Jack London gets up early every day, laces up his running shoes and hits the Lady Bird Lake Hike and Bike Trail. For the successful attorney and critically acclaimed author, the trail is his cathedral, his office and his home.

“My books are composed and my plot lines resolved, my deposition questions are thought up, my tactics are thought through by having that time alone everyday where I look up and there’s this canopy or river,” London said. “It’s just a wonderful place. To me, it is Austin.”

For London, 63, running is a release, a hobby and a social activity. He often runs with longtime friends.

“I know, literally, thousands of people and have since the 1970s, because we see each other on the trail. I think that most of them have no idea what I do outside of the trail. It’s a completely pure environment where we say ‘hi’ to each other and we may stop and run with each other,” London said. “No one cared if I was a lawyer or that other people were insurance salesmen or janitors at Brackenridge [Hospital]. I get a huge amount of my spirituality and my peace from the trail.”

The trail has even taken him to races in other countries, including a marathon in Rotterdam, Netherlands, which also served as the Olympic qualifying trials for the Dutch team. Race officials convinced London to run because his speedy start could set a fast early pace for their Olympic hopefuls.

“I did not win or place or show and almost got run over by a trolley because I was so slow,” he said of the race. “By the time my group came through, they were shutting down the course, and the street car had started up again.”

He recalled running in the 1986 London Marathon, which had been a goal of his for many years.
“Mile 21 or 22 is the Tower [of London], and then the course moves on to Trafalgar [Square],” he said of the 26.2-mile race. “There is a water stop every mile, so I decided to skip the water stop at Mile 24.”

But instead of going on to Buckingham Palace, the course turned, and there were no more water stops.

“By the end, I was so dehydrated and was just suffering. When I finally crossed over Westminster Bridge, they put a little ribbon around your neck and say ‘Great job, here’s your medal,’ ” London said. “Well, they got to me and said, ‘Great job. Do you need a doctor?’ ”

He keeps a framed poster from that marathon in his office. It features a shot of the London skyline and two runners along the Thames River. A bubble above the runners says “Oh, God. I can’t go on.” A bubble above the iconic St. Paul’s Cathedral says, “Oh, yes you can.”

For a while, he said, that summed up his life, and a connection with the city was forged.

London and his wife, Alice, who he calls “by far, the smartest person in our house,” even bought a home in London, on German Street, where they spend as much time as they can.

They have a little ritual when they arrive in the city. They will drop their bags at their home and freshen up. They’ll pick up sandwiches at a favorite shop and head to St. James Park, where they will people watch for four hours.

“We’ve been doing that for 20 years, and London is our second home,” London said. “Alice agreed to go out on a date with me because I wrote her a poem about Hyde Park.”

London came to Austin from his hometown of Groom in the Texas Panhandle to attend law school at the University of Texas and graduated in 1972. He practiced for a few short months before he left to fulfill an Army obligation. During his service, London was sent to bases all over the U.S. as a captain with the Quartermaster Corps. He even did a stint with the Judge Advocate General’s Corp, arguing cases in federal court in Virginia.

A call to serve

He returned to Austin in 1973 and began building a successful law practice, taking cases of all types.

In 1984, an Army buddy of his, Marty Martinez, a former Army helicopter pilot, was working as a civilian pilot. He was paralyzed when his civilian helicopter crashed. London agreed to represent Martinez in a suit against the helicopter’s manufacturer.

“We became one notch higher than best friends and almost blood brothers,” London said. “He was in a wheelchair for the remainder of his life.”

Martinez was eventually awarded $3 million, and London began a successful career as a products liability litigator against airplane and helicopter manufacturers.

“It involves incidences when a product does not work as designed or hoped for,” London said of his legal specialization. “Ninety-nine percent of my cases have involved fixed-wing aircraft or helicopters that have come apart in mid-air and killed or injured people.”

His career has taken him to countries such as Canada, the Netherlands, China and Mexico investigating and reconstructing accidents and trying cases all over the world. His office in Westlake is filled with exact scale replicas of the aircraft involved in some of his cases, and he describes the affect his career has had on him as post-traumatic stress disorder.

“These [models] represent the places where my family members and friends have died and just how easily that could happen to you or me,” he said.

Martinez died last November from complications with his injuries, and the death has left a lasting impact on London.

“It was just one of the most horrible things to watch your friend finally die from all of the complications after the accident,” he said.

Through that, and other personal tragedies, running has remained a constant in his life.

Overcoming grief

There is a bench on the Lady Bird Lake Trail that is dedicated to Daniel London, Jack’s son, who, along with his girlfriend, Beth Early, was killed by a drunk driver in 1996. Daniel was just two weeks shy of his 20th birthday.

More than his son’s gravesite, the bench is where London feels most connected to him.

“I really did think that I was going to stop living then,” London said, recalling the years after the accident.

He leaned on his wife, Alice, for support, and he credits her with saving him.

“If Alice hadn’t taken care of me I just would have quit surviving,” he said.

For five years, he said, they grieved, didn’t leave their home in West Lake Hills and didn’t see friends. Their two other sons graduated from high school and went to college, and their daughter began a career as a teacher in Arlington.

It was on a trip to Belgium in 2001 that things started to change for London.

“I thought, ‘It’s time to start doing the things you are going to do in your life. If you don’t, you’re going to die regretting these things you didn’t do,’ ” he said.

A dream fulfilled

London had dreamed of becoming a novelist since he was in college, but his legal career and family obligations pushed that dream aside. His wife encouraged him to enroll in an academy in France that specialized in novel writing. He enrolled in 2003, and a story that had been bouncing around in his head for 20 years was finally put to paper.

London said that he has been fascinated by the World War II period for decades and had always wanted to write a story set during that era. He conducted countless hours of research to get the details just right. The result of that hard work was his first book, “Virginia’s War: Tierra, Texas 1944,” which was published last year by Austin-based Vire Press.

“These people, for many of us our parents, grew up on a different planet,” London said. “They lived on a planet where the life expectancy was 55, and many babies died as infants. They lived on a planet where most women didn’t have a job unless they worked at the telephone exchange or as a nurse or a teacher.”

Before World War II, the average American who didn’t live in a city never traveled more than 50 miles from home, London said. But the war changed everything for most people: Women went to work, men went off to war, industrialization hit a breakneck pace and the introduction of widely available sulfa drugs and antibiotics increased life expectancy.

“We’re talking about a place that looks like America but is a completely different place,” he said.

This time of great change and upheaval is the period in which he chose to set his novels, the “French Letters” trilogy.

In “Virginia’s War: Tierra, Texas 1944,” a young woman, Virginia, is living in a small town in West Texas.

“Virginia works in the courthouse at the ration desk,” London explained. “Her brother is the postmaster, and her father runs the newspaper. Her boyfriend, Will, is a doctor who is in the army in France.”

The two seminal events in the book are when Virginia finds out that she’s pregnant and when she discovers a newspaper notice on the post office bulletin board, printed by her father, that she and Will had eloped.

“Well, that’s news to her and, of course, Will has no idea,” London said.
Much of the drama in the story centers around the letters that Virginia and Will send each other – and the letters that her brother, the postmaster, keeps from her. The idea for the story came from some of the letters that he read from that time period.

“These letters from soldiers are remarkable, three and five pages, and they rarely talk about what they are doing,” London said. “They didn’t want anyone to know they were in danger.”

The second book in the trilogy, “Engaged in War,” hits shelves Sept. 14 and will focus on Will’s time in France. In a temporal twist, the letters that Virginia is reading in the first book are being written in the second book. Aside from well-developed characters, London aims for a sense of place with his books. Tierra is the geographical equivalent of the everyman.

“I want you to feel like you are in that town,” London said. “Or, in Will’s book, I want you to feel like you are weighed down by the smell in an apple barn in France where they have set up an Army field hospital. I’ve had people from Idaho to New England tell me they thought I was sitting on their main street when I was writing (‘Virginia’s War’).”

“Virginia’s War,” was named a finalist for the Best Fiction of the South, Willie Morris award, a finalist for the Novels with a Romantic Element award from “Dear Author” and a finalist for Best Historical Fiction of the Year from the Military Writers Society of America.

While being an author is very different than what he thought it would be like, he is enjoying the ride.

“I’m certainly not in it to make any money, but I love writing, and I’m very gratified at the recognition that the book has received,” London said.

The third book in the trilogy, “Children of a Good War,” hasn’t been written yet, but if a particular passage is giving him trouble or a character isn’t cooperating, his running shoes and the Lady Bird Lake trail aren’t far away.