Death of American Virtue - Ken Gormley [15]
Billie Jeayne Reynolds, Ken’s older sister by sixteen years, lived a quiet life as a teacher in Kingwood, Texas, where she avoided the limelight and dodged reporters hunting for Ken Starr’s kinfolk. Speaking in a soft voice, she remembered a well-mannered, dimpled little brother with rosy cheeks, who returned happily from school each day and then buckled down to do his homework. “Ken was never pushed, but somehow he just always wanted to do his best,” Billie Jeayne recalled. With his older brother, Jerry, he purchased a barbering license and assisted his father to keep the family solvent. Their mother, Vannie, would tell reporters searching for clues about the now-infamous special prosecutor: “He polished his shoes every night, and his daddy’s shoes, just sitting down on the floor in front of the TV.” An idle mind was the devil’s playground; the Starr family believed in hard work to suppress temptation.
As a child, Ken Starr listened attentively as his father rehearsed Sunday sermons under a shade tree in their backyard. As he grew older, Ken kept his own favorite verses of scripture on note cards in his shirt pocket, to read during spare minutes as an opportunity for silent reflection. Religion, according to Billie Jeayne, was always a central force in Ken Starr’s life. “Oh, it played a very important role,” she said. “I suppose it started [with his] being carried to church when he was three weeks old.”
Roberta Mahan, Ken’s homeroom teacher at Sam Houston High School, remembered a cherubic boy who was president of his senior class and who worked diligently as a writer and photographer for the school newspaper (the Raven) and yearbook (the Cherokee). “He was deeply involved in everything,” she recalled. “He had a lot of curiosity, he was very intelligent, he wore glasses and looked the part, he was very affable, very well liked by all of the other students.”
High school friend Sam Millsap, who himself went on to pursue a career in law, described Starr as uncommonly mature for his age. “He was one of those guys who seemed to be 40 years old from the time they were born,” Millsap told a reporter for the San Antonio Express-News in 1998. “He was always apart from the rest of the gang, and he was comfortable with that. I never thought that was weird, probably because I was dorky also.”
Among his peers, there was a general assumption that Ken Starr would rise to the top, making a name for himself, although few would have imagined that his career path would have taken this particular twist. The junior yearbook in 1963 contained a photo of Starr with a caption: “Kenneth Starr, ‘heap big boss man’” of the class. “Ken himself thought he was going to be a preacher,” said Miss Mahan. “And I think the other students did, too, knowing that his father was a preacher, and that he was a serious-minded student and that he was religious. He was a moral-type person.”
According to high school friend Alan Reaves, Ken was “probably the most conservative of all the kids.” Although Starr was a Democrat, he naturally gravitated to the conservative side of the party. Still, Starr admired many public servants regardless of party affiliation. In 1963, he joined a group of student council members making the trek to see President John F. Kennedy at Brooks Air Force Base. Although JFK was too liberal for him politically, Starr couldn’t wait to see Kennedy in the flesh. The group from Sam Houston High got close enough to see the handsome president from a distance—a great thrill. The next day, when news reached Sam Houston High that President Kennedy had been assassinated in Dallas, Starr was devastated. “To think that it all happened in Texas,” recalled Reaves, “made it all the more horrible.” Starr composed a somber editorial for the school newspaper: “Now, as we begin to pick