To understand what Ted Conrad did, it helps to understand what Cleveland was in 1969, and what Ted Conrad was.
Cleveland in the late 1960s was a city in the middle of a convulsion. The Cuyahoga River had caught fire that summer—June 22, 1969—for the second time, an industrial disaster that became a symbol of environmental crisis. The city’s steel industry was starting the long contraction that would hollow out its east side. The neighborhoods were tense with the same racial pressures that had produced riots in 1966, two years before. The 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago had fractured a generation. In 1969, the moon landing offered a brief collective brightness in a decade that had been mostly dark.
It was not, in other words, a city offering easy exits to a twenty-year-old who felt trapped by ordinary prospects.
Theodore John Conrad had grown up on the margins of Cleveland’s working world. He was born in Denver, Colorado, but his parents divorced when he was young—still in elementary school—and he moved with his mother and his sister to Lakewood, Ohio, a western suburb of Cleveland along Lake Erie. His father, Edward Conrad, was a retired Navy captain who later worked as an assistant professor of political science at New England College in New Hampshire.
Ted Conrad graduated from Lakewood High School in 1967. He had been elected to student council. His IQ was later noted at 135. These are the markers of a capable young man, someone who might have had options. He attended New England College, where his father worked, for one semester, and then left. He enrolled at Cuyahoga Community College back in Cleveland and did not finish there either. He was not, by all later accounts, a student who found meaning in formal education.