sides to every news story, but soon learns that if he presents a perspective that conflicts with Albion Munson’s world-view, Munson edits it out.  Jack and Albion go at it regularly over Munson’s savage editing.  Try as he might to craft a viewpoint that will avoid Munson’s slashing pencil, Munson guts Jack’s stories of anything that remotely reflect a political view other than conservative, red-meat, All-Americanism.