6 Enter Igor

In 1969 Keith took his poor academic habits and D average to Selah High School as a freshman and came into immediate conflict with other students. As always he magnified every slight and went out of his way to misconstrue school rituals as personal attacks. “They always pantsed the freshmen in front of the girls, but I didn’t know it was a tradition. I walked into the high school and found my brother Bruce and ten other juniors waiting to meet me. I kicked and punched and did some serious damage, but they pulled my pants down to my ankles. Then they giggled and walked away. Right in front of everybody I had to undo my belt and pants and pull them back up. When I became an upperclassman myself, I would never pants the freshmen. I just couldn’t see the humor in it.”

 

He soon learned that his established reputation as the Middle School nerd had preceded him. Students began calling him Igor, or Ig for short. “Brad started it, just for a joke. But it caught on. We’d all seen Igor in the Frankenstein movies, but I wasn’t short, and I wasn’t a cripple with a limp. For a while I thought they might be trying to say that Dad was Dr. Frankenstein and I was his geek, but that didn’t make much sense either. So I just swallowed hard and took it—Mr. Nice Guy. That was the only way. After a while I didn’t even feel like I was in school. I felt like I was pretending to be in school. It was the only way I could get through.”

 

In later years Les Jesperson said of his middle son, “Part of his problem was that he was very gullible. You could talk him out of anything. He was everybody’s mark.”

Students worked Keith for loans and handouts, seldom repaid. He was a regular victim of practical jokes. Even though he was the biggest boy in the freshman class, he tended to yield rather than fight back. A classmate recalled, “He could be bright when he wanted to, but then he would do something stupid. He’d be too kind or too mean, too generous or too stingy. You never saw the in-between. His parents made him open a checking account, and in a few months he was overdrawn. He’d written too many checks to other students. He did a lot of generous things like that, but then he’d turn around and do something cruel and hateful. I always wondered if he was in control of his own brain, if he might’ve had brain damage. He sure acted like it.”

 

When Keith noticed that Selah High girls seemed impressed by athletes, he went out for the football team. He looked like a natural—two inches over six feet, two hundred pounds, well muscled. On the Vikings’ first day of practice, he ran into trouble. “Coach wanted to play me at tackle and guard, the dumb positions. In the scrimmage, he told me, ‘Kill ’em, Keith.’ I said, ‘Coach, I’m not gonna go out there and try to kill somebody.’ He said, ‘Well, give me one-hundred percent effort. Hit ’em with everything you got.’ I said, ‘As big as I am, coach, I’d hurt my own teammates.’ He said, ‘Son, if you don’t do what I say, you won’t play.’”

Keith rode the bench for several games before he was sent into a game. “Coach told me to take out the other team’s running back. He says, ‘If you hit him hard, I’ll put you on the squad.’ I ran right through a blocker and near broke one guy’s leg. Then I rammed my helmet in the quarterback’s chest and broke two of his ribs. I was thrown out of the game.

“Coach said, ‘Great job, Keith.’ I thought, I nearly killed the guy, I got thrown out, and…that’s a great job? I told coach I didn’t want to play if he only intended to use me to hurt somebody.

“The next game I sat on the bench. I stayed on the squad for a few more games, but my heart wasn’t in it. I never could understand the concept of a bunch of guys working together. It didn’t come natural to me, I was a loner. The coach had a way of degrading me. He’d walk into the locker room and holler, ‘Hi, men,’ and then say, ‘Hello, Keith.’ When he got mad, he referred to us as women or girls. I guess he thought that was a motivator.

“I dared him to call me ‘girl’ to my face, and he turned away. After that I knew he wouldn’t play me, so I quit to concentrate on wrestling and made the ‘B’ squad. Dad never came to our meets. Mom came once in a while. They both watched my brothers play sports, but they seemed bored with anything I did.”

Friendships didn’t last long. A fellow student recalled, “Nobody could take all that bellyaching. He was a nice guy in some ways, but it was like he had a permanent toothache. Most of the kids couldn’t be bothered.”