Jack Gore Collins was born in Waukegan, Illinois, in 1930. He joined the Navy Reserve Officer Training Corps to pay his tuition to Princeton University, where he graduated in 1952. He then served in the Navy at the tail end of the Korean War. He met Janine Decker during leave in 1954, and they married in 1957; they later had three children. He earned a law degree at Harvard Law School in 1958. After graduation, he relocated to Oregon to be a law clerk for Oregon Supreme Court Justice Walter Perry. In 1958, he went into private law practice in Salem, Oregon. He became an assistant attorney for the U.S. Department of Justice in 1963. He worked under U.S. Attorney Sidney Lezak. He was promoted to first assistant U.S. attorney in 1966. In 1982, Charles Turner replaced Sidney Lezak, and Collins was made chief of the Civil Division. In 1992, his title changed to chief of the Asset Forfeiture Division. He retired three years later, in 1995. He taught administrative law at Lewis and Clark College and later at Portland State University. He died in 2010.

Sources: Vital records in Ancestry.com; information provided by Collins in his interview and in two additional oral history interviews, SR 1250 and SR 1251, that are also held at the Oregon Historical Society Research Library.