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Starting in 1974, David taught high school English for two years in Lisbon, Iowa, a town where his parents had lived for a while when he and Ted were at college. Co-workers describe a popular teacher who cared greatly for his students and nothing for material things. If he ever had a proper winter coat, no one seems to have seen it. When guests came to his apartment, he served them soft drinks in jelly jars. But unlike Ted, David demonstrated a gift for human contact. Though not much of an athlete, he joined the other high school faculty for Thursday-night basketball games. "You could talk to Dave about anything," says Jim West, a junior high math teacher. "We used to kid him about being so smart, and he'd say his brother was so much smarter that he had a hard time talking to him. That was hard to imagine."
After Iowa, David passed through a number of jobs. One was as a supervisor at the Addison, Illinois, factory of Foam Cutting Engineers, a company that also employed his father. For a while in 1978 one of his subordinates was Ted, who had left Montana briefly in the hope of earning some money. According to investigators, at the factory Ted began dating a female supervisor. (A fellow employee told TIME it was a single date.) After their relationship went nowhere, he responded by composing crude limericks about her and posting them around the plant. When David ordered him to stop, Ted stuck one onto the very machine his brother was operating. David instantly fired him. Ted had been on the job just four months. Soon after, he wrote the woman a letter in which he said he had considered doing harm to her. She was lucky, he told her, that he had decided not to. How serious was the threat? The first Unabomb explosion had gone off three months before his firing.
In the early 1980s, David made his own move into the wild. For a pittance he bought a 30-acre spread at Terlingua Ranch, a grandly named stretch of bare-bones, no-nonsense privacy among the mesquite and greasewood of the Chihuahuan desert, where lizards and diamondback rattlers are the nearest neighbors. To a few friends, he was even known jokingly as "Henry David"--as in Henry David Thoreau, the literary patron saint of nature lovers and solitary souls. He took a passionate stand against paving the two-lane road into Terlingua Ranch. "We both worried about the destruction of mankind from too much emphasis on technology," says Joe La Follette, an English teacher and friend who joined David on long desert hikes. "But he didn't have a solution."