Jacques de Spoelberch ’54
In an article Jacques wrote for the 2008 Portsmouth Abbey Alumni Bulletin, he recalled, “My father, a Belgian pioneer aviator who flew (and reportedly jousted) with Charles Lindbergh, died in l939 when I was two. My mother, a Main Line (PA) beauty whose will was as resolute as her heart was big, whose grandfather, as head of the Pennsylvania Railroad, installed the tunnels under the Hudson and East Rivers through which countless travelers have journeyed in the last hundred years, and whose great aunt was the belatedly recognized artist Mary Cassatt, died in 2000 when I was a mere sixty-four – a seemingly unfair distribution of time on the part of the Deity who handles such matters.”
to say, with my parentage. At the outset of WWII my mother was U.S. on the last passenger ship to leave the port of Genoa, Italy, in June of l940. But at the conclusion of that conflict, she reminded us that we were Catholic (she herself was Protestant) and Belgian, and we returned immediately from Bryn Mawr, PA, to Brussels. Within months I found myself deposited in the Benedictine Abbey School of Maredsous, which made the Priory, little less today’s Abbey, look like a
ment when I wondered what on earth I was doing up here, right now. Unfortunately that moment occurred when a tackle needed to be made, which the estimable Coach Ralph Hewitt made all too public in his half-time comments.”
“How I arrived at the Priory in the fall of 195l had to do, needless able to get herself and her two sons to the
rain-lashed day in late November. Nor forget the existential mo-
“I studied hard at the Priory,” he says “and I particularly enjoyed my English courses with Mr. Kelly and those in French with Mr. Treo. My favorite priests were Father Andrew, Father Aelred Graham and Father Hilary.” Upon graduation from the Priory, Jacques attended Princeton, majoring in English and comparative literature, and writing a substantial thesis on the origins of the realistic novel his senior year. In late 1959, Jacques joined Houghton Mifflin in Boston and soon became an editor there and in the New York City branch office. He left the traditional Houghton
modern spa. “
Mifflin world in 1972 to become the editorial
Jacques played on the Priory football team
in New York. At ILM, Jacques built a small list
his first fall and the baseball team in the spring. “I’ll never forget a 7-0 loss to St. George’s on their high plain overlooking Newport and the bay on a gloomy, windy,
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director of International Literary Management of writer clients and also cobbled together biographies and autobiographies of celebrities in the worlds of sports, business and fashion.
P ORTSM O U T H A BB E Y S C HO OL