Word: hinckleys
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Says a family friend: "There but for the grace of God goes anyone's kid." Beverly McBeath was no friend at Highland Park (Texas) High School, but she speaks for all her schoolmates when she recalls that John Hinckley was "so normal he appeared to fade into the woodwork." Nonetheless, some time in the barren years since his 1973 graduation from high school, Hinckley went beyond mere ordinariness. His solitude and fecklessness became chronic, and he started drifting...
...then to his climactic infatuations with handguns and a teen-age movie star. Says his father's business associate Clarence Netherland: "Something happened to that boy in the last six to eight years to break him from the family tradition and the family life-style." In fact, John Hinckley's past years seem not to constitute a break so much as Hollywood's slow fade to black...
John Jr. was Jack and JoAnn Hinckley's last child. He was born on May 29, 1955, in the southern Oklahoma town of Ardmore, where his father worked as a petroleum engineer. Two years later Hinckley Sr. took a job in Dallas, 100 miles south. The growing family was good-looking and healthy and Protestant, and all five settled down to life in Uni versity Park, a moneyed Dallas suburb of broad lawns and handsome houses. The Hinckleys are "a fine Christian family," according to one friend, and regular churchgoers; it was fitting that their first home in Dallas...
...troublesome teen-ager or even a loner. Indeed, in the seventh and ninth grades he was elected president of his home room, and as an eighth-grader managed the basketball team. John Hinckley was no aloof oddball then. Says his junior-high friend Kirk Dooley: "No one rooted louder than Hinckley for the Highland Park Red Raiders...
...John's father had amassed capital of $120,000 and set up his own oil exploration business. Hinckley Oil, now known as Vanderbilt Energy Corp., affirmed the man's entrepreneurial mettle. And Son Scott, an engineering major at Vanderbilt University, would soon join his dad's wildcat enterprise...