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As kids across the Easton area head back to school for another year, I recently decided to do a little shopping myself.

While wandering through a local department store, something stopped me dead in my tracks.

There, hanging among the jeans and button-down shirts, was a dark fedora.

You know the kind. The sort of hat you’d expect to see perched on the head of some private detective in a 1950s movie.

To everyone else walking through the store, it was just a hat.

To me, it was a portal back about 45 years. Because the moment I saw that fedora, one name immediately popped into my head.

Jack Paul.

If you grew up in the Easton area between the late 1950s and early 1980s, there’s a pretty good chance that name just triggered something inside you.

For those who didn’t, allow me to explain.

Jack Paul was the Easton Area School District’s truant officer. And to a kid who occasionally decided that attending school was more optional than a requirement, Jack Paul was terrifying.

Forget Michael Myers.

Forget Jason Voorhees.

Forget Freddy Krueger.

Those guys only came after you in movies.

Jack Paul came to your house in person.

All it took was a parent or grandparent uttering seven simple words:

“Jack Paul is coming to get you.”

And his name was never uttered as “Jack,” or “Mr. Paul.” Nope, it was always, always Jack Paul.

Suddenly, school didn’t seem so bad.

I honestly can’t remember much about what Jack Paul looked like. Time has erased most of those details.

But I remember the fedora. Boy, do I remember that fedora.

Over the years, I’ve discovered I’m far from the only Easton kid with a Jack Paul story.

One person remembered living along Route 611 near the mineral spring and purposely missing the school bus. Jack Paul apparently became such a regular visitor that he was showing up about once a week to retrieve them.

Another told me Jack Paul lived around the corner and that their mother called him plenty of mornings to come pick up a brother who refused to go to school.

And then there was my favorite:

“My mom allowed him to walk into my house and come get me. I tried hiding in the sewing room, but he would not leave until he got me. He was the nicest guy but scared the living shit out of me.”

That pretty much sums up Jack Paul’s relationship with an entire generation of Easton children.

He might have been the nicest man in the world. We didn’t care.

He was coming to get us.

And, yes, eventually he came to get me too.

I had developed something of an attendance problem in sixth grade. And by “attendance problem,” I mean I didn’t particularly feel like attending.

Despite repeated warnings and veiled threats from my parents and grandmother — “You better go to school or Jack Paul is going to come get you” — I continued testing the limits of the Easton Area School District’s attendance policy.

I actually became pretty good at it.

There was a barn next to our house, and on particularly ambitious mornings I would hide inside it.

In February.

In Pennsylvania.

In freezing temperatures.

That’s how badly I didn’t want to go to school.

Apparently, sitting inside a freezing barn for six hours seemed preferable to math class.

Kids aren’t always known for making sound decisions.

Then came the morning when my grandmother finally decided she’d had enough of me skipping school.

She picked up the telephone.

“Jack Paul is coming to get you,” she told me when she hung up.

Yeah, yeah. I’d heard that one before.

I wasn’t going anywhere, except to the television set to watch the Godzilla movie that was coming on at noon.

About fifteen minutes later, Nan asked if I’d like some eggs for breakfast.

Now that sounded like a reasonable alternative to school.

“Of course.”

Soon the eggs were frying in her cast-iron skillet and bread was popping into the toaster.

Life was good.

No school.

Nan’s dippy eggs.

Godzilla on the 19″ television.

What could possibly go wrong?

Knock. Knock. Knock.

Someone was at the door.

And in walked a tall man wearing a fedora.

Uh-oh.

Jack Paul removed his hat, introduced himself to my grandmother and then looked directly at me.

“It’s time for you to go to school, young man. Let’s go.”

There was only one problem.

“My grandmother just made me breakfast,” I said.

Jack Paul looked at the plate of eggs and toast.

Then he looked at me.

And rather than drag me kicking and screaming from the house, the most feared man in the Easton Area School District calmly sat down across the table from me.

“All right,” he said. “Finish eating and then we’re leaving.”

Checkmate.

So there I sat, eating my eggs with Jack Paul sitting across from me waiting. The funniest part I remember is that my grandmother asked him if he wanted her to make him a plate. He declined.

I don’t remember how those eggs tasted.

I don’t remember what we talked about.

But I certainly remember where I went when breakfast was finished.

School.

Years passed, and by the time I reached my junior and senior years of high school, Jack Paul had pretty much disappeared from my thoughts. Eventually, I graduated, grew up and became one of those adults who now looks back and wonders how the hell any of us survived some of the stupid things we did as kids.

While researching this story, though, I stumbled across Jack Paul’s obituary from 1987. And that’s when the scary man in the fedora became someone entirely different.

Jack Paul had served as the Easton Area School District’s attendance officer from 1957 until his retirement in 1984. Before that, he’d been an Easton police officer. He had also served in the Navy during World War II and helped found Easton’s Police Athletic League.

But there was more.

Jack devoted much of his life to helping young people in the Easton area. His work earned him the Easton Exchange Club’s Book of Golden Deeds Award as well as recognition for his involvement with local youth.

He also started something called the Buddy Fund, which helped provide necessities to underprivileged children so they could attend school.

Think about that for a moment.

As kids, we thought Jack Paul’s job was to hunt us down, throw us into the back of a car and deliver us to jail school against our will.

What we didn’t understand was why he wanted us there.

He wasn’t the villain in our childhood stories. Quite the opposite.

He was a man who apparently believed every kid deserved a chance — even the stubborn sixth grader sitting at his grandmother’s kitchen table trying to use a plate of eggs as a last-minute stay of execution.

That’s something you don’t understand when you’re eleven years old.

Back then, I only knew the legend.

The hat.

The warnings.

The knock on the door.

And those dreaded words:

“Jack Paul is coming to get you.”

Forty-five years later, I walked through a department store and spotted a fedora hanging on a rack.

For a few seconds, I was eleven again.

I could almost smell Nan’s eggs frying in that cast-iron skillet.

I could hear the knock on the door.

And I could see that man in the fedora walking into the kitchen.

Only now, after learning more about the man underneath the hat, the memory feels a little different.

Jack Paul wasn’t someone Easton’s kids needed to fear. He was someone who spent much of his life looking out for them.

Of course, try explaining that to an eleven-year-old hiding in a freezing barn in February of 1981.

Because if someone had yelled up those stairs…

“Jack Paul is coming to get you!”

I’d probably still be running.

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My new novel, The Seventh Echo is available now from 
Adverse City Publishing
© 2026 James Wood