Will:
I'd appreciate it if you or someone I know could read this at Jim's memorial:
I knew Jim Schefter since grade school. I thought he was about the smartest kid on the block. I don't know if he walked around with a slide rule hooked to his pants like the other smart guys I knew but there was something about Jim that you knew, sooner or later, would result in some wonderful success. Maybe it was that old North Dakota determination. Grit, my mother would have called it or if somewhere deep down, there was the will to be great. But Jim was great: as a writer, as a father, as a pioneer in journalism, and as a friend.
Our paths sort of wandered off after high school but amazingly, for almost 20 years, we were crossing each others path or living within a mile or two of one another without even knwoing it. But since the mid-ninties, I've seen Jim a lot. I read drafts of his Corvette book and looked at the preface of The Race to see my name in the book. God bless you for that, Jim. And I got to know Jim as I hadn't before when he was carrying a slide rule on his hip and was, by far, the smartest kid on the block.
I got to know him and it hardly seems possible that I won't see him again. It doesn't seem fair that you re-aquaint yourself with an old friend and well before his time, he's taken from us. So for you, Jim, I want to tell you that we'll miss you, that we valued and admired you, that you were a great person with ambition and talent and an extraordinary will to excell. And if by now you're telling God that Heaven could be engineered a whole lot better, that He ought to use the design of the 1998 Corvette, then all the better for the rest of us who will come by for a glass of wine and catch up on old times when we meet again.
Morley Glicken