Jack 1939 – Francine Mathews
Jack 1939 – Francine Mathews’s story of JFK in Europe in 1939
The inspiration for the historical novel Jack 1939 came to author Francine Mathew after seeing a photograph of John Kennedy on a street in Germany in 1937. She writes this about the picture..he was….
….wearing clothes he’d probably slept in for a week, tousled hair, head thrown back , mouth opened in a grin. He was juggling fruit for the camera. He looked like a wild and free street busker without a care in the world; he was also rail thin, the bones in his face painfully prominent I forgot completely that he had ever been that young. The image haunted me for weeks. I wanted to know more about that boy….