The Maladjusted Murdering Genius Who Put Evergreen Park On The Map

EVERGREEN PARK, IL -- The debut Discovery Channel's scripted docudrama about Evergreen Park’s most infamous resident — Ted Kaczynski — is likely to thrust the south suburban village back into the glare of notoriety as the boyhood home of the Unabomber. “Manhunt: Unabomber” is a true crime thriller detailing Kaczynski’s capture using forensic linguistics. The show airs Tuesdays at 8 p.m. Central Time on The show premieres this past Tuesday (Aug. 1) with a two-hour episode at 9 p.m. Central time. Repeats of the debut episodes are being aired on cable and can also be viewed in their entirety on Discovery.

From 1978 to 1995, Kaczynski, a reclusive genius building bombs in a cabin no bigger than a backyard tool shed in rural Montana, terrorized the nation by mailing bombs seemingly at random to universities and airlines. For 17 years the nation knew no more about the mysterious Unabomber than the iconic composite sketch of a mustached man wearing aviator sunglasses and a hoodie. Kaczynski’s bombing spree killed three people and injured 23 more, some maimed for life.

“Manhunt: Unabomber” follows a young, bright-eyed, real-life FBI profiler, Jim “Fitz” Fitzgerald (Sam Worthington), who develops a forensic profile the elusive Unabomber based on the mad rantings of Kaczynski’s manifesto, “Industrial Society and Its Future.” Kaczynski is portrayed by Paul Bettany. Discovery touts the seven-part miniseries as the untold story of the FBI manhunt for the nation’s deadliest serial bomber.

In 1995, Kaczynski threatened to bring down a commercial jet liner unless the Washington Post and New York Times published his warped manifesto. During that same summer, the FBI narrowed the Unabomber’s origins to Chicago’s suburbs, although federal agents were off by 20 years in their timeline of when the serial bomber attended high school and college. For several months, the FBI focused its search on student records dating back to the 1970s at the University of Illinois-Chicago. The FBI went so far as to surmise that the Unabomber may have been a disgruntled college dropout attending the city university. When Kaczynski’s younger brother, David, recognized the ideas and idioms expressed in the manifesto as possibly being those of his brother, the FBI moved in on Kaczynski’s cabin in Montana, where they found bombs and bomb making materials, and 40,000 pages of journal entries.

The capture of the nation’s most deadly serial bomber in April 1996 caught many Americans off guard, but none more so than the residents of Evergreen Park, some of whom remembered the excruciatingly shy Evergreen Park Community High School classmate, that hung around with a group of other young men known as the “Briefcase Boys,” who did mathematics equations in their spare time and carried their textbooks in briefcases.

"Kids were much more polite," EPCHS gym teacher Ardith Inman told the Chicago Tribune. "It's not that they were simple. They were just not as worldly as they are now."

As the American public relished stories of Kaczynski’s capture after 17 long years on the lam, making bombs in his Montana cabin and allegedly fertilizing his vegetable garden with his own feces, Evergreen Park went on a soul search of its own. Former neighbors, classmates, teachers and shop owners contemplated Teddy Kaczynski, wondering if there was some personality tic or something about the town set off in the reclusive “walking brain” boy that triggered his future as a serial bomber-by-mail.

In 1952, when he was 10 years old, Kaczynski's Polish immigrant parents, Ted “Turk” Kaczynski, a sausage maker, and his mother Wanda, moved to a tract home at 92nd Street and Lawndale Avenue in Evergreen Park. When Kaczynski was in fifth grade, a counselor at Central School, then a K-through-8 grammar school, gave young Ted an IQ test, on which he scored 167, putting the boy in the genius range.

At Evergreen Park Community High School, Kaczynski played trombone in the marching band, and was a member of the math club, biology club, coin club and German club. His classmates regarded him as something of an oddball. Although viewed as “quiet” by most of his peers, a Chicago Tribune story from 1996 describes teenage Ted as a “talker once you got to know him.” While still n high school, Kaczynski eschewed traditional morality at age 14, writing a journal entry recounting a girl he had seen in the street when he was 13.

"Something about her appearance antagonized me, and, from habit, I began looking for a way to justify hating her, within my logical system. But then I stopped and said to myself, 'This is getting ridiculous. I'll just chuck all this silly morality business and hate anybody I please.' Since then I have never had any interest in or respect for morality, ethics or anything of the sort."

Kaczynski graduated from EPCHS in 1958 several years ahead of the other 16-year-olds in his school and neighborhood. He shipped off to Harvard University, where he had won a scholarship in mathematics the year before, but did not mix well socially with the more mature university students. Kaczynski’s history in Evergreen Park ends here, as his parents would eventually relocate to suburban Lombard while Kaczynski was in college and much disliked associate professor at the University of California at Berkeley.

Evergreen Park is subtly changing from the post-World War II suburb of Kaczynski’s growing-up years. Bleeker’s Bowl is no more, although one wonders if the studious Kaczynski ever knocked any pins down there. Arthur Rubloff’s futuristic Evergreen Plaza is undergoing demolition from a dated 1950s-era indoor shopping center into a 21st century reboot as an outdoor standalone mall. Central School is now a middle school for sixth through eighth grade students.

The wild prairie of Kaczynski’s youth, where he took refuge from his happier peers in the bit of urban nature it provided, has been bulldozed and replaced with big box stores. While most residents have moved on, preferring to focus on this year’s stellar season of Evergreen Park's youth baseball teams, the notoriety of the “Unabomber’s hometown” is about to return.