Then, on a winter day in 1980, he met the woman who would become his wife. Kathy Videtich had big, watchful blue eyes above high cheekbones, framed by permed brown hair. Formerly of DRI’s travel office, where she made accommodations and booked flights, she had recently been transferred to the chemistry division when Tim strolled up to her desk to request a few thermometers for an oil-shale project. Kathy couldn’t help but appraise the trim, dark-headed young man. It wasn’t simply that he was handsome and had a nice smile, though she would remember these things about him after he’d taken his leave. The detail that stuck out about him was that this small fellow had brought with him two full sandwiches for lunch. She would carry that odd first memory of him forevermore, the image of a young man who’d retained the metabolism of a thirteen-year-old boy—and the rabid curiosity as well.
Tim was smitten from the start, but he wouldn’t see her again for more than a month. By then, Kathy had left DRI altogether. Yet, by chance, on January 31, 1981, Tim and a friend sauntered into the bar where Kathy was celebrating her new job as a legal secretary in a downtown law firm. Her girlfriend showed interest in Tim, but it was Kathy who absorbed his complete attention. Within an hour, their chemistry was undeniable. Tim thought her beautiful and down-to-earth. Kathy thought he was unlike any other twenty-three-year-old she’d ever met. He had goals, dreams; he was going somewhere. At the end of the night, she furtively slipped him her phone number.
The fledgling romance rapidly intensified, in spite of Tim’s demanding travel schedule. That was, after all, one of the reasons Larry Brown had hired him. He was young, untethered, able to split town at any time. But when he was home, he and Kathy were inseparable. One night, while she was cooking dinner for him, he looked at her thoughtfully for a moment and announced, “You’re the missing piece to the puzzle I’ve been trying to put together.”
On March 26, after less than two months of courtship, he asked her to marry him.
That April, they bought a place of their own in Lakewood, just southwest of Denver. The outside was brown brick with white siding. Inside, there was a big basement for Tim’s workshop. Two tall maples threw deep shade onto the front yard in summer. The wide street was quiet and lined with similar houses, which emptied young children onto the sidewalks, front yards, and driveways. Tim had grown up less than two miles away; in fact, his parents still lived nearby. Tim and Kathy’s children could eventually attend Alameda High School, as he had. It was the perfect place to start a family.
In December 1981, they were married in a small chapel at the University of Denver, with Larry Brown and the full DRI crew on-site to celebrate. From the start, Tim believed that if they waited for the right time to have children, the right time would never come. So, in April 1983, Amy was born. Jenny followed in December 1984. With Kathy staying home to raise the babies, money was tight. To keep up with the mortgage, Tim worked Saturdays and some nights at a radio-repair shop near Broadway and Eighth, as he had in high school. Given the nature of his job, he was also frequently away from the family. Six days a week he was working, though it never seemed to wear him down. When he was home, especially on Sundays, he was in full-swing dad mode, changing diapers and making up games for the girls. “He’s always gone at a hundred miles per hour,” Kathy says.
Their family of four was all Tim could ask for. Then, on April Fool’s Day 1988, he returned home from the test range to some surprising news. Kathy declared that another Samaras was on the way. Tim wasn’t convinced at first; they had taken every precaution. They asked the doctor to confirm the test, and when there was no longer any doubt, he shrugged: “Okay, I guess we’re having three!”
Kathy went into premature labor that September and was placed on bed rest and medication. On October 31, the doctor took her off the drugs. Though the child’s due date was December 3, she expected to go back into labor within days. The contractions came on Tim’s birthday, November 12, and within hours the couple welcomed Paul Timothy—all six pounds, twelve ounces of him—into the world. Tim now had a little boy he could dress up as a foam tornado for Halloween, replete with cutout bolts of lightning.
It was around the time of Paul’s birth that the old familiar urge returned. It had gripped Tim as a young man and had since been subsumed by the demands of adult life. Now, he began to look up at the sky again.
Kathy had long ago accepted that Tim would never be like other husbands. His work was unusual and potentially hazardous, and she knew there were some things he wasn’t supposed to talk about. He could not, for example, go into much detail about the Patriot missiles he tested. He traveled often, and there was always some project pulling him away. But this new thing was perplexing. Why couldn’t he take up golfing, bowling—hell, even model airplanes like his father? Why did he have to start driving off in search of what everyone else runs from?
What was he looking for out there? What did he
