Sellout by Victoria Bruce

Author:Victoria Bruce
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781632862594
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Published: 2017-04-12T04:00:00+00:00

13

The Engineer

Although he calls himself a typical nerd, with a subscription to Popular Science and Omni magazine, over the years John Kutsch has developed a public acumen that most of his fellow engineers notably lack. It began in the Chicago suburb of Glenview in 1967, when John arrived “as a mistake,” he says, eight years after his next youngest sibling, in December 1967. His parents—in their mid-forties when he was born—were as old as some of his friends’ grandparents. By the time John was ten, he was the lone kid in a big house, and “got to do pretty much whatever the hell I wanted.” His father was a World War II hero and a well-respected hospital administrator whom young John held in very high esteem. His mother was diagnosed with severe multiple sclerosis at the same time she found out she was pregnant with John, her eighth child. “Even though she was crippled and in a wheelchair most all my life, she was still the toughest lady in the world,” he says. She was also well educated, a rare female college graduate in the 1940s. By the time John was in school, his parents “were distinctly over the whole ‘raising kids’ thing,” he says. “Checking report cards and college planning were long abandoned.” John spent his free time building things and taking them apart again. He wasn’t much of a student at his prep school—the Loyola Academy in nearby Wilmette. What set him apart from other machine-loving nerds was that he acted in school plays and volunteered for every outreach program he could through his Jesuit school. He visited elderly folks, worked in a soup kitchen, and helped out with underprivileged kids.

John pulled off a very high SAT score, but didn’t feel the urge to follow his friends to Ivy League schools back east. Without a push from his parents to do otherwise, he chose the same second-tier school that one of his brothers graduated from. The Loyola Academy college counselor called him out in the hallway. “She said, ‘What are you thinking? You’re going to shame us by going to Southern Illinois University. Can’t you apply anywhere else?’”

As soon as he arrived in what he calls the “cultural desert” of Carbondale, Illinois, John plotted his exit strategy. He took an enormous course load, intending to graduate with an engineering design degree as soon as possible. He was up at seven in the morning and in school until ten. He served as vice president of his fraternity, Tau Kappa Epsilon. “It got me used to trying to manage a bunch of cats who wouldn’t take direction,” he says. Even better for a guy from a white-collar suburb, the fraternity was incredibly diverse. “I had roommates who paid for college by de-tasseling corn. I had roommates who paid for college working on their dad’s farms. The TKE house was racially mixed, and its members studied a wide variety of majors. I would never have that if I went to Boston College or the Rhode Island School of Design.

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