Word: hinckleys
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...fall of 1970, John Jr. began classes at Highland Park High School, where his sister was a senior. That year Diane Hinckley apparently burst forth as a campus star; she performed in a school operetta, she was head cheerleader, homecoming queen candidate, vice president of the choir, member of both the student council and the A-students' National Honor Society. There are at least ten pictures of her in the yearbook, which cited her as one of the class's eight "favorites." She was a formidable sibling presence for Sophomore John...
Lubbock, dry and bleak, is 318 miles from Dallas on the flat cap rock of west Texas. The population is 180,000, and 22,000 are Texas Tech students. John Hinckley Jr. was one of them, a business major, as of September 1973. He never finished, but over the next seven years Hinckley attended classes more than half the time. By 1977 he had dropped business in favor of liberal arts and earned at least a B average-good enough to be on the dean's list. But once away from home, he made not even a token effort...
...single pal or girlfriend has turned up from those seven sketchy years at Texas Tech. His few acquaintances recall Hinckley as an expressionless blank...
Still he caused no alarm. Says German History Professor Otto Nelson: "I never picked up anything unusual or bizarre about him. He never asked a thing in class." (Hinckley did, however, choose to specialize: one paper focused on Hitler's Mein Kampf, his other on Auschwitz.) Says Mark Swafford, one of his Lubbock landlords: "I only saw him with another human being one time." Hinckley's student life was a sad, remote vigil. "Everywhere there were empty bags from hamburger joints and cartons of ice cream," says Swafford. "He just sat there the whole time, staring...
...late 1976 Hinckley went to California. He intended, John Sr. told a friend, to "crash Hollywood." He ended up at Howard's Weekly Apartments, in the seamy Selma Avenue district of Los Angeles-a street market for whores, drugs and every kind of sleaze. Perhaps during this period Hinckley developed his obsession with Actress Jodie Foster. Consider the plot parallels of the movie Taxi Driver, starring Foster as a prostitute and released just before Hinckley left for Los Angeles...