At 28 years of age, John Jackson would have been downright ungrateful had he complained about the hand that fate had dealt him. A 'Maths brains' from as far back as he could remember, he had by then put a long distance between the humble circumstances of his birth in the hills of Cambridge above Montego Bay and his new position as business manager at the Sevens Estate based in May Pen, Clarendon. And from where he stood, the future was looking good. But how often it is said that "Chicken merry, hawk deh near".

This was 1976. Up to that point, Jackson had made a man of himself, drawing on the solid examples of hard work and positive living set by his parents, Frederick and Lucille Jackson. "My mom and dad were remarkable persons," he says, the pride now completely betrayed. "My dad's profession was that of a cabinet-maker. He made some of the best and most neatly put together furniture that anyone could buy."

JACKSON. believes the stock market is the best way for ordinary Jamaicans to improve their lot

If Frederick Jackson did not manage to pass on the love for his trade to his children, he most certainly bequeathed to them the need to be especially neat, polished and careful with what he considered to be fine art. He and his wife were avid readers.

As a lay preacher in the church, he maintained absolute honesty in everything he did, never had a bad thing to say about anyone and always lent a hand even to those who tried to pull him down, John testifies.

As a young man, John admired his dad as he played the piano, organ, violin and the saw, used as a popular musical instrument at the time. He also wrote and taught music, which could explain the path taken in life by John's brother Paul Jackson. Daddy Jackson also ploughed the land, a small plot that was dwarfed by that of the Delissers beside it, but of which he was very proud.

Mrs Jackson, too, made her family especially proud when, after sending eight children to school, and in her 50s, went back to school herself and completed the Jamaica School Certificate (JSC) exams and ultimately the teacher's college exams. She taught for several years in Cambridge.

"That to me is a remarkable feat that I use from time to time as an example of what ordinary people can achieve if they want to. If both my parents had the opportunities that their kids have you would be writing about them instead of me," Jackson's pride is again betrayed.

Government doesn't belong in sugar

As he reflected on his parents' example, Jackson felt he must have made them proud. He had spent eight productive years at Peat Marwick Mitchell and Company during which he had gone to England and qualified himself, and now had landed the job as business manager at Sevens Estate.

There he quickly settled in, working closely with the managing director, Trevor Donaldson. Two years later, Donaldson was appointed executive chairman of the state-run National Sugar Corporation (NSC) and he engineered a transfer of sorts to bring Jackson on board as the internal audit manager. This was 1978.

Jackson moved to Kingston from May Pen and took on the job with enthusiasm. To add substance to his auditing team, he recruited the very bright Earl Samuels, now executive director of the National Housing Trust (NHT), whom he had first met at Peat Marwick.

Jackson feels that the stint at the NSC - which ran the state-owned sugar estates - taught him why governments should not be in business, saying "there is a tendency to utilise it for the boys". For example, "some junior ministers were given motorcars even though they were not employed by the NSC".

Moreover, Jackson believes that the government never has enough capital to pump into business, as was the case with the sugar industry at the time he was with the NSC, and later with Air Jamaica, the national airline. "The people who are well connected try their best to see what they can get out of it. Many people think it will not work anyway so they might as well milk it."

Follow the McConnells

In retrospect, Jackson says the NSC could have been a success, if things had been done differently, minus the politicians. "The cane can't wait on the minister's political decisions.

Too many people want their pound of flesh." But he points to what Billy McConnell is doing with Appleton Estate as a model for the sugar industry, using a centrifugal system for irrigation that saves three times as much of the expensive water as was done in the old system. They realise twice the amount of sugar tons per acre and use less manpower, thereby substantially cutting production costs.

Jackson has a plausible prescription for what ails sugar and the policy makers are advised to draw on that valuable expertise provided by his experience at the National Sugar Company.

In the end, he admits, he got frustrated with the cash-strapped NSC, when the Sugar Industry Authority (SIA) began "usurping funds" that the corporation needed and they began to limp along. Worse was to come. Astil Sangster, the minister without portfolio in the agriculture ministry, provided the last straw.

"He confronted me one day and accused me of discrimination in the way I disbursed funds to the creditors of the sugar estates. I was hurt because I had a scrupulous practice of sharing up what funds I had received from the SIA, on the basis of the cash flow requests from the estates. It was they who then paid their creditors.

At the same time I was aware that some creditors were pressuring the estates for payment for goods that were not supplied.

"For me, it all came to a grinding halt in 1983," says Jackson. And the pun was intended.

Jackson and Jackson is born

By now he had lost the appetite for working with an institution and decided he would go into auditing on his own. With his brother Mark Jackson, he started the auditing firm Jackson and Jackson. The company grew steadily, providing enough cash flow to allow for borrowing and investing. Importantly, some of that money was used to buy stocks.

John had developed an interest in the stock market, first through his brother Mark, and when another brother, Frederick Jackson Jnr, then working at the Bank of Nova Scotia, bought some of the bank's stocks.

The value doubled overnight. Impressed, John started keeping an eye on the stock market and he began to read up anything he came across on stocks.

He bought some Montego Bay Freeport shares and saw the value jump three times the price he had paid. Then he bought into Pan Jam and KIW International and sold off those shares just before the KIW share price plummeted.

With a young family, he bought a house in 1978 and didn't have enough money to play the market. But after leaving the National Sugar Company, he set his eyes back on the market.and on something else that would further drive his passion for the stock market.

The Jamaica Stock Exchange, for reasons not known to Jackson, had stopped updating their annual yearbook. Seeing an opportunity, Jackson approached the exchange and offered to update the yearbook, from the last published in 1973 to 1985. While doing so, he discovered that the stock market had grown a stupendous 128 per cent in 1981! He was onto something here.

A while back he had invested some money in a security guard company. He took back his money and placed it in stocks. Jackson recalls that Lascelles stocks had jumped from $8 to $50 and that they had given bonus shares. From "little or nothing", he saw his portfolio grow into hundreds of thousands of dollars.

Play the stock market

As he searched for other opportunities to make money, Jackson hit upon another idea. He wrote an article on the economy and offered it to The Gleaner newspaper which published it. "I remember the stockbroker Lodrick Atkinson commenting that 'John should stick to stocks and forget the economy', but I did not take his advice," Jackson chuckles.

Hector Wynter, the editor-in-chief, liked the article and asked Jackson to write a regular column.

"It brought me a bit of attention. But unfortunately I wrote out of my personal gut feeling rather than hard research," he concedes. In any event, he wrote that stocks were undervalued and won praises from Pat Garrell, whom he regarded as one of the best stock experts.

They became good friends. As many others have found, Jackson soon realised that writing a column was very demanding and forced him to take research more seriously. He had to. People were meeting him and telling him that based on his articles they were buying stocks. He had no intention of playing fast and loose with their money. His own interest in the market peaked.

"I spent a lot of my breathing time pouring over stocks and how they were performing. I was attending seminars locally and overseas to keep abreast and on top, in the same way a successful athlete has to keep up with his training," he explains.

Jackson is convinced that the stock market is the best way for ordinary Jamaicans to improve their lot. Of all the investment instruments, it provides the greatest return, he advises. "And the risk is not as great as many people seem to think."

Giving examples, Jackson says if one had put $100,000 into BNS shares in 1991, that would now be worth $6 million or $7 million; that same $100,000 in Courts shares would today be worth $20-odd million and $18 million in Seprod shares. Jackson uses "an incredibly successful" system he developed in 1989 to rank stocks.

He is not saying one should put everything in shares. "It depends on how risk averse you are, that is how much risk you can afford to take and your age. And you should get a second opinion about the performance of the shares you are interested in. It is necessary to watch the performance over a period of time. But the returns are worth it," he is confident.

Sue and counter sue

If Jackson's writings brought him attention, it also brought him some amount of notoriety. In one article, he wrote in The Gleaner that the Workers Bank was bankrupt, based on its published financial statements.

He is convinced up to today that the article quickened the bank's decision to sell the entity. But at the time the big wigs did not think it funny. In a statement, the Workers Bank libelled him, Jackson says, by claiming that he had deliberately falsified the information he published. Carl Stone (now deceased) was also writing a column in The Gleaner and became embroiled in the issue.

"Stone was close to Richard Bernal who was doing some consultancy work with the bank. He (Stone) found out that I was a member of Paul Chen-Young's Eagle Unit Trust Board. I was, of course, unaware at the time that Chen-Young had made an offer to buy out the Workers Bank. Stone assumed that when I wrote my article I was doing Chen-Young's bidding," Jackson relates.

Jackson sued to protect his name and in an out-of-court settlement the bank agreed to run a full page ad apologising to him, and Stone wrote an apology in his column. Jackson believes he is the only man to whom the peppery writer had apologised publicly, once it became clear that he was accurate in what he had written about the bank.

Among his media credits at the time, Jackson did work for the now defunct Jamaica Record, KLAS-FM, RJR, POWER-106 FM and was a regular member of the Breakfast Club. The media bug having bitten, it was inevitable that he would go into publishing himself, producing the respected Investor's Choice, a monthly business magazine now run by his son, Steven Jackson.

But even while his reputation was spreading nationally, Jackson's auditing firm began to feel the shocks of the 1990s economic downturn. In 1991, the firm merged with Jasper Burnett of Burnett Brennan Parkinson and Company to become Jackson Burnett Parkinson Jackson.

At one point, the company was employing 26 workers at peak. But by the mid-1990s, the financial meltdown had claimed many of its clients and the company went into survival mode. Effie Crooks, formerly of Price Waterhouse, Fujitsu-ICI and Crooks and Associates, was invited to be the senior partner in the firm now called Crooks Jackson Burnett, a strategic move that helped the company to survive.

Omar Davies the PNP's best choice

One of the satisfactions he has derived from the companies is the fact that he was able to take in many green persons and train them, and now to see some of them go on to become financial controllers. He did auditing up to two years ago, maintaining an interest in accounting. The accountant is a pivotal person in an organisation, he says.

That is why he thinks Finance Minister Dr Omar Davies "is the best of the PNP candidates for the job as prime minister", even though Jackson believes Davies "has screwed up the economy". "Even though some people don't like Omar, from a national standpoint, he is in the best position of all of them to know what is happening in all the ministries."

In a manner of speaking, John Jackson had up to this point done well and life was good. The other delights of his life were his wife, the former Celia Stewart, and their three children, Suzanne, Jo-Anne, a future Jamaica government scholar, and Steven, a future journalist. But now it was time to test the true mettle of a man who had maintained a firm and steady hand on the helm of his own life. We'll see now - it seemed as if fate was conspiring - what this John Jackson is made of.

Everybody knew that Jackson had this special love for Suzanne. Despite her youth, she had a heart for the underprivileged. She was active in church, played music, acted in religious plays, and never seemed interested in material gains.

Daddy's paternal pride knew no bounds when she declared that she wanted to work with the deprived of the world through the United Nations. And she had started at home, by taking some street boys off the road, putting them in a home and keeping them clean. He couldn't wait to see what she would become.

Ill omen

Now 21, she went to Cuba and from there flew to Ecuador to meet a friend she had previously met on a student exchange programme in Switzerland. It was the summer of 1998 and she was to return to begin final year studies at the University of the West Indies.

Around that time, Jackson went to Negril and while there received a telephone call from his sister to call home in Cambridge. His mother informed him that his father was not doing well.

He decided he would visit the old man the next day in Cambridge before returning to Kingston. That night he did not rest well, and in a dream he saw himself being hugged. But the hands belonged to Suzanne. What was the meaning of this?

On his way to Cambridge, he passed a crowd milling around two men who had crashed off a bridge. After visiting his ailing dad, he took a flight back to Kingston. In flight, he noticed that someone had opened a newspaper page to an article about the first anniversary of the death of Britain's Princess Diana.

It dawned on him that he had also been in Negril when she died in a car crash in a Paris tunnel the year before. But surely these are just random thoughts, with no specific connection to anything, he said to himself. But he couldn't dismiss a growing feeling of coldness and unexplained despair.

Back in Kingston he felt like eating hard dough bread and drove up to Hagley Park Road. As he left the bakery, an elderly woman stretched out her hand to beg. He gave her what change he had on him and she said "God bless you, son".

Then a sudden feeling of guilt swept over him. For that little change, the woman had seemed so grateful and had said "God bless you". He scraped up all the money he had in the car and gave it to her. That made him feel better. It was Saturday and he looked forward to seeing Suzanne, who was due to return home the next day.

My baby is dead!

At 7:30 that night, the telephone at home rang. No man should receive such a telephone call. It was about Suzanne. Her plane had crashed in Ecuador and Suzanne was dead! No God, no, this couldn't be true! It was. The plane had tried to take off but could not and had been delayed while they fixed the problem.

On its second attempt to take off, it again failed and this time ran off the runway and crashed. Some people were killed but many survived that crash, Suzanne, apparently, among them. Then as rescuers worked among the survivors the aircraft exploded, killing several more, including Suzanne. Jackson heard the news as if in a trance.

"It was as if someone had ripped my heart out," he remembers. "Nothing is as painful."

When he eventually came back to himself, it suddenly hit him that what had seemed to be random thoughts were attempts to communicate with him. It occurred to him too that Suzanne's plane was trying to take off about the time he was taking off to get back to Kingston. In her memory, he opened the Suzanne Jackson Children's Fund to assist underprivileged children to get an education.

Father and brother too

But the spectre of death was not done with him yet. The next to follow was his ailing dad who succumbed to his illness. Then his brother Paul was brutally slain when assassins rained bullets on a Nine Night underway in Seaview Gardens. How much can one man bear?

"I look at it from a philosophical standpoint. There are certain things that we want to avoid but can't," he says, admitting that he is still grappling with how best to tell the experience of suffering the loss of loved ones.

How do you mourn a loved one?

He laments the absence of a national institution where the bereaved can go to grieve over their loss in an environment of understanding. The church helps, but is not a replacement for that.

The need becomes more urgent after the consoling crowds have left, he says. And he recalls that about the time Suzanne had died, the mother of a soldier who died in a plane crash had called to console him. But he ended up consoling her. The former government minister, Horace Clarke, also lost a son around that time and they mourned together.

"There is a one-year pain that is intense. You get into the bathroom alone and it hits you. You see the back of someone resembling your loved one and it starts all over again," Jackson is clearly now fighting back the tears.
He advises persons who come to support the bereaved to be sensitive. "Don't say 'I am sorry'.

That can drive a dagger further into the heart of the mourner. Sorry creates pity and reinforces the sorrow. A hug is probably the best means of empathising. Say 'I'm here for you or I'll give you all the support I can'.

And don't visit the home late at night and expect the mourner to be up and ready to receive you after a long day of visits."

He doesn't want to head up the organisation he is advocating. But he will work with anyone who is willing to spearhead it. For there is a season for everything under the sun: a time to born and a time to die.
Next week: Horace Peterkin - Tourism's man of the moment

Send comments on this interview to desal@cwjamaica.com

Your View of the Interview

. This interview with Mr John Jackson has prompted me to respond, even though I've been enjoying the series for some time. I honestly don't know what you did, but there's just something special in your presentation on this one. This story seems to have brought out your best. All your writing skills were there for each and everyone to see. At first I thought that I was reading a Sydney Sheldon novel. It's simply a masterpiece! Right now, I'm just hanging on the edge of my seat for part two.

I believe interviewing John was a good choice, as he has been a role model for many persons over the years. He could easily be called a legend in his time. What I admire most about him is his versatility and 'never say never' attitude. He has taken his falls and has risen each time. He is the epitome of Confucius' saying, and I quote, "Our greatest glory is not in never failing, but rising every time we fall." I only hope that for all he's been through that the Lord Jesus is a central part of his life.

Desmond, as you continue to interview Jamaicans of the finest stock, I just want to encourage you to keep on keeping on.

Uriel Williams
williu2005@yahoo.com

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