Poison Pearls (Paperback)

Too young to fully appreciate it at the time, he nonetheless was witness to modern American history as Bugsy Segal brought the Mob and the Strip to Las Vegas. He was also witness to the U.S. governments’ above ground atomic testing and his older sister still has the dog tags that the government issued to her and other school children in the area because of the proximity of the atomic testing grounds.

Epilepsy became a dominating factor in his life after his family moved east to New England. Since then, they’ve been something that, directly or indirectly, has affected every day of his life.

Every day begins and ends with anticonvulsant medication.

Living on the edge? I suppose so… There is probably very little in his life that he does that some well meaning person has told him that he’d never be capable of, never mind what mean spirited people have had to say to or about him.

Living independently was his first goal. Eventually being retrieved by his mother from the State care that she had committed him to, she moved to Central Florida, taking him with her and it was there that he turned eighteen, leaving home over a year before he graduated from high school.

Unable to drive, Karl turned to hitch hiking as an alternative means of travel. Impecunious, but rich in spirit, he found many agreeable traveling companions as he criss crossed the country in the exploration of his youth. There were others, of course and he narrowly escaped a would be rapist during one trip. He also found remnants of women’s clothing on a few occasions, where someone had obviously been less fortunate in making their escape than he was. Another time in the Blue Ridge Mountains he was forced to take cover when someone thought that it was amusing that flatlanders could be used for target practice. Several of these experiences are related in his poem, The Skeleton, which was published in his first book, Poison Pearls. In it he relates the risks that he took in his youth to his discovery later in life of some skeletal remains near another roadside on the Olympic Peninsula in Washington.

Still, his good experiences far outweighed the bad and the kindness of strangers took him down many unexpected roads. From the sexy waitress who convinced him that he needed a place to stay the night to the garrulous rum runner who took him on a winding nighttime journey down North Carolina’s back roads. Traveling through Oklahoma, he caught a ride in a pickup truck full of Indians and forty miles later, when it was time for them to turn off the main road, they invited him to accompany them to a tribal powwow where they were welcoming one of their braves back from Viet Nam. Truckers, rednecks, hippies, bikers and hot rodders all shared their rides with him at one time or another.

His education, work and personal history has been as varied as the people who he met in his travels. Going from place to place and back and forth between his parents had him attending several schools in any given year.He has attended public, private and state schools, changing schools so often that his grades were seldom a true indicator of his education. However, when it came time for the senior placement exams, three out of eight scores placed him in the 99th percentile. A true one per center! Of his other scores, math was the only one that dipped below the 95th percentile, so despite his circumstances, his medications and his disability he had learned and achieved a greater education than the great majority of those students whose classes he shared. Not that it made any difference... The armed forces didn’t want epileptics, so they weren’t about to help with his education and his family had no money with which to send him to college.
So he has become a learned person of high intelligence, but he seldom thinks of himself in those terms. Having a sketchy scholastic background with few diplomas other than those from high school and a basic college education has left him without any particular specialization, even though his majors shifted back and forth between Theater, Communications and the Biology. However, his life experience has been exceptionally rich and he has overcome many obstacles along the way. Curiously, he has risen to the challenges that life has given him, but the physical challenges have always been greater than the mental ones. Additionally, his doctors have always tried to steer him away from a sedentary lifestyle, telling him that being physically active was a proven therapy where seizure control was concerned and that, of course, has always been of primary importance.

His work history has been colorful, to say the least! He has worked as a lumberjack, livestock handler, farm hand, rough carpenter, circus roustabout, moving man, machine operator, Civil Defense dispatcher, mail handler and as a reading teacher for developmentally disabled children.. The few times that he has worked as a salesman found him selling guns, hardware, alcoholic beverages and original art. When he had his own shop (Karl’s Kollectibles), he sold almost anything that qualified as an antique or collectible, but specialized as much as was practical in paper collectibles, dealing in books, documents, newspapers, autographs and posters. He still has a respectable personal collection of first editions and old newspapers that include headlines from such varied points in history as Lincoln’s assassination, the sinking of the Maine and the bombing of Hiroshima.