In 2007, as a 60th birthday present, Patrick Gunkel was taken on a 2-week trip to Italy and Switzerland by his friend, University of Texas geologist Robert Folk.
Years later, Folk recounted via email to Professor Betsey Dyer of Wheaton College, Massachusetts, that when the two of them were exploring the famous historic town of Pompeii, Gunkel deliberately ignored every NO ENTRY sign he came across and just kept on walking.1
“I think he feels compelled to flout authority at any opportunity,” Folk told Dyer. “He has had many ‘principled’ run-ins with teachers, police, librarians, etc.”
Folk knew Gunkel about as well as any of his close friends.
But was Gunkel always like this?
Despite the provocative suggestion in my clickbait title, the answer is actually… yes, he always was.
Even as a young child, Gunkel appears to have been extremely precocious and without much sense of the normal boundaries that typically separate children from adults.
As with many aspects of Gunkel’s personality and character, we might be tempted to chalk this up to one of any number of mental illnesses.
But I’ve been down this road many times, and trust me… as a way of trying to understand the enigma of Patrick Gunkel, the “mental illness” rubric just isn’t very helpful.
Gunkel was an incredibly vibrant, eccentric, unique, irreducible individual who may have had numerous overlapping mental reasons for his behavior.
And yet the trauma that Gunkel experienced in New Orleans at the hands of a group of abusive police officers in 1968 certainly didn’t improve his outlook toward authority in the slightest.
So… What Happened to Gunkel in New Orleans?
In an episode that is just sadly too common in America even today, Gunkel related his account of policy brutality to his friend and former Hudson Institute colleague Anthony J. Weiner (no relation to the disgraced New York Congressman) in an August 2000 email.2
As Gunkel told Weiner, he was visiting the New Orleans zoo on a Sunday and was “picked up quite unjustifiably for vagrancy in order to fill a quota.”3
Gunkel, a thin 21 year-old wearing wire-rim spectacles, argued with the police officers who then brought him down to “Central Lockup.”
As Gunkel watched the desk officer tossing items from his wallet into the air and laughing, he suddenly found himself surrounded by at least 20 more officers.
“After taunting and playing with me for a minute, they beat me thrice—in front of the desk, in a passageway, and finally in a back room,” Gunkel wrote, “Until I was nearly unconscious, with a broken nose and unilateral [i.e., single-sided] deafness that would last for three weeks.”
One of the officers, Gunkel says, used brass knuckles.
Another grabbed him by the balls.
“This case of extreme police misbehavior and brutality was dealt with, as a departmental matter,” Gunkel went on.
The charges against him were dismissed, and one or two police officers were fired.
This fairly positive outcome, Gunkel believed, was only due to the intervention of his father Douglas, “a person of some political power in Illinois,” and his uncle, who was “a Federal Court Judge in Chicago.”
Although the episode may have been somewhat aggravated by Gunkel’s personality—he does say that he “reacted indignantly to the brutal and offensive questioning of the two officers” and told them they were “behaving like animals”—that’s clearly no justification for what happened to him.
It’s difficult to see this horrific experience with the New Orleans police as anything but fundamentally formative for Gunkel.
Perhaps further research will reveal writings or statements by Gunkel in which he directly links this episode to his distrust of authority later in life, but I have not yet found the episode recounted anywhere else.
Oppositional Politics
Gunkel’s oppositional nature eventually found a shape in oppositional politics.
In fact, according to my research, Gunkel did not show much of an interest in politics until his late 20s.
Then, while working for Herman Kahn’s Hudson Institute in Croton-on-Hudson, New York, Gunkel seems to have become a rabid libertarian.
Gunkel’s libertarian streak stayed with him until his move to Texas in the late 1980s, where the supposedly libertarian paradise of Austin turned out to be just another place where you had to follow the rules.
In particular, Gunkel was outraged at a new law that would force bicyclers like himself to wear helmets.4
But he’d also had other run-ins with authority, including the management at his Austin apartment complex, where Gunkel was evicted for refusing to wear shorts in the swimming pool.
Gunkel repeatedly went swimming wearing blue jeans instead of the proscribed swimming shorts “to demonstrate the pointlessness of rules substituted for rational argument in the running of our society,” Gunkel raged to John Kelso, a reporter for the Austin American-Statesman.5
Gunkel was well aware of his own nature.
And he accepted it despite all the problems it would inevitably cause.
“[I am] a stubborn singularity in a society that just does not care or share my ideals and that can only laugh at the exception,” Gunkel wrote to Weiner in the same email that I’ve quoted from in this article.
It’s no wonder Gunkel made far more enemies than friends in his life, and that even his few friends were often exasperated by his regular refusal to conform, compromise, and concede.
As shown in the email snippet below, Gunkel’s traumatic memory of his beating in New Orleans came up in the context of another run-in with the police when he was around 50 years old:
Note: I have the right to disseminate this material. It may not be copied, stored, reproduced, or disseminated without express written permission. However, excerpts can and should be used for scholarly purposes.
References:
(1) Found in the MIT Distinctive Collections archive.
(2) Found in the MIT Distinctive Collections archive.
(3) Gunkel specifically mentions being at the zoo on a Sunday, which actually makes me wonder whether the zoo was even open. Was he arrested because he was trespassing in the zoo? I briefly tried to find historical hours for the New Orleans zoo at this approximate time, but gave up rather quickly. I am sure the information can be be found and it could add color to the overall story, yet it’s just one very minor detail that I lack the ability to uncover at the present moment.
(5) See “Ban on Pants Dampens Swim” by John Kelso, October 4, 1986, Austin American-Statesman.