Jason MacRae
| Jason MacRae | ||||||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
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| Sex | M | |||||||||
| Birth date | 1951 | |||||||||
| Spouse | Jody MacRae | |||||||||
| Spouse2 | Christine MacRae | |||||||||
| Spouse3 | Vicky Varney | |||||||||
Children
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Jason MacRae has been a resident of Bradford, Michigan, for most his whole life. He went to elementary school there with Mignon and Joe Varney. In High School, "He'd dated Mignon for a while in high school, even though she'd been a grade ahead of him"HS7 He was heavily involved in Boy Scouts as a kid.
Since Jason had some experience welding in school, when he enlisted in the Army he chose to train as a welder. He worked a maintenance battalion in Vietnam and Sergeant Morgenstern taught him to be a blacksmith as well. When he rotated to a base in Germany, he found himself working for Morgenstern again and soon was learning advanced techniques.
Jason got out of the army in 1972 and by early 1973 he was working at General Hardware. Continuing what he learned in the Army, Jason would make knives at a smithy in his garage. His blades were described as the "most beautiful knives you've ever seen. They're real art objects, some of them sell for thousands of dollars. Real collectors' items".HS1 Around 2000, Jason was seriously considering escalating his hobby into a bigger operation.
As the owner of a pristine 1968 red Firebird convertible, Jason is often asked to drive in parades with queen candidates riding on the back deck. Vicky Varney has fond memories of him driving her as a homecoming queen candidate and that was also how he met his first wife Jody. They had one son, Duane MacRae, before Jody left before 1978 and has not been heard from in twenty years.HS1 About two years after Jody left and his divorce for abandonment came through, he married Christine MacRae. Duane remembered Christine as the only mother he knew, but she died of a slowly progressing leukemia, around 1989.HS2
Jason is described as "medium-height, medium-build, dark-haired man with the full beard" in October 1998. In respect of his Scottish heritage, he could affect a Scottish accent and could wear full regalia, including a kilt.HS4
At the 1998 Halloween party hosted at the Heisler's house, Jason wore his kilt which wasn't strictly in the theme of cross-dressing, although he was a man in a skirt. Eve McClellan thanked Jason at the occasion, " I have a special respect for him for a number of reasons. He saved my butt from bullies a couple times back when we were in high school, and I think he was one of only a few adults in town who didn’t look down on me for being a little odd. He taught me by example that it’s all right to be a little off the wall if you have the courage to do it, so in an indirect way he helped give me the courage to do what I wound up having to do."POF3
Jason was Vicky Varney's back-door neighbor; she knew him all her life.HS1 They had always been friends, and eventually married on July 2, 2000.HS35 Vicky gave birth to their daughter Melissa on September 11, 2001.HS36 Jason would be fifty in 2001, making his birth year around 1951.HS30 By the time Duane and Michelle Rawson visited after he'd run the Iditarod dog sled race, Jason and Vicky also had a son, Mike, nearly a year old.INTA3
Jason helped Dave Patterson with car shopping in 2001. After asking a few questions, he directed Dave to the car he ended up purchasing. Jason also drove him to Phil Sharp's office for insurance.PUTP18
