Bruce Severy, a full-bearded, idealistic 26-year-old, moved from Southern California in 1973 to the small town of Drake, North Dakota, where he had accepted a job teaching English at the public high school. He, his small family and their menagerie of pets settled into a large, white frame house across from the school.
Severy’s progressive bent showed in the curriculum he taught. Insisting that his students should learn “how to think, not what to think,” he assigned his sophomore literature class contemporary fiction to read, including Kurt Vonnegut’s “Slaughterhouse-Five,” a strange and quirky anti-war novel published four years prior.
