Jack Cole lived in Kabul and traveled extensively throughout the country tending to the health of the Peace Corps volunteers. Next was Swaziland for one year, where Jack split his time between a government hospital and the volunteers. Then on to New Delhi for two years in India, again responsible only for keeping the volunteers healthy.
Jack Cole grew up in Matamoras, a small town on the Delaware River in northeast Pennsylvania. His father was a freight conductor on the Erie Railroad. Many other family members also worked for the railroad.
He attended Penn State University for his undergraduate degree and the University of Pennsylvania for his MD. He entered the US Army after internship and ended up in the European Theatre. Wounded in Normandy during the Battle of the Hedgerows, he is a Purple Heart recipient. He entered private practice as a General Practioner in his home town, Matamoras, PA and then moved to the Lehigh Valley in Pennsylvania where he was on staff at Lehigh University in Bethlehem, PA. After four years he opened a private practice in Bethlehem.
While still in medical school, Jack married a medical technologist. He and Lynn started a family, eventually producing eight children -- 5 boys and 3 girls. Because Jack always wanted a baseball team, they adopted a ninth child while serving in India with the Peace Corps.
In 1968 he was accepted as a staff physician for the Peace Corps. In August of that year Jack, Lynn, five of the children and the family dog left for Afghanistan for a two year posting. They lived in Kabul and traveled extensively throughout the country tending to the health of the Peace Corps volunteers. Next was Swaziland for one year, where Jack split his time between a government hospital and the volunteers. Then on to New Delhi for two years in India, again responsible only for keeping the volunteers healthy.
After returning to the USA, Jack again resumed practice in Bethlehem. He and Lynn often traveled to New York to attend the opera and the ballet. In 1989 Jack "retired from the practice of family medicine but not from life". He began a career as a writer. His first book, a collection of verse, includes snippets and impressions of life from each of these areas, thus giving rise to the title Wandering Voices.
His second book, Richard and Sabina, recounts the lives of Richard and Sabina Wurmbrand. Romanian Jews who converted to Christianity prior to World War II, the Wurmbrands suffered and were imprisoned under the hands of the Nazis and then the Communists. They lost most of their families in the Holocaust.
Jack met Richard and Sabina through his son Chris and Chris' intended. Maya is a Romanian woman that the Wurmbrands considered to be like a daughter. Richard performed the wedding for Chris and Maya. Jack met with Richard and Sabina many times over the five year period spent writing the book.
Jack has written and published many other poems and short pieces that have appeared in various reviews and journals. You may read more about him and about Lynn in the Fall 1999 issue of the Northampton Community College Magazine. Their pictures and one of his poems are on the cover. The article about them is in pdf format, requiring the Adobe Acrobat Reader. It discusses their life in Afghanistan, Swaziland and India where Lynn assisted Mother Teresa in a leper colony. The article starts on page 26 of the magazine, which displays as page 15 in the Adobe Acrobat Reader.
