Foster Wildroot disappeared on a Tuesday morning in early November of 1956. He was last seen on his way to school, walking on Minnetonka Street at a quarter to nine as he did every weekday morning. Foster’s mother told police on Wednesday that before he left the house her son, who was ten years old and in the fourth grade, had eaten a piece of rye toast with strawberry jam on it, drunk half a cup of black coffee and taken with him an apple to eat at recess. The weather was unusually warm for November, so Foster wore only a blue peacoat, which he did not button up, and did not take either a hat or gloves. He was small for his age, said Frieda Wildroot, and very shy. Foster did not have many friends, almost none, really, she told them; he kept mostly to himself. He had brown hair, cut short, and wore black-framed glasses to correct his severe near-sightedness. Foster stuttered badly, she said, an impediment that hampered his ability to orally answer questions put to him in the classroom. As a result, Foster disliked school. She did not, however, believe he would run away from home, as that was his sanctuary, where he spent his time alone in his room building model airplanes.
Foster’s father, Fred Wildroot, did not live in Chicago with his wife and son. At present, Frieda told the authorities, her husband was working in a coal mine in West Virginia, from where he mailed her a support check every month. The police asked if she thought it was possible that Foster would try to go to West Virginia to see his father, and she said that Fred Wildroot had neither seen nor communicated with his son since the boy was six years old.
“Fred moves around a lot,” said Frieda. “Foster wouldn’t even know where to go to find him.”
Foster Wildroot was in Roy’s class but since he did not talk much or participate in sports on the playground, which was Roy’s main interest, they did not really know each other. None of Roy’s friends knew much about Wildroot; like Roy, they saw him only in school, where he sat by choice in the last seat of the back row in the classroom. Foster had been absent from school for a week or more before Roy noticed he was not there. Even after he did, Roy figured the kid was sick or that his family had moved away. Many people left Chicago during the 1950s, most of them relocating to the West Coast, primarily to Los Angeles.
“Wildroot lives on your block, doesn’t he?” Roy asked Billy Katz. “What do you think happened to him?”
“My mother thinks he was kidnapped by a pervert,” said Katz. “She says Chicago’s full of perverts. Wildroot’s probably locked in a basement where the perv feeds him steaks and ice cream to keep him happy after he does shit to him.”
“I just hope they don’t find his body dumped in the forest preserves with his head cut off, like those sisters,” Roy said. “They were our age, too.”
“He stayed inside his house all the time,” said Billy. “I hardly seen him. He didn’t play with any of the other kids on the block, neither. My mother says his mother works part-time ironing sheets and stuff at the Disciples of Festus House for the Pitiful on Washtenaw, but I don’t know how she knows.”
“What about his father?”
“Never around. Maybe he don’t have one.”
Foster Wildroot was never seen again, at least not in Roy’s neighborhood. Billy Katz said Mrs. Wildroot still lived in the same house, though, and one day, about six months after Foster went missing, Mr. Wildroot showed up.
“My mother seen him,” said Billy. “Tall, skinny guy, walked with a cane.”
“How’d your mother know it was Foster’s father?”
“He went to every house on the block and handed a card to whoever answered the door, or else he put one in the mailbox if nobody was home, then he went away. My mother said he didn’t talk to anyone.”
“What does it say on the cards?”
“If anyone knows what happened to my son, Foster Wildroot, please write to Mr. Fred Wildroot at a post office box in Montana or Utah, someplace like that.”
A year later, Roy and Billy Katz were playing catch with a football in the alley behind Billy’s house when Billy pointed to a woman dumping the contents of a large, cardboard box into a garbage can behind a garage a few houses away.
“That’s Mrs. Wildroot,” he told Roy.
After the woman went back into her house, Billy said, “Let’s go see what she put in there.”
The garbage can was full of model airplanes, most of them missing wings or with broken propellers.
“See any you want to take?” asked Billy.