11/13/96 - 03:59 PM ET - Click reload often for latest version
CHICAGO - Ted Kaczynski did have friends growing up in suburban Chicago, but he was closer to his textbooks.
While other 16-year-olds were heading for homecoming dances, he was headed for Harvard.
"It was tough on him," said Russell Mosny, a classmate who watched as his friend's emotional needs took a backseat to his intellectual brilliance.
Ted's parents nurtured that academic prowess, only to see him shrug it all off for a hermit's life in the Montana mountains. But he didn't escape completely.
Some 1,200 miles away from Kaczynski's tar-paper shack, in a modest blue suburban home where his parents lived for two decades, his family discovered suspicious documents that led to his arrest as the suspect in the Unabomber case.
And while authorities search for clues in the 18-year bombing spree, former neighbors and friends pieced together their memories of a very bright, painfully shy boy.
Wanda and Theodore R. Kaczynski raised their two boys, Ted and David, during the 1950s in Evergreen Park, a tiny suburb full of trees and brick homes on Chicago's southwest side.
They were friendly folks - Theodore played horseshoes and sometimes passed out samples from the sausage factory he ran. Both boys were bright, but Ted was more than that.
"I have never known anyone who had a brain like he did," said neighbor Evelyn Vanderlaan.
Mosny said he had a lot in common with his friend: both spent much of their time at study and playing in the band; both graduated at age 16; and both suffered the awkwardness of being too smart and too shy to fit in.
But Mosny said he forced himself to overcome his shyness, while his friend never could relate to anyone outside his circle of fellow bookworms. "He had a hell of a time," Mosny said.
Kaczynski never wore the Levis and engineer boots sported by others at Evergreen Park High School, said classmate Wayne Tripton. Instead, he carried a leather briefcase.
Still, Tripton said he doesn't remember Ted standing out in a crowd. "It was like Ted could be there and be disappeared at the same time."
While Kaczynski moved on to get degrees at Harvard and Michigan, and an assistant professorship in Berkeley, his parents went to Iowa with son David, who was seven years younger.
Theodore Kaczynski either owned or operated a foam packaging plant, while Wanda, already in her 50s, earned an education degree from the University of Iowa in 1968.
By 1969, the family was in Lombard, another quite Chicago suburb.
Neighbors don't recall ever seeing son Ted at the one-story home, which was to be his parents' last.
In October 1990, Theodore Kaczynski, recently diagnosed with fatal lung cancer, shot himself to death while his wife and David were in another room of the house. Lombard police and neighbors don't recall Ted coming home at the time of his father's death.
Wanda, a spry woman who loved children, stayed in the house and worked at a nearby elementary school, watching children at lunchtime and reading to them whenever she could until recently, when she decided to move to Schenectady, N.Y., to be with David.
Federal agents said the Kaczynskis found some of Theodore's documents as they cleaned up old boxes in the Lombard home, and thought they were similar to the Unabomber's manifesto. After much soul-searching, David made the information available to authorities.
Shortly after the house was sold on March 15, FBI agents searched a large shed in the back yard painted blue to match the house.
"They basically just packed up the whole shed and took it away," said Lombard Police Chief Leon Kutzke.
Federal agents won't say exactly what they found, but it raised their suspicions. They began surveillance of Ted in Montana several weeks ago.
"Even if he's not guilty of this, obviously a pretty great mind has gone to waste," Mosny said. "He's not contributing in a hundredth of the way he could."
By The Associated Press
