In spite of this, he got an education on the fly, read a great deal of contemporary literature, met almost everyone of the period worth knowing and was a fine journalistic writer.

After leaving the Merchant Marines, he moved to New York where he married his first wife, Kit, and began his career as a photographer by taking pictures for a commercial real estate firm.

Shortly after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, Edward Steichen recruited Jacobs to join his Naval Aviation Photographic Unit.

Other of Jacobs's images capture the earnestness of young aviation cadets, the humiliation of a Japanese prisoner of war on the deck of a battleship, and melancholy scenes of Navy pilots on leave with their dates.

When the war ended, Jacobs and two of his colleagues, Horace Bristol and Victor Jorgensen, still dressed in uniforms, walked into the offices of Fortune and boldly proposed that the magazine hire them, and assign each a different part of the world as his beat.

[9]: 46–48 A photograph of Jacobs was in The Family of Man exhibition, created by Edward Steichen in 1955 at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, which resulted in a book of the same name.

[9]: 57–69, 74, 86, 90–92, 94, 98, 159, 164, 166–167, 200, 204, 206–207, 215, 219, 233 In later life, Jacobs opened two restaurants, one on Maryland's Eastern Shore—grudgingly frying up hamburgers when obliged to instead of his wonderful soft shelled crabs with smithfield ham or chicken à la Maryland—and one in Marlboro, Vermont, where he fed, among others, the members of the Budapest Quartet and pianist Rudolf Serkin.