Kent and the Mt. Dew Incident of 1981

Spring, 1981….most people know it for the big shootings–Reagan and Pope John Paul II, but there was a third incident that spring that remains vivid in my mind after 40+ years…and I know for other people there, details remain clear as well.

Of course, my details and theirs may not match–this is the tricky nature of time and the mind.

It was Visitor Day at the school I attended. I was in 8th grade and it was lunch. The lunch room was in two sections. The top end was mostly JH students while the lower part was the HS students with a middle table where the teachers sat once they had their lunches.

On the lower level, a kid named Kent put down his sack lunch, then went to get a bottle of pop (Yes, in those days, pop was served in 12 or 16oz bottles…when done, you put your bottle back in a rack that the distributor took back when they brought new bottles). Kent was a sophomore, 15 at that point.

While Kent was away, another kid, a junior named Dan, showed up at the table and moved Kent’s lunch and sat down in the spot Kent wanted. –>I know this from others…it’s not a detail I would’ve paid attention to otherwise. In the meantime, I was sitting down with Mark G. and Peter T. I was on the edge nearest the teacher table. Mark was across from me and Peter was next to him. What happens next is from others–Kent returns with his pop and sees Dan has moved his lunch. Kent says, “That’s my seat” and Dan responds with the typical snarky response of “Not anymore”, either from being a jerk or presumed seniority since he was a junior. Dan then went back to eating his food.

Kent was not amused. Since it was spring, he decided to demonstrate his baseball skills—and he lifted the Mountain Dew bottle and brought it down into Dan’s skull. I didn’t see the swing directly–I saw motion beyond where I was focusing, but I heard the thud of bottle on skull and skull on table. My memory tells me it was Mr. Palmer (a scumbag pedophile actually) who jumped one table to grab Kent–and that Mr. Gray was next, pinning Kent down.

I remember everyone had to clear the dining room. I remember there was a lot of blood–and I mean a lot. The school was too cheap to change carpets, so the blood-stained carpet was there up until I left in Spring, 1985. Dan missed a month. Kent was expelled–but he didn’t face serious criminal charges because he was a minor.

All on Visitor’s Day.

I think I should mention a couple other things else as part of the memory…when I was little, I’d carpooled with Kent to school (weirdly, I remember his dad’s name was Hal). Kent was always a troublemaker–a la Eddie Haskell, but when he came back to the school in HS, Kent had found his way into becoming a REAL loser–heavy drug use, petty crime, heading towards worse.

So Kent got expelled, went elsewhere, got expelled there, and eventually wound up in juvenile detention. That didn’t fix him, so Kent’s drugs/problems grew worse until he was convicted of aggravated assault and served time in Ft. Madison–Iowa’s maximum security prison. And then…in Ft. Madison, apparently, Kent got sober and clean. He found strength in faith, supported by the prison chaplaincy…and when his time was up, he went back to school, picked up a divinity degree, and has spent the last 20-ish years serving as a prison chaplain and counselor, working to help others who fell as deep as he did get out of their holes.