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.
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.
