Chaitanya Jyothi Museum Opening, 2000
RAMANAM
In nomine Patris, et Filii, et Spiritus Sancti. Amen.
Countrymen,
ORBIS NON SUFFICIT
SOLUS DEUS SUFFICIT
This morning, the West Point Community bid Farewell to a great benefactor, John Jack Stalker Price, Class of 1964.
Warren Hearnes, ’89, wrote the official announcement for the WP-ORG Advisors:
It is with great sadness and a heavy heart that we relay the news that Jack Price USMA ’64, one of the founding advisors of WP-ORG and a guiding force in everything that WP-ORG has accomplished for grads, parents, and friends of West Point over the past 22 years, passed away this morning surrounded by his family.
This is truly a sad day. Jack Price was larger-than-life for all that had the privilege of knowing him. Jack has left us, but he left us — his friends, his classmates, his country, his family, and all of WP-ORG — better than we were when he met us. He challenged us and made us want to be better. He had such a positive impact on this world that the stories of Jack will be told for years to come.
We’re in the process of building a fitting eulogy page for Jack. In the meantime, please add your personal thoughts and remembrances here.
Please keep his wife Sam, son Cameron USMA ’96, and daughter Megan in your thoughts and prayers.
Well done. Be thou at peace.
Respectfully,
Warren Hearnes USMA ’89
for all WP-ORG Advisors
Along with others at Jack’s personal page at WP-ORG, I left this tribute to a dear friend and mentor:
I am so very sorry. Jack was a most dear friend of our family and helped smooth our daughter’s path to the Academy and mine with the Academy and West Pointers generally. I am so very sorry. Be thou at peace, great friend Buffalo Mountain Jack!
Everything Jack touched prospered. His very glance shed the power of life. He braced you just by looking at you. He was walking, talking, seeing courage. He had the finest, most accurate over-the-horizon radar, so to speak, of anyone of my acquaintance save Paul Tillich alone.
This hits like a hammer here. I am so very sorry. The West Point Community, all three pillars, owes its internal strength, its modern lines of communication, to Buffalo Mountain Jack. This reminds also of the transience of life. I was at home with Sam and Jack in October 2016. Jack was healthy as a horse, eager to tour his and Sam’s endless handiwork, and we had just corresponded, as we did not a little since 1997, a month ago or so. So be thou at peace, great friend Buffalo Mountain Jack! I am feeling the blows of mortality.
Jack described himself as a Galactic Universalist. As I took it, that bonded him to me as a fellow Franciscan sort of permanently preaching at the court of the Sultan in Egypt.
Enter upon eternal joy, my friend, Buffalo Mountain Jack, the bee-keeper, husband, father, son, technologist, arborist, inventor, cultivator, explorer, adventurer and above all warrior, you earned it many times over!
To me, fair friend, you never can be old,
For as you were, when first your eye I ey’d,
Such seems your beauty still. Three winters cold
Have from the forests shook three summers’ pride,
Three beauteous springs to yellow autumn turn’d
In process of the seasons have I seen,
Three April perfumes in three hot Junes burn’d,
Since first I saw you fresh, which yet are green.
Ah! yet doth beauty, like a dial-hand,
Steal from his figure and no pace perceiv’d;
So your sweet hue, which methinks still doth stand,
Hath motion and mine eye may be deceiv’d:
For fear of which, hear this, thou age unbred;
Ere you were born, was beauty’s summer dead.
Sonnet 104, William Shakespeare
Βασιλεία του Θεού
Kingdom of God
Update 1: It feels not possible Jack can be gone. He was no Christ figure, however, this feeling must be something like how the Apostles felt when Jesus died. It just could not happen. Why would he do such a thing? He must have had a reason, a very good reason. I cannot fathom it.
AUM NAMAH SHIVAYA