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Joe Jackson, ‘responsible for the greatest entertainment family the world has ever known’ has died. He was 89. (June 27)
Media: Associated Press
NEW YORK (AP) — Joe Jackson once had his own dreams of success. He tried to be a boxer and then played guitar with a group called The Falcons. But he realized early on that there was an overwhelming pool of musical talent in his children, particularly a little bright-eyed boy named Michael.
He channeled his ambition through them, creating one of the greatest pop vocal groups, The Jackson Five, and launched the career of one of entertainment’s greatest legends in Michael Jackson, as well as another superstar talent, daughter Janet.
Yet the legacy of Jackson, who died Wednesday in Las Vegas at the age of 89, was steeped not only in the brilliant guidance of his children into the world’s premiere entertainment dynasty, but the iron fist with which he did it. Michael described beatings with the switch of a tree branch, and a fear so great of his father that he would sometimes vomit at the sight of him. His children called him Joseph — they weren’t allowed to call him by fatherly terms.
“You call me Joseph,'” Janet Jackson recalled her father telling her once when she called him dad. “I’m Joseph to you.”
By the time they were all adults, his children severed professional ties to him, preferring to let others guide the careers he once nurtured.
Still, in times of turmoil, it was Joe that they continued to turn to. When Michael Jackson stood trial on allegations that he sexually abused a child (he was acquitted), it was Joe Jackson who was at his side on most days. Janet Jackson rationalized that her father wanted the best for his children, even if he didn’t go about it the right way.
And La Toya Jackson, who once accused her father of physical and sexual abuse, later blamed her abusive former husband for coercing her to say it. In later years, relished her time with her father.
On Wednesday, she delivered a loving tribute to him.
“I will always love you! You gave us strength, you made us one of the most famous families in the world. I am extremely appreciative of that, I will never forget our moments together and how you told me how much you cared,” she wrote on Twitter.
Joseph Walter Jackson was born in Fountain Hill, Arkansas, on July 26, 1928. He was the eldest of four children to a high school teacher and a house wife. When he was 12, his parents split and he moved with his father to Oakland, California. At 18, he moved to Indiana to live near his mother in East Chicago.
It was in Indiana that he met and married Katherine Scruse, with whom he settled in Gary. He worked as a welder and crane operator, sometimes holding…
