Chicago Wasp-Killer, MBA…by Robert M. Katzman
Robert M. Katzman’s Amazing Story: http://www.differentslants.com/?p=355
© June 26, 2012
This is a curious story about control, written at a time in America when few of us have control over anything. But also defiance, self-determination, art, science, isolation and confrontation. When I was nine years old.
It is also about killing wasps. The kind of wasps with six legs, not that other kind. Why would anyone think that?
The time of this story is summer, 1959. The place, southern Wisconsin.
I was nine years old. I was not afraid of flying stinging wasps. And that made all the difference.
When I was nine, my parents packed me off to an overnight camp for the first time ever. For two months. Maybe they thought I’d wander off in the woods and get eaten by something bigger than me. Most things were bigger than me. But I don’t think any experienced bear would find my skinny little body worth the trouble.
I was sick all the time from whatever weeds grew in the rural part of southern Wisconsin. There were no drugs in 1959. I want to think enduring the ragweed misery helped build my character, but there’s no evidence of that.
I didn’t want to be at that large camp with its mob of screaming children racing around and its tall athletic counselors who told us what to do, every-single-minute-of-the-day. Like my grammar school but worse. Around the clock supervision.
Two months to a nine-year-old was an eternity and just like that famous book about lethal children by William Golding, Lord of the Flies, published five years earlier, some situations bring out unexpected aspects of children’s personalities, like savagery or other characteristics. He was right.