Jack Cole

I want to tell you a story.
This story is about a man named Jack.
He lived an interesting life.
When he was 17 he bicycled from New Castle, Pennsylvania to Los Angeles, California, and then sold the story to the Boy Scouts of America magazine Boys’ Life in 1935.
A year later he married his childhood sweetheart Dorothy Mahoney.
Not long after that began to Jack write and draw comic books for the better part of his adult life. One of his creations, Plastic Man(pictured to the right), is still around today, and more popular then ever.
After 11 years, he left it all behind in hopes of moving onto something bigger. Soon, he did, at the new magazine Playboy. There he worked as the premiere cartoon illustrator, under the name of Jake. He had a job there for the rest of his life, having no less then one piece of work in every issue of Playboy.
Cole finally realized one of his life’s ambitions in May of 1958, when he created his own daily syndicated newspaper comic strip, Betsy and Me. By the end of that summer, it was appearing in 50 newspapers.
He was at the high point of his career. Then one morning, he went out and mailed two letters. That afternoon around two o’clock he told his wife he was going to pick up the mail and a newspaper. Instead, he went to a sport shop and purchased a .22 caliber, single-shot Marlin rifle. He called his neighbor to around 5:15pm what he was planning to do, and to tell his wife. He parked his Chevrolet station wagon on the side of a gravel road, and shot himself in the head.
Those letters he mailed that morning? They were suicide notes. One to his wife Dorothy, and the other to his employer/friend, Hugh Hefner. However, he did not die immediately.
Three boys found him around 6pm, shot in the head, but still alive. They got help, but it was no good. He died at 6:45pm at Woodstock Hospital.
The only person who knows why Jack killed himself except for his wife, who testified at the coroners inquest that he had given his reasons. It is unknown if Hefner knows or not, but Dorothy cut off all communication with him and Jack’s family, and remarried roughly a year later.
To this day, Jack’s death remains a mystery. After-all, who would want to kill them-self when they are at the most successful point of their career?