It was the fall of 1981, and I was twenty-two years old. A few months earlier I had graduated from the University of Texas at Austin, and I was living in a two-r oom apartment in Lynn, Massachusetts, working as a carpenter’s helper by day and reading social theory by night. I was taking a year off before heading to graduate school where I’d been accepted into a Ph.D. program in Marxist social science. I hated cruelty and injustice of all kinds, and I thought then that only Karl Marx had figured out how to weed these evils out of us. On weekends, I would drive northeast to Haverhill, Massachusetts, the mill town on the Merrimack River where I’d grown up. Sometimes I’d sleep at my father’s house on the Bradford College campus where he’d been teaching since 1966. One Saturday morning, he asked me if I wanted to go with him and his wife Peggy to spend the night with his friends Thomas and Elizabeth Williams. They’d all be staying in a cabin the Williamses had built themselves in the White Mountains of New Hampshire two hours north.
