Jack Loeffler Looks Back

Spencer Beckwith On The Arts

As an Army private in 1958, Jack Loeffler witnessed the first atomic tests in the Nevada desert. He spent years afterward as a radical environmental activist. But those years also included gigging as a jazz trumpeter, watching for fires in an Arizona forest, tripping on peyote with Carlos Castaneda and, ultimately, having a successful career as a self-taught aural historian. Jack tells his story in Headed Into The Wind, just published by UNM Press.