ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Jim Staack was born and raised in a blue collar neighborhood in Davenport, Iowa. He graduated from Davenport West High School and attended Macalester College in St. Paul Minnesota for a year before enlisting in the U.S. Navy. Well, he was actually drafted into the U.S. Army as a result of an unfortunate lottery “win” while temporarily out of college, living in Minneapolis, trying to establish residency in Minnesota, having been accepted at the University of Minnesota to begin in the winter semester early in 1966.

After boot camp, he attended Damage Control “A” school in San Francisco and his was the first class during his tenure there that did not get orders to riverboat duty in Viet Nam. Instead, he was sent to and served at Charleston, South Carolina aboard a mine sweeper repair ship where he learned that a Damage Controlman was mostly a carpenter. In 1968, he married his present wife, Eva and entered New York University, the School of the Arts, the Institute of Film and Television, receiving his Bachelor of Fine Arts degree in 1971.

While living in New York, his teleplay The Brand New Coffee Making Machine was produced and aired on a local, New Jersey channel. He moved with his young family back to Davenport, Iowa in anticipation of doing documentary news films for a local television station there. However, the job evaporated before his arrival and he ended up working as a welder for several years. He did get work with a small film production company (him and one other guy) and worked on a film for a milk cooperative. He spent much of his time on that project holding a microphone in a field, in front of a cow, trying to elicit the proper “moo.”

His family next moved to Germany, landing in a small town outside of Munich. He spent over a year trying to get jobs in the German film industry. When he finally landed a job it was as a soundman on a small film crew. The film was for the German Department of Agriculture. He spent most of his time on that project holding a microphone on a hillside, in front of a cow, trying to elicit the proper “moo.” Shortly thereafter he found work as a roadie with the Helmut Hoegel Band, a popular Bavarian dance band. He spent several years with the band before taking the LSAT at a military base near Munich and moving his family to Florida to attend Stetson University College of Law.

He received his Juris Doctor Degree in 1979 and has worked as an attorney in the Clearwater/St. Petersburg area since. He is a Florida Bar certified real estate specialist with a focus on complex, commercial litigation. He has written several unproduced original screenplays and unpublished novels. His published work is the epic Germanic poem Das Nibelungenlied which he translated from the original middle high German into a prose work in two parts, Love and Death and Revenge.

He is presently dusting off the manuscript of the novel Who the Hell’s Krump? (a/k/a Shipmates) which is about serving in the U.S. Navy in the late 1960’s and was written shortly thereafter. He is also working on Communication set around the lives of attorneys in a small firm which explores the various ways people communicate with one another and how ineffective we are at it. One or the other will be finished first.