In the late 1960s Bart Slepian yearned to be a doctor but there was still the matter of earning a medical degree. As he entered his mid-20s, Bart had not reached his goal. He attended a community college in Rochester, New York, then enrolled at the University of Denver, majoring in zoology. But he was not a star student. He couldn’t get into medical schools in the United States. He wasn’t the only one—if your academic record was less than sterling, you didn’t stand a chance. Two out of three applicants were denied entry in the late sixties.
Barnett Slepian was born in 1946 into a family where expectations were high long before he entered the world. He was the youngest of four kids. Bart’s grandfather was a Russian Jewish immigrant who sold shoelaces from a pushcart in Cambridge, Massachusetts Bart’s father, Philip, attended Harvard, but following his graduation the family company failed, and Philip never recovered financially, struggling to make a living. He moved his wife and their four kids out of Boston to his in-laws’ apartment in McKeesport, in southwest Pennsylvania, then to Pittsburgh, and then to Rochester. He set himself up as a freelance writer, driving across the country in a Studebaker to research the origins of prominent citizens and writing their stories for small-town newspapers.
In spite of his personal struggles, or perhaps because of them, Philip, like his father, insisted on the best education for his children, pushing them hard. That was part of the family tradition, and part of his Jewish heritage as well. You do well in school. End of discussion. Bart perhaps felt the pressure differently. He was so much younger than his siblings, and he was tremendously shy. When his sister Serena chided him saying, “Look at you, Bart, the handsome boy.” Bart would look away with embarrassment, or cry.
As he got older Bart saw one of his brothers earn a doctorate in mathematics. Another became an ear-nose-and-throat specialist, Serena an educator. He eventually overcame his boyhood shyness, grew to enjoy putting people on, joking. With his failure to get into med school in the United States, Bart considered other avenues for earning a medical degree—and one of those was in Belgium, at the University of Louvain. Among other Americans he met there was a guy named Rick Schwarz, who grew up in the Bronx and could not get into New York University. Getting into the overseas school wasn’t the hard part—staying in was. The standards were high. Moreover, he had to study medicine in French. Bart often spent all-nighters studying with a friend named Carole Lieberman. His irreverent humor made her laugh. She saw him as this guy fighting the odds to become a doctor. He had no French, and barely enough money for food. She saw him as a Don Quixote figure, this guy armed for battle in life with little more than dry quips and an invincible will. He did not finish the program, and neither did Rick Schwarz, who in 1970 returned to New York to consider his options.
That November Bart visited his sister Serena in Reno, Nevada. Serena had been left a widow the previous July with a four-year-old daughter named Amanda. She was also eight months pregnant, struggling to pay for ballet and piano lessons and summer camp by, among other things, dealing cards at the blackjack table at Harrah’s. In her adult life, daughter Amanda would eventually grow to become a talented writer, and author an article for George magazine about her uncle in the days when he was struggling to make it:
November 1970. Dark, stringy Bart parked his rusting ’65 Chevy crammed with his every possession in front of my paternal grandparents’ white-trimmed house in Reno, Nevada. They were still ashen from my father’s death four months earlier; still ashen from my father’s elopement with my Jewish mother five years earlier. My eight months pregnant mother hugged her baby brother with a fervor that enraged me. My grandfather took a long time to say, “Come in. Come in.” In the den, conversation spluttered.
“So you missed the funeral because you were in Belgium?” my grandfather asked.
“Yes,” Bart answered.
“Medical school?”
Nod.
“Shouldn’t you be in classes right now?”
“I flunked out.”
“Cocktail?”
“No, thank you… It was my French. I didn’t spend enough time on my French.”
“Maybe you should make it easier on yourself and go to an American school?”
“They all rejected me.”
“Boy you must really want to be a doctor.”
Low, sardonic laugh.
Bart Slepian may have been a wilting flower as a young boy but he had, by 1970, at age 24, hardened himself to take whatever came at him with dark humor and a stubborn, take-no-crap attitude that went beyond conventional notions of determination. In the absence of a med school that he could both enter and finish, he drove a taxi for a time. Serena used to watch the faces of Amanda and her friends light up when Bart arrived in the cab and told the girls to hop in. He shoveled manure at a friend’s farm near his sister’s place in Reno. He would not let go of his dream of becoming a doctor. Backing down was not an option.
Greenbrae, California Redwood High School
1971
Inside the high school auditorium the bass creeps in, boom-boomba-boom-boom, the hi-hat clicks in smartly, tish-tish-tish, melting into hot licks from the trumpets, bam-bam-BAM, as Sammy Nestico’s The Blues Machine cooks on stage. School bandleader Syd Gordon stands off in the wings, lets the kids swing, then counts them in on the next number—“Here we go now!”—into the most famous swing song of all time, Glen Miller’s “In The Mood,” a throwback to the jitterbugging forties. In the old days, Syd remembered the kids in the band looked pretty sharp, wore red blazers. This being the 1970s, though, the players are dressed casual, no uniforms. In the front row, the jazz band features the saxes, in the middle the trombones, and the back row four trumpets. Off to the side are the piano, drums, guitar. In back, his lips working the brass trumpet mouthpiece, is a skinny, 16-year-old boy with darkrimmed glasses, rust-brown hair and pale blue eyes. Jim Kopp.
Redwood High was a big school, 2,500 students. The building was pure Bauhaus architecture, several blocks joined together. Teachers joked that they taught at “San Quentin west,” a reference to the maximum security prison, not too far along the highway from the school, that had replaced Alcatraz. But Redwood was a mostly staid, upper-middle-class place. Teachers wanted to be there. The San Francisco Bay Area was at the center of America’s cultural tug of war, but the struggle was not in much evidence at Redwood, ten minutes north of the Golden Gate Bridge in prosperous Marin County. Still, there was “respectable” activism—the teachers were proudly liberal and most of the students were, too.
Jim Kopp was not immune to the idealistic vibes of his time, or at least the music that grew from it. One artist in particular struck a chord—the Canadian painter-turned-folksinger Joni Mitchell. Once he heard her, that was it, he forever held the music, and Joni, close to his heart. It gave him a kind of spiritual connection with Canada, a place he had visited in 1965 when he was 11, when he saw picturesque Bouchard Gardens in Victoria, British Columbia. Joni Mitchell was not just a folksinger to him. She was a poet. An angel poet.
Jim did not bond with music teacher Syd Gordon like students often did. Gordon stayed in touch with some of them long after graduation, but years later he had little recollection of Jim Kopp, other than that he was not an exceptional talent. Jim played trumpet in the school orchestra, marching band, jazz band, went on the school trip to Anaheim and Disneyland, where the marching band appeared in a parade. Good enough to play in the bands, but that was it. In general his personality was understated, years later students would have only a vague recollection of him. Those who did recall him remembered his intelligence, a sardonic sense of humour, an ability to see the absurd, irony. He disdained the conventional, what he called “boilerplate” even though he did not stand out in any way as being unconventional.
During the school day, with Mt. Tamalpais in the background, students talked and hung out on the side lawn. There were the normal cliques, the freaks, artsies, jocks. Jim didn’t belong to any one particular group. After school, or at lunch, some students went on hikes, visited each other’s homes. Jim was not one of them. He was not exactly a loner, he had friends, maybe even a girlfriend. It was easy to blend into the woodwork at the school, especially when you were a twin, and Jim’s brother, Walter, also attended Redwood, a member of the United Nations club, a more personable guy than he was.
So many students, many from privileged backgrounds with considerable expectations for their future. One who cut a popular figure in the class of 1969 was Robin Williams, who was voted Most Humorous and Most Likely To Succeed by his classmates.
Jim’s final full year at Redwood was 1971. His yearbook photo showed him in heavy, black-rimmed glasses, his neatly trimmed, rust-colored hair brushed across his forehead, wearing a striped tie and a restrained confident smile. A conservative exterior, but then there were other boys with a similar look. He took summer school to graduate early. It was as though he didn’t need the glorious trappings of his senior year, he was smart enough to graduate early, and so he did.
During his last year, Jim made what amounted to, for him, a political statement. Syd Gordon had an idea. The Redwood Giants football team had a game that Friday night. Time, thought Syd, to shake things up a bit, to make a statement. Syd asked the kids: why not do something different at halftime, make a statement against the Vietnam war? They would form a peace sign at the center of the field. A couple of the students spoke out against doing it. One of them was Jim Kopp. When it came time to do it, he and the other dissenters stood off to one side in silence. Vietnam would soon cease to be an abstraction for him. According to his own account, in 1973 he and Walt had their names drawn as “high probability” numbers in the U.S. draft lottery. But the war ended before their numbers were called.
Life for Mary Kopp, the youngest of Chuck and Nancy’s three daughters, was never easy. To the neighborhood boys living near the Kopp house on Via Lerida, Mary seemed odd. She was a heavy girl with a round face, who wore dark-rimmed glasses. She resembled her mother, Nancy, who also struggled to keep her weight down. It was Marty, the middle sister, who had the looks, the personality.
Jim believed Mary was tormented by other students. They were shallow and cruel. He knew she was a gentle soul who taught everyone how to love. She was the one who first taught him to read when he was four. Jack and the Beanstalk. He still could see sunlight pouring in the window back in South Pasadena, the room with walls covered in knotty pine and painted a garish pink. Mary had been diagnosed with schizophrenia in 1965, when she was 13. Not uncommon for those suffering mental illness at the time, she underwent electric shock therapy. She was diagnosed with leukemia six years later, when she was 19. Even as she fought the disease, Mary managed to graduate from Redwood high in 1972. She became a born-again Christian.
On May 2 1974, she died. Three months away from his 20th birthday, it was the first time Jim could say that death had truly affected him. The family gathered for the burial in a town just north of Greenbrae called Novato, where Nancy’s Lutheran Church was located. It is a beautiful spot, lush green grass of the cemetery set against the parched foothills in the background. On top of the main stone is a concrete cast of her small hands, with “Mary” written freehand with a finger above it. She was buried next to her grandmother, Kathryn Leonard. Jim wept along with Mary’s friends from the neighborhood, the ones who had understood her and had cared about her.
Guadalajara, Mexico
1974
“OK, so I ask to borrow the book. Borrow, you understand.”
Bart was at it again, holding court. Could anyone tell an anecdote better? He had that delivery, that Bill Cosby thing going. He picked out things in everyday life, little absurdities, ironies. It was a Sunday night, and Bart was hanging out with the guys, Rick, Lawson, John. None of the others could match his jokes, his knack for telling a story, apocryphal or not, to highlight an absurdity, and just be damn funny. Maybe it was the setting that gave him so much material. What he and the others were engaged in was a serious enterprise, to be sure, but here they were, in their mid-20s, studying medicine in Mexico for Chrissakes. They were attending med school at Universidad Autonoma de Guadalajara (UAG) with its more liberal admission standards.
“Borrow. A book. Just—a book. From Brian,” continued Bart. “I needed to borrow it, you understand. It was mainly for this one chapter.”
The guys grinned and listened. Bart Slepian shared an apartment with a married couple who were also in the med school. The husband’s name was Brian. He was pleasant enough, but Bart did not get along at all with Brian’s wife.
“And so Brian says, ‘I don’t see why not,’ and he turns to his wife. ‘Can Bart borrow the book?’ And she says, ‘Well, you know, we, ah, paid for that book.’”
Pause.
“And the husband said, ‘Well, he’s just going to read it. He’s just going to read a chapter. Just the one chapter.’” Pause. “And she says, ‘Well what if he reads the whole thing?’”
The guys roared.
UAG was a strange place to be back then. Most of the students were local, but there were also about 2,500 Americans down there. The Americans didn’t really associate with the Mexicans, who were mostly kids, right out of high school. Bart made the most of life there. He always caught the Sunday American movie carried on a local TV station. Sometimes it was a classic western, like High Noon with Gary Cooper. His favorite was The Man Who Shot Liberty Vallance.
Rick became the mouthpiece for their group, because Bart’s Spanish was, to put it charitably, a work in progress. Bart was 28, not quite six feet tall, maybe 170 pounds. He wore big round glasses, had unruly hair that was receding, and did not yet have the beard he would grow in his thirties. Jogging kept him slim, but he did not have a particularly athletic build. Still, Bart had a sharp mind, the sense of humor. He could be very charming with women and he dated American students here and there. Bart also used his modest appearance to his own benefit, turned it into a strength, a game. His exterior masked sinewy strength.
He was also a bit of a con. Actually, a lot of a con. A hustler. He took his act to a local pool hall. Bart did not look especially hip or cool. He wore schleppy T-shirts, jeans. He’d linger around the tables until challenged to a game.
“Well, O.K. I guess.”
Bart would toy with the opponent, just hold his own, let the bets grow, and grow—then run the table and send the other guy home with an empty wallet. His buddies took it all in, stifling their laughter. He played backgammon with friends like Lee and Brian, for high stakes. For a time, arm wrestling, of all things, became his best con of all. Early days at the school, he challenged Rick to a match. They set up at the table, locked hands.
“You ready?” said Bart.
“Yep.” Someone yelled, “Go!”
It was over. Bart’s first move was lightning, so quick and sneaky that Rick had barely felt his arm tense with anticipation before the back of his right hand was flat on the table. They tried again, and again Bart won. He was the best arm wrestler any of them had ever seen. He beat all comers, took some money in side bets, too. In second year, after beating some of the local Mexican students, national pride came into play. A hulking guy was brought forward by the Mexicans, his arm the size of a man’s leg. Even cocky Bart looked taken aback by the ringer.
“Uh, Bart,” said Rick. “Sure you want to do this?”
“Not a problem,” said Bart.
“Bart, this guy’s gonna break your friggin’ arm.”
It was a raucous scene in the cafeteria, the air of a championship fight, gringos lined up behind their unlikely-looking-butundefeated champion, Mexicans behind their mountainous local boy (who may or may not have been an actual student). Bets were down. John, Lawson and Rick all knew that Bart surely didn’t stand a chance. But they bet on him anyway. The two combatants locked hands, Bart’s hand swallowed by his opponent’s, the roar from the spectators grew. At “go,” Bart was already on top, accelerating as he always did. This time, he was overmatched, even the quick start wasn’t enough. He lost.