Chuck Kopp rose from bed, stepped on the floor and ambled to the bathroom. His limp was not helped by the weight he had been putting on. At 45, the husband, father of five, corporate lawyer, could see in the mirror his graying, receding hair and thick face. Only the green eyes had not changed. Perhaps he also saw a flash of the young man who had been a wiry and slender six feet tall, a young Marine in khaki uniform serving in the Second world war. He put on the pressed white shirt, blue tie, gray suit. Old school dress, as always, because that’s what Chuck Kopp was, a man’s man. He got into his company car, backed carefully out of the steeply sloping driveway, and then down the hill, out to Sir Francis Drake Boulevard to Highway 101 and out of Marin County.
In 10 minutes he’d emerge from the early-morning sunshine and perhaps hit the fog rolling in to San Francisco Bay as he crossed the Golden Gate Bridge. He worked as chief legal counsel for West Coast Life.
He worked with friends like Anne, Harry and Joan. They would often lunch at Sam’s Grill, a fashionable spot in the financial district on Bush Street, their preferred seats being the dark brown wooden booths—real booths, with walls extending up nearly to the ceiling and a curtain in the doorway for privacy. (Some lawyers chose them to do private business, but still checked the neighboring booths to ensure no one was eavesdropping.) They talked business over some Napa Valley wine, Sam’s legendary sand dabs and creamed spinach. Chuck Kopp was polite, held doors for women. He spoke in a deep baritone, mannered, intelligent. There was something just below the surface, a toughness that those who spent time with him could sense. When angered, though, Chuck would not let it out.
Charles Leo “Chuck” Kopp was born in 1922 in Los Angeles, named after his father, Charles Sr., who had emigrated from Austria. Chuck’s parents were Christian Scientists and the story went that he quit the group in his late teens when he was told to have his appendix removed and his mother opposed the operation, urging him to let God take care of it.
Also in 1922, on April 13, Nancy Leonard was born in Los Angeles to Walter Leonard, a physician, and Kathryn Leonard. Both Chuck and Nancy attended John Marshall High, a school named for America’s most famous Supreme Court justice. Alphabetic fate brought them together. The class was seated that way: Kopp, then Leonard. Chuck was tall and lean, Nancy had sandy-blond hair. Back then, a couple could be called high school sweethearts without a trace of irony. And Chuck and Nancy were just that, sweethearts, destined to one day be married.
By the summer of 1941 they had graduated. Nancy went to Berkeley for nursing, Chuck to Los Angeles City College before attending College of the Redlands. The war against the Nazis had raged in Europe for almost two years. What cause is just enough to go to war? So far, the war against Hitler was not a struggle for which Americans were ready to fight, die, and kill. On Sunday, December 7, 1941, America’s dreamy isolation exploded at Pearl Harbor. Monday morning, Chuck Kopp enlisted in the Marines. He scored high enough on his entrance exam that he was sent for officer’s training in Virginia, and became a lieutenant.
The training center was in Quantico, which later became the home of the FBI’s behavioral science unit—a place where, one day in the distant future, Chuck’s son would be the subject of concerted attention. Nancy, meanwhile, earned her nursing diploma at St. Mary’s Hospital in Minnesota. In 1944, she took a train cross-country to visit Chuck in Quantico. They got married that year. They were both 22 years old.
Early in 1945, Chuck was shipped out to California, en route to Hawaii, where he stayed for about six months awaiting orders for the anticipated invasion of Japan. The invasion never happened, and Chuck never saw combat. On August 6, an 8,000-pound atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima, killing about 70,000 people. A second bomb was dropped on Nagasaki on August 9, killing 40,000. An American invasion of the main island of Japan would have produced massive casualties for both sides. The bomb perhaps saved lives. But it killed, over time, perhaps as many as 350,000 people, some instantly, some slowly, rotting bodies from the inside out. When does the end justify the means? When is it just to kill an innocent? In the autumn of 1945, American forces landed to mop up and occupy the country, and Chuck was among those in the occupational force, based in Osaka.
After the war Chuck and Nancy Kopp lived in San Gabriel, and then settled in nearby South Pasadena. Chuck entered law school at the University of Southern California. On July 20, 1948, before Chuck had finished law school, Nancy Kopp gave birth to their first child, Anne. In 1949, Chuck graduated with his doctorate in jurisprudence— finishing in the top third of his class. At the end of that year, December 17, 1949, Martha—“Marty”—was born. The Kopps lived in a roomy two-storey home at 1947 Oak Street in South Pasadena, a city located along historic Route 66, just ten miles from downtown Los Angeles. It was an idyllic place, although the neighborhood was still haunted by the “Monday Massacre,” which occurred less than a kilometer from Chuck and Nancy’s home.
On May 6, 1940, Verlin Spencer, the thin, bespectacled viceprincipal of South Pasadena junior high school called a meeting of school district officials. “Good morning, Spence,” one of them said, and not long after that, Spencer shot five of his colleagues dead with his Colt Woodsman automatic .22-caliber pistol and crippled another before wounding himself with the gun. He was found lying in a pool of blood on the floor of the cafeteria.
There was no apparent motive, and Spencer swore for the rest of his life he did not remember any events of the day. A psychologist theorized that Spencer, a man of considerable intelligence working towards his doctorate in education, was a clinical paranoiac who wanted to improve the education system, and in doing so, elevated himself to the position of a “benevolent deity.” His suicide was intentionally, though subconsciously botched, went the theory, so he could “remain the center of attention, commanding that position in a grisly triumph over imaginary enemies.”
On August 14, 1952, Chuck and Nancy had a daughter, Mary. They now had three girls. Perhaps Chuck Kopp, being old school, wanted to have a boy. In any event, Nancy became pregnant again. On August 2, 1954, at age 32, she gave birth to twin boys at Pasadena Memorial Hospital. There were complications. The babies had to be delivered by Caesarian section. The first son they named Walter Charles. The second, James Charles—Jim, the baby of the family. The boys were born two minutes apart—a period of time in history, Jim always joked, that Walter would never let his fraternal twin forget.
Jim would always look lovingly upon his days growing up in South Pasadena. See dad rousting the family well before dawn, New Year’s Day, 1965. The two 10-year-old boys and three teenage girls and mom and dad get on their bicycles and ride to Pasadena to secure a good spot for the Rose Parade. They are there, front row, to see the Spanish horses, the St. Bernards from Sierra Madre search and rescue team, marching bands.
Jim was like any other kid. He took six stitches in his eyebrow playing baseball. In his teens he hummed the melodies of the Beach Boys and Jan and Dean while body surfing at Huntington Beach—the future site of the Baywatch TV series, as he would later enjoy pointing out.
By the end of the 1960s Los Angeles was booming but California’s financial capital was still in San Francisco, where all the insurance head offices were located. For Chuck Kopp, an insurance lawyer, the Bay Area was a step up. When Jim and Walt were 13 years old, Chuck and Nancy moved the family just as protest and revolution reached their climax in the Bay Area. In 1967 Chuck bought a house that sat across the bay from the chaos in San Francisco proper, a modest house on Via Lerida in a suburb called Greenbrae in Marin County. Their home, like others in the neighborhood, was built into the side of a steep hill, a natural skateboard park for young Jim and his friends. From his living room window Chuck could see the land unfold like a carpet at his feet. In the distance, just barely visible, was the bay. He had a successful legal career, a family man who had fought for his country. He was a member of what would, in more nostalgic times to come, be called the Greatest Generation.
Chapter 3 ~ Don Quixote
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
