Jack Horkheimer was born in 1938 to a wealthy family in Randolph, Wisconsin, the son of Mary Edmunda (née Foley) and Arthur Philip Horkheimer. His father owned a publishing firm and was the mayor of Randolph for 24 years. Horkheimer started his show business career in 1953 at the age of 15 when he hosted a radio show on WBEV. In 1956, he graduated from Campion Jesuit High School.

Horkheimer was born with a congenital degenerative lung disease known as bronchiectasis and, as a result, suffered from chronic pain. His ailment was not diagnosed until he was 18 years old. During this time, he suffered from radiation sickness and lost his hair as the result of medical X-Ray treatments. In 1957, he had to leave the Honolulu Academy of Fine Arts because it was suspected that he had tuberculosis. His health issues caused him to move to Miami in 1964 for the humid warm climate.

During the summers away from college, he travelled the country playing jazz on the piano and organ under the name “Horky”. His agents at the Artists Corporation of America ended up giving him the stage name “Jack Foley”. He later changed this to “Jack Foley Horkheimer”. He graduated from Purdue University with a bachelor of science degree in 1963 as a distinguished scholar.

He moved to Miami, Florida, in 1964 for health reasons and began volunteering at the Miami Science Museum planetarium. He later became its director in 1973.

Horkheimer started his astronomy career in 1964, when he was 26, after he moved to Miami and met astronomer Arthur Smith. Smith was the president of the Miami Museum of Science and the chief of the Southern Cross Astronomical Society. Horkheimer started volunteering at the planetarium writing shows and was later offered a position with the museum.

Smith asked Horkheimer to run the Miami Space Transit Planetarium when it opened in 1966. Horkheimer’s shows were successful and the planetarium went from losing money to becoming profitable. Horkheimer worked his way up to become the planetarium’s educational director and eventually the executive director.

Horkheimer changed the planetarium show from a science lecture to a multimedia event including music, lights and narration. He created the Child of the Universe show for the planetarium in 1972, which became famous and used in other planetariums across the country. Sally Jessy Raphael portrayed the voice of the solar system in this show. The show won an international award from the society of European astronomers in 1976. Horkheimer became the executive director of the Miami Museum of Science’s Space Transit Planetarium in 1973 and stayed there for 35 years until his retirement in 2008. In 1988, he produced Star of Bethlehem: A Mystery Revealed in which he used computer programs to project three possible dates of planetary conjunctions that the Magi would have recognized as signaling the birth of a great Hebrew King: November 12, 7 BC, April 17, 6 BC or May 8 2 BC.

Horkheimer was known nationally for his commentaries about “astronomical events.” He was a science commentator for local Miami news station, starting in 1973. A 1982 viewing event for The Jupiter Effect inadvertently resulted in a nighttime riot due to media coverage beyond Horkheimer’s control. In 1986, he helped promote an event for viewing Halley’s Comet, traveling towards the equator aboard the supersonic airliner Concorde. He appeared on CNN several times, narrating solar eclipses and even hosted shows on Cartoon Network.

Jack Horkheimer was probably best known for his naked-eye astronomy television show Jack Horkheimer: Star Hustler, which started in 1976 and was broadcast nationally in 1985. Created, produced and written by Horkheimer, the show changed its name to Jack Horkheimer: Star Gazer in 1997 because Internet searches were producing results for the adult magazine Hustler.