Fewer people knew Guy Kemper. Some of his few close friends, like youth
counselor Bob Fazdin, knew him as Guy. A lot of his buddies down at the
Fireside and Jury Room called him “Big Ed” to match his six-foot-inch
height and two-hundred-ninety-pound bulk. At work, he was nicknamed
“Forklift” because of his ability to carry two ninety-two-pound sacks
of cement on his massive, outstretched arms.
His mother had
named him Edmund Emil Kemper III to continue a tradition in her husband’s
family.
Guy was not as
widely known as Herb (Mullin). He had only come to town in 1969 to visit his
mother, who had lived in Aptos since 1965 and worked at the University of
California campus north of town.
His mother,
Clarnell Strandberg, told friends very little of her or her son’s past life
other than allusions to the Hollywood crowd and a good bank job she had held in
Helena, Montana. She was considered good at her job — an administrative
assistant to Charles Post, the first provost of UC’s Stevenson College — and
later she moved across campus to College Five.
Guy was
introduced to her friends as her highwayman son — he worked for the California
Division of Highways as a flagman. He visited occasionally on his motorcycle.
In early 1972
Guy took a recuperation leave from his job — he had broken his left arm in a
motorcycle smashup — and spent more time in Santa Cruz area and at his mother’s
apartment.
Neighbors could
always tell when Guy was visiting — arguments would inevitably erupt, shouting
sessions in which he would be upbraided for lazing about drinking beer and not
making something himself.
Mrs. Strandberg was a large woman, standing exactly six feet tall and built as square as her son. Her voice was heavy and when angry carried a long distance. She had been known to reduce Guy to tears in front of his friends with her sharp tongue.
After he wrecked
his motorcycle, Guy drove an old yellow Ford and immediately crumpled the right
rear fender, requiring a makeshift tail light on that side.
The easily
recognizable two-door sedan came and went at all hours. And the mother and son
arguments raged as often and irregularly.
He once
explained to a neighbor girl, twenty-year-old Carla Gervasoni, that the
arguments between him and his mother were just the way they expressed
themselves as a family.
“We like to get things out in the open. My mother and are really very close and we know these fights don’t mean anything,” Guy said, apologizing for the late hour at which the last argument had erupted.
Source: Sacrifice Unto Me (Don West, Pyramid Books, 1974)
