Jim Eckardt has passed away in a little town some 100 km from his beloved New York City. Jim Eckardt was a writer at ScandAsia for a while and during that year++ became a well-known character in the Scandinavian community in Thailand.
Jim had just been through a year of living stupidly in Cambodia – that was the title he gave the book he wrote about that year in his life – and he was dead broke. He called me and asked if ScandAsia had a job for him. I laughed and said a heavyweight like him would have to be paid more than what I paid myself. He asked what that was. I told him. “That’s fine with me,” he said, and then he came the next day for work.
It was March 1999 and Jim was 52. In Thai-Danish Trade News, I introduced him in a short presentation:
He loved writing interviews and he was also involved as an editor of the “Scandinavians in Siam – the consecutive years”. Unfortunately, Jim worked for ScandAsia before the world went digital. Still, we have preserved a few of his works in electronic form. Here is an obituary which he wrote about late Dr. Einar Ammundsen:
https://scandasia.com/memories-of-dr-ammundsen/
Below is an interview with lawyer Say Sujintaya who was prominent at the time in the Dancham. Incidentally, the same issue of Thai Danish Trade News includes an interview with Charlotte Weber, Stig Vagt-Andersen and the above obituary for Dr. Ammundsen as well. Flip the pages and see Jim’s influence on headlines like “Annual General Party” – about the AGM in Dancham.
As a colleague, Jim was not a breeze of fresh air, he was a hurricane. Most nights ended in a beer too many. One night, before going home, he leaned back against our red pickup truck, pulled out his thing and started peeing. The guard starred at him. Jim just laughed and shouted “Have you never seen a New Yorker before?”
Our colleague Christer Nilsson, who alerted me to Jim’s passing, which he found in Crutchley’s column in Bangkok Post, shared another memory with me from one night, where the office had gone bowling together probably on Jim’s suggestion.
“Jim was so drunk that his fingers got stuck in the bowling ball and he glided down the lane… not reaching the pins..” Christer Nilsson recalls.
But a guy like Jim is only on loan. Eventually, The Nation needed an editor for the opinion pages, and Jim moved on to work for The Nation. Jim became 77 years old.
It was surprisingly difficult to find an image of Jim Eckardt on the internet. But eventually I found this one on the blog of another legendary farang in Thailand, Scott Murray, who wrote an interview with Jim Eckardt here.
I also found the image below in this obituary in “Tribute Archive” kindly written but obviously by someone who didn’t really know him like we did.
