Jim Schutze is the ink-stained wretch of a newspaper reporter you can only wish you could be.
Jim Schutze has been nominated for two Edgar awards. He is the author of By Two and Two, Preacher's Girl, and Pontiac. The Dallas bureau chief of of the Houston Chronicle, he has been an investigative reporter for the Detroit Free Press and the Dallas Times Herald, and the Dallas Observer.
He has also been a friend for nearly 20 years.
When his new book, PONTIAC, was released a few years ago, I begged him to let me shoot the author's photo. Since the story was set in an old New England boys’ boarding school, he picked a location on Dallas' famed Swiss Avenue, replete with older mansions that could just as well be found in New England.
With great regret, the photo was not used on the book cover.
Camera: Nikon D850, with 80-200 f/2.8 lens and very light fill flash from a Speedlight 700. 1/250 at f/7.1, ISO 320, 90mm
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Summary of PONTIAC:
In the inner sanctum of an elite 1960’s boarding school, boys test their boundaries and class when they welcome an outsider.
One New England boys’ boarding school, a bastion of the WASP aristocracy, has been holding out stubbornly against pressure to diversify. Grudgingly, St. Philip’s School in New Hampshire opens its doors to its first scholarship student: young Woodrow Skaggs from Pontiac, Michigan, the tough, rough-edged son of an autoworker.
Things do not go smoothly—the world portrayed in Pontiac may be shockingly inappropriate to the readers of today. The attitudes of the St. Philip’s students toward gender and sex cruelly predict the treatment girls will receive twenty years later when many of these schools become coeducational. And yet in their awkward, often violent attempts to figure each other out, the boys of St. Philip’s also provide a window to better, more tolerant times ahead.
Told through memories, vignettes, letters, and compelling conversation, Pontiac sees journalist and author Jim Schutze bring a keen and empathetic eye to the evolutions of culture in the twentieth century.