His condition was supposed to be congenital. It was the reason he never left Miami (except for an occasional cruise, as long as it stayed in humid nearby regions). He wanted me to solve the mystery of his lungs. He knew I’d be disappointed, but then he told me he wanted me to do something more important anyway.įorget the usual biography. Now, he was telling me that he’d given such an interview to Astronomy magazine, and it would be appearing in their January 2006 issue. Several times, I’d brought up the idea of a long article about him, but he always put me off, saying he didn’t want to be profiled. He sounded more manic than usual, if that was possible. Then, in October 2005, Jack called me and left a message. I talked about doing a lengthy piece about his background, something that would really give “Star Hustler” its due. He talked about having me to the set to see him film a show. I visited him in Miami, and later I moved to South Florida. (I’d been a planetarian for three years in the early 1990s, to help pay for grad school.) We talked and talked about Burnham, and about planetariums. And I wept like a baby.”) Yes, he’d mined the Celestial Handbook for much of his show material. (I’ll never forget Jack’s words: “I got that in the mail, saw what it was about, and took it to read in the bath, where I could take my time with it. So I addressed a copy to Jack at the Miami planetarium where he worked.Ī few days after I mailed that article, Jack called me, telling me that he was grateful to learn so much about Burnham. I figured Jack would want to hear about the real story of Burnham, who had seemed to vanish after writing his masterpiece.

Its three volumes are a treasure of lore about the night sky, and it was obvious to me, as someone who occasionally watched and always admired Horkheimer’s shows, that he was drawing heavily from Burnham’s collected wisdom. In 1997, I wrote the first long biographical piece about Burnham, who is famous (at least among people who use telescopes) for a 2,000-page bible of the night sky he produced, called Burnham’s Celestial Handbook. I hadn’t heard from him since last year, when we’d talked, once again, about our favorite mutual interest: a dead American astronomer named Robert Burnham, Jr. Even after his death at 72, there are still some shows he completed that will be showing up on his website for a few days. In his later years, it was obviously a pain in the ass to keep filming those shows for a guy whose every breath was labored. But he never discussed it with me, at least.) (And yes, I note that, without much subtlety, a 2006 Astronomy magazine profile that the Washington Post and others are drawing from for their official obits compared the never-married Jack to Rip Taylor and Charles Nelson Reilly - hint, hint - and more than a few are calling his act “campy”. Well, even if you didn’t go outside, it was still fun to watch Jack pointing out the constellations. He’d dance around your television set, marveling at the brightness of Antares or the proximity of Jupiter and the Moon, and he made it sound like so much fun to go outside in the city and look up at a glowing orange sky of crud. Well, I thought, I’ll just wait for the canned “Star Gazer” obits to appear, and when I get back to town I’ll get around to writing about my friend, the one who hated that he’d been forced by PBS to drop his “Star Hustler” tag because someone somewhere had no goddamned sense of humor.Īctually, to me he jokingly called himself the “Star Geezer,” and he loved being the guy who showed up on your PBS station for five minutes at like midnight to tell you what was in the sky that week.

I didn’t hear right away because I was on my way to a week in Maine.

Jack horkheimer star gazer