On the night of July 18, 1969, a black Oldsmobile plunged off a narrow one-lane bridge on Chappaquiddick Island, Massachusetts. By morning, the car had been found submerged. Inside was the body of Mary Jo Kopechne, twenty-eight years old, a former campaign worker for Robert Kennedy. The next morning, Senator Ted Kennedy walked into the Edgartown police station and identified himself as the driver.What happened in those hours has never been fully explained. Kennedy himself said his ...

New York Times bestselling author Jack Olsen spent his career telling other people's stories. The Pitcher's Kid is his own, a memoir of his first eighteen years, finished just before his death in 2002 and never lived to see published.Born in Indianapolis in June 1925, Jack Olsen grew up chasing his father across a Depression-era America of unpaid bills, midnight departures, and furnished rooms abandoned in the dark. Ole "Swede" Olsen was a man of spectacular invention, a charmer, a...

A Harrowing True Story of Survival on the Eiger's Deadly North FaceThe Germans call it the Mordwand. The Murder Wall. The north face of the Eiger in the Swiss Alps is a vertical mile of unstable limestone, perpetual avalanches, and weather that can turn lethal without warning. Eighteen climbers had already died attempting it. In August 1957, four more went up.They started as two separate teams. Claudio Corti and Stefano Longhi were Italians from Lecco, rely...

Every city has a Sweet Street. You know it when you see it: the neon signs, the strip clubs, the honky-tonk bars, the sidewalks that come alive after midnight. Most people hurry past. Jack Olsen went in.In the early 1970s, Olsen embedded himself in the bars and strip clubs of San Francisco's North Beach neighborhood, spending months among the hustlers, pimps, strippers, waitresses, bartenders, bouncers, junkies, cops, and club owners who inhabited this shadow economy. He listened t...

In the early 1970s, Jack Olsen turned his journalistic eye from the corporate women of New York City to the college campuses of America. What he found was a generation in the middle of reinventing itself.Fourteen young women speak here in their own words, without editorial interruption. They are students navigating the collision between the lives their parents imagined for them and the world they inherited: a counterculture in full bloom, with all the freedom, confusion, alcohol, d...

The Billygoats are champions of the NFL's National Conference, and they are on their way to the Super Bowl. Their plane has just been hijacked.The man with the machine gun is enormous, drug-addled, and disturbingly familiar. He has a pair of sure hands. And he has a very specific agenda.Alphabet Jackson, the Billygoats' balding ten-year veteran offensive center, is the man telling this story. He has spent his career in the trenches of professional football, surviving knee o...

"A giggle, a crunch of gravel, a single wave of a grimy hand, and her only child was gone."One cool April day, Mike Pritcher visits the home of his estranged wife, Lael, and takes their five-year-old son, Ace, for an overnight outing. He doesn't bring him back. When Lael calls the police, they tell her it's a domestic matter. When she calls her lawyer, he tells her she has the right to snatch Ace back. That's about it.So that's what she sets out to do.What follows i...

Fire 5 is no ordinary fire company. It's a special roving unit, dispatched wherever trouble is worst across the city. And the men of Fire 5 are no ordinary crew.Narrator Charly Sprockett introduces them one by one: the veterans and the probies, the brawlers and the philosophers, the men swapping funny stories and marital woes between calls. There's the unit's first female firefighter, Lulu Ann Tompkins, whose arrival upends the station's carefully maintained chaos. And there's the ...

Broussard "Bru" Massy is eight feet two inches tall, a New Orleans piano prodigy who gave up basketball for a music conservatory and then, inexplicably, gave up music for the pros. He can barely fit through a doorway. He has never played organized ball above junior high. And he doesn't talk to reporters.The city's NBA franchise, the hapless Wasps, signs him as a publicity stunt. Nobody expects him to last two weeks.He lasts the whole season. And then some.Told throu...

Severn Gamble drops his wife Margot at the corner near the Justice Building on a stormy Tuesday evening. She's going inside to pick up a typing job — a two-minute errand. He waits. The rain comes down hard. She never comes back out.No one saw her enter. No one saw her leave. The envelope she came to collect is still sitting on the lobby desk.So begins one of the most gripping novels Jack Olsen ever wrote — a psychological thriller set inside a decaying Pacific Northwest cit...

For more than a year, Jack Olsen embedded himself in the world of big-city police. He rode with them on their beats, visited them in their homes, walked with them into bars and back alleys and onto what he called "the killing grounds of this most dangerous of occupations."What he found became Night Watch.Watch Commander Packer Lind is 37 years old, burly, dedicated, and trying to hold his precinct together. His officers are a ragtag collection of bruisers, smart-alecks, and...

In 1968, Jack Olsen wrote what Sports Illustrated would later call the most significant series of stories in the magazine's history.Published across five consecutive issues beginning July 1, 1968, "The Black Athlete: A Shameful Story" shattered the comfortable myth that American sport was a level playing field, a rare arena where race didn't matter and Black athletes had found true equality. Olsen proved it was a lie.Black collegiate athletes were recruited for their speed ...