Jack Livingston

Biography

Buffalo’s winter of 1929 welcomed Jack Livingston with a hiss of acetylene and the blue-white flare of a welder’s torch. For a decade he traded the klieg lights of Hollywood for the sparks of a steel shop, framing skyscrapers in molten seams while the Depression aged outside. When the city’s skyline finally bored him, he and Alice Mitchell folded their lives into a sedan and followed the Hudson north to Sheffield, Massachusetts, where he reinvented himself again—this time as the smooth-talking man in the sample-case, peddling gadgets from door to door. On the sun-washed afternoon of 14 September 1952, the couple headed home along Route 44. A curve near Salisbury, Connecticut, took the wheel from Jack’s hands; the car veered, kissed bark, and stopped against a stand of maples. By the time rescuers arrived, both husband and wife had succumbed to chests crushed by steel and a constellation of internal wounds. Flames later consumed their bodies, yet their ashes remain together, housed in a small columbarium niche at Sheffield City Cemetery, Berkshire County, quietly overlooking the hills Jack once canvassed.