The Long and Winding Road from Math Ph.D. to Monumental Sculptor

Freedom’s Just another Word . . .

By Jay Lagemann

Maybe the best place to start is when my life took a turn that made it different from most of my classmates. Like so many of us, I avoided being drafted and sent to Vietnam by going to graduate school, in my case M.I.T., whose math department offered me a full fellowship. Stanford had done the same, but my father, who lived in New York City, was dying of ALS, and I wanted to stay close to him. So M.I.T. it was.

At Princeton I’d enjoyed the academics, especially the art courses. What’s not to like about sitting in a darkened room listening to an intellectually stimulating lecture while looking at beautiful pictures? So why was I a math major? I didn’t fit the stereotype. I’d been a high-school football player, had pretty girlfriends , and generally thought of myself as a cool guy. But math was easy — without much work I got very good grades, which kept my parents happy, which was important since they were paying the bills. That left plenty of time for partying, skiing, and generally having a good time.

M.I.T. was different. Suddenly I was only taking math courses, and it became pretty obvious I didn’t love it, at least not enough to want to spend my life doing it. It was pretty depressing. But what did I want to do? I didn’t know, and with the stupidity of the Vietnam War becoming more and more apparent, I rapidly lost faith in our government and the whole academic community. I knew that M.I.T. was getting three- fourths of its funding from the Defense Department; the professors knew this, too, and adapted by accepting the status quo. Who can blame them? If I had a career, kids, and a mortgage I’d probably have done the same.

But I had none of those responsibilities. During the first three years of graduate school I lived with Anne, a wonderful Radcliffe woman from a well-connected family. Her folks liked me, I liked them, and everyone thought we’d get married and have a good, successful life, but I had other plans. I couldn’t see committing to a “normal” life I no longer believed in. As people said back then, I was free, white, and over 21 — or at least I’d be free once I reached 26, when I’d be out of graduate school and no longer eligible for the draft. So Anne and I broke up the night the ’70s began. I turned 26 that year and could have dropped out of M.I.T., but I’m not a quitter and knew that even if I never directly used my doctorate, it would be an impressive accomplishment. I wrote my dissertation on a hopelessly abstruse topic in mathematical logic, turned down an offer from Tufts for a teaching job I hadn’t even applied for, and took off for Europe to experience FREEDOM.
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Janis Joplin sang, “Freedom’s just another word for nothing left to looe,” but you can’t be free without money. Today people are graduating with six-figure debts, but we lived in different times, and I was smart enough to save money from my summer jobs with IBM Research and at the Pentagon and to use my math and programming skills to multiply it in the stock market, so I was able to leave M.I.T. with a Ph.D. and a year’s salary in my brokerage account and no job or commitments. My father, the one who always had ambitions for me, had died in 1969. My mother, a Phi Beta Kappa and the first female network radio director after she and my father worked at CBS in the late 1930s, just wanted me to be happy.

We all know the saying, “If you’re so smart, why aren’t you rich?” To me, the better question is, “If you’re so smart, why are you working for someone else?” I never liked being cooped up inside four walls because someone else said you had to be there, or wearing a tie, which felt too much like being a dog on a leash. I guess, like Peter Pan, I never wanted to grow up.

In the summer of 1971 I was finally free. So with everything I needed in my backpack, and an old Gibson guitar in my hand, I took off for Cambridge University, in England. I had finagled a fellowship to be there to attend a logic conference with my Danish lover, who was also from M.I.T.’s math department, as was her husband. As they say, life can be complicated.

Post-conference, I backpacked solo around Europe and started writing a memoir. I returned to the States, but not for long. Growing up, I’d spent vacations on Martha’s Vineyard, where my parents had a summer place, and through a connection there I got a chance to sail across the Atlantic from the Caribbean to Spain. I was new to ocean sailing and starting out couldn’t tell a sheet or a halyard, but I soon learned celestial navigation (this was long before GPS) and became an experienced open-ocean sailor.

After that trip I was offered good money to help deliver a Hinkley 48 yawl from Spain to South Africa. I couldn’t pass up a chance to have a white Christmas in Cape Town with the roses blooming (our winter is summer down there). On the way we got caught in a storm at the edge of the Roaring 40s, with waves 50 to 60 feet high and winds over 70 m.p.h. I’ve never felt so scared or close to death. As the boat floundered, an albatross circled us several times, showing me how to work with the storm rather than fighting it.

We survived, and for weeks I felt happy just to be alive. In Cape Town I met a British surfer and ocean sailor named Michael. He was there for the Cape-to-Rio Race, at the time the longest ocean sailing race in the world. The boat he was crewing on was still in transit, so I put him up on my boat, and we became great friends.

Part of being in a new country is getting to know the locals. One guy I met introduced me to his “connection” in what was known in the Apartheid era as Cape Town’s “Colored District.” It’s funny how people who like to smoke pot manage to find each other. The “connection” sold me a $20 bag, which turned out to be a quarter of a pound! So I was generous with it and gave an ounce to the first mate of the Ondine, the largest yacht in the race; he returned the favor by giving me a spot on the Ondine’s crew. (The Hinkley 48 was also in the race, but the owner was Brazilian and had an all-Brazilian crew for the race.)

Crewing on the Ondine was an experience. I even got to take the helm a few times. My loftiest moment came when I was hoisted in the bosun’s chair to the top of the 100-foot mast to uncross the spinnaker halyards for an “inside out” spinnaker change.

We arrived in Rio at the start of Carnival. The yacht club threw a big party. I met a lovely Brazilian girl and danced with her on a tabletop like I’d done at Princeton Houseparties. We partied for five days straight.

The Hinkley 48’s Brazilian owner was also in Rio. Impressed as much by my Princeton and M.I.T. credentials as by my still relatively modest ocean-sailing experience, he hired me to skipper his boat on the return voyage to Spain. In fact, I was less experienced than most of the crew. While at sea we revarnished all the brightwork and made the boat nicer than the owner had ever seen it. He paid me well enough that sailing started to feel like work. So rather than taking on another sailing job, I flew back to Brazil to be best man at Michael’s wedding. It was great living with a Brazilian family and getting to know their culture. Then travelled for a while I returned to Martha’s Vineyard for a two week long 30th Birthday Bash. My present to myself was to build a tree house, where I could finish writing my memoir.

When I went to New York to try selling my memoir to a publisher, I met and fell in love with Marianne and her twin daughters. She laughed and cried when she read my manuscript and fell in love with me. At that point I lost interest in finding a publisher. We moved to the Vineyard, where pretty soon we were running out of money, so I got a one-day job assembling Hobie Cats, a type of small sailboat, for use in the movie Jaws 2, then being filmed on the Vineyard. I kept showing up for work and made myself useful, so finally they had to hire me for the Boat Department.

When the shooting moved to Florida we followed, and Marianne began screen printing T-shirts for the film crew and I worked my way into Special Effects, where I helped choreograph several of the boat crashes. Six months later the shooting was done, and we headed west for L.A. to find more work in the movie business.

We never made it. In Tucson our 10-year-old Volvo broke down, and by the time it was fixed we’d changed our minds about Hollywood and detoured to Mexico. That was another adventure. We had Marianne’s two eight-year-old, blue-eyed twin girls, Chris and Jenny, with us. All of us had skateboards (almost unknown then in Mexico), and whenever we got to a new town we’d hop on them and cruise around the zócalo (town square). A great way to meet people.

Alas, the Volvo wasn’t up to the challenge. The starter motor died in San Blas, the head gasket blew in Zihuatanejo, the automatic transmission crapped out in Acapulco, and the distributor started spinning freely in a one-horse town called Nueva Inglaterra. Maybe that was a hint. With Paradise eluding us south of the border, we returned to Martha’s Vineyard to start a business screen-printing T-shirts.

Marianne did most of the work, while I became the nominal C.E.O. of our fledgling company so my Princeton classmates wouldn’t think I was a bum. The manager of the Black Dog Tavern, in Vineyard Haven, was the brother of a good friend, and he gave us the contract for printing Black Dog T-shirts. The Black Dog Tavern is famous now, but at the time (1980), it was just a local bakery and reastaurant. It would be a few more years before its T-shirts sported the iconic silhouette of a Labrador retriever, and sales were modest, maybe a few hundred a year. But with a lot of work, mostly by Marianne, we grew the business; 20 years later we were printing hundreds of thousands of Black Dog T-shirts.

Most small businesses lose money in the first years, and we were no exception. Rather than get real jobs, we decided to live cheaply. In summers we camped out, with a garden hose and extension cord providing water and electricity. In winters we lived in my parent’s uninsulated summer house with a wood stove to keep us warm. My theory was to be happy and to work on building wealth rather than worrying about income and status symbols. When you’re young it can be fun to rough it. We drove rusty old junkers but ate good, fresh food and bought art. A large wooden raft washed up on the nude beach a mile from the land in Chilmark my parents had given me. I salvaged it and with its large wooden beams built our house. I learned not just carpentry, but plumbing and electricity, and even dug my own well. The house, which I think of as my largest sculpture, has evolved as we’ve grown older. For a few years we had a dishwasher while still using an outhouse. Family members argued over whose turn it was to do the dishes, but nobody complained about the outhouse. It had a nice view and lots of good reading materials.

I still loved sailing and had picked up a Hobie Cat from the Jaws 2 set. We sailed it whenever the wind blew, until I fell in love with windsurfing. In the early ’80s, during the winter months we took the girls out of school and camped and windsurfed in Florida. For my 44th birthday Marianne gave me a plane ticket to Hawaii for four months on Maui, a windsurfers’ Mecca. I went there again for a second winter. (Both times, Marianne came out for six weeks at the end of my stay, while the kids remained with friends on the Vineyard to finish school.) By then I was comfortable sailing and surfing in mast-high waves. When not on the water I spent time making sculpture. Ever since meeting Marianne I ‘d made things for her and the girls, but it was in Hawaii that I started taking sculpture seriously.

By 1991 our business was finally starting to earn a small profit, but our lease was running out and the country was in recession. Instead of panicking we doubled down and gambled everything, mortgaging our souls and property to buy a rundown house dating from the 1760s in the business district of Vineyard Haven for 40 percent of its cost two years earlier. I spent a year gutting the structure and rebuilding it from the inside out, converting it into office and factory space for our T-shirt business. It was scary to risk everything with the economy tanking, but it fit with my idea of building wealth. It worked out, and in the process we saved one of the town’s three remaining Colonial-era buildings.

My big break, though I didn’t realize it at the time, came in 1994, when I got the commission to build The Swordfish Harpooner, an 18-foot-tall sculpture for the celebration of Chilmark’s tricentennial. When I proposed this monumental work I wasn’t sure I could pull it off. I’d never built anything near that size. But Princeton had taught me that we were the best and brightest and could bullshit our way through anything. And working in Special Effects on Jaws 2 had taught me it doesn’t matter how many times you fail as long as you get it to work in the end. That’s all anyone sees.

People are curious about commissions and often ask, “How much are you getting?” I felt sort of embarrassed telling them, “Nothing.” But that wasn’t strictly true. By creating a large sculpture in a beautiful public setting I was getting something more valuable than money. The Swordfish Harpooner made me one of the best-known sculptors on Martha’s Vineyard, and soon there was demand for a small bronze version of it. I knew nothing about making bronzes, so I took a workshop in bronze casting at the Johnson Atelier, near Princeton. Since then I’ve worked with six different foundries and have cast close to a thousand pieces.

In 1999, after 24 years of living together, Marianne and I got married. Our decision to do so had nothing to do with propriety and a lot to do with estate planning. It cemented a relationship that didn’t need cementing. We enjoy our life and our wonderful family!

It must be obvious by now that I am easily bored. Fortunately, I enjoy steep learning curves and attempting things I don’t know how to do. When you’re trying something new at first you’re almost always bad at it, but if you keep working and learning from your mistakes, good things start happening.

Take the case of my TV show. I liked playing with video and figured it would be fun to have a TV show, but I didn’t know what it would be about or how to do it. I recalled our Jaws 2 boat crew motto — “Just do it!” — and also remembered what an artist friend told me when, just starting out, I showed him some of my early sculptures: “Why don’t you make 50, and then we’ll talk about it.” So I plunged ahead with Jay’s View on our local public-access TV, where nobody pays you but nobody can fire you, either. It frees you to realize that your first, second, or third try don’t need to succeed. If you get five good shows out of the first 50, that’s great! Over the years I’ve made more than 70 half-hour Jay’s View episodes; some are bad and some are pretty good, but the trend is definitely up. In 2002 I became one of the founders of MVTV, the Martha’s Vineyard cable access station.

After helping the Black Dog expand its T-shirt business by maybe 1,000 percent over 22 years, it offshored the contract to China to save a few pennies a shirt. By then, the Black Dog was 75 percent of our business. So we “retired,” became landlords, and got to spend more time with our six grandchildren.

In 2007, after a two-month adventure mountain biking in awesome locations all over the Southwest, I learned I had early-stage prostate cancer. What a shock. How the hell do you deal with something where all the options are bad? I chose surgery even though it was likely to screw up my sex life. My operation was a success, but my cancer had already spread. That happens with the same odds as rolling “snake eyes.” Bummer.

I took off to Hawaii to recover. I camped on the beach, swam with the dolphins, mountain-biked over the lava and through jungles on the Big Island and tried to figure out how I was going to deal with cancer. As an atheist I believe you have only one life to live. So far, mine had been damn good. So why not try to make the most of whatever I had left? I decided that family and feeling good were what mattered to me.

Fortunately, we live next door to three of our grandchildren. The other three live in Vermont which isn’t that far away, and we often visit. Now I’ll drop everything to bike to the beach with them. Creating sculptures, mountain-biking, and loving Marianne feel good, so, “Just Do It!” Feeling sorry for myself feels bad, so I fight that and try to force myself to do what makes me happy. Not easy, but since my cancer I am actually a happier man.

And good things have a way of snowballing. After I decided to concentrate on making big sculptures for my sculpture garden to please myself other people saw them liked them too. Soon I sold my first six- figure piece, had a museum show, and finally got a commission to build a bronze 18-foot man swinging a girl. You may remember the life-sized steel original that I brought to our 25th reunion. Swinging Jenny (a reference to one of our daughters) will be installed on West 58th Street in Manhattan two weeks before our 50th.

Life is good.