AN interview with jim kern By Carlos Schomaker
The creation of the Florida Trail starts at Jim Kern. This September we paid a visit to the igniting force behind not just FTA, but the American Hiking Society (AHS) and Big City Mountaineers (BCM). At his house outside Saint Augustine, we discussed his experiences, ideas, passions, and even his favorite libation. Jim is now in his 80th year on this planet, and despite recent challenges with hip surgeries, he is as irrepressible, funny, and opinionated as ever. He even showed us the hardware from his first surgery! Sitting in his dining room, with a beautiful view of the Guana River Marsh, Jim held forth on the past, present, and future. He also made us an excellent lunch of sandwiches and avocado salad. The opinions expressed here are his, of course; Jim Kern is not shy. All of us who love hiking trails and the outdoors owe him a debt of thanks for his vision and spirit. ************************************************* Tell us a little about your upbringing. I grew up in a little town in Leonia, New Jersey, near the George Washington Bridge. There’s a cluster of a dozen little residential communities up there. I went away to boarding school after my freshman year in high school, to Andover in Massachusetts. Typical teenager, I didn’t know where I was going, what I wanted to do. My parents—I was very fortunate—had an idea that I ought to go. I got a terrific education at Andover. I was about in the lower tenth of my class in grades my sophomore and junior years there. My senior year I made it into just about to the middle of my class, and I got into Yale. My father had gone there, and again, he nudged me a little. I was malleable. How did you wind up in Florida? I had a ‘conversion experience’ when I was a sophomore in college. I had been in Scouting. And through the merit badges I got some outdoor experiences. I was turned on by the outdoors, but it was a little frustrating. How can I go to Yale, but still sit in a fire tower and be a forest ranger or something? My father would not be happy with that. And I didn’t know how to reconcile it. Then, my sophomore year in Yale, I went to a lecture. This young man came to the college with an adventure film that he had made in Brazil. And it was really a transforming thing. Wow. I thought, now THAT my peers and family could accept—if I traveled the world and made films and lectured and wrote. I just saw that guy as: I can do that! I didn’t know he had a trust fund [laughs]. His mother was a Hamm, from the brewery, and his father had restructured Connecticut General Life Insurance. So he came from an influential family. That was all just over my head. Anyway, that film set the spark which I held tightly to. From then on, every major decision was based on that—like the length of my Navy career. Join the Army and get out in two years, or add some valuable education and become a Naval Aviator? It was a tough choice, because I wanted to get going on this thing that was in my head. But I took the Navy flight program up in Pensacola. I didn’t get very far because the Navy decided they had too many pilots after Korea! After I soloed, they got my class in a room, and said: “We need you to sign on for five years. If you don’t, we’re going to discharge you, honorably. So boom, I was out. And
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