The Misappearance of Steven Kubacki

Part 3: News of a mutual acquaintance

For those just tuning in, we highly recommend starting at the beginning.

In May 1979, after Steven Kubacki “woke up” in some kind of greenery in Pittsfield, Massachusetts, claiming to have no memory of the past 14 ½ months, he told reporters that he had found with him several items of clothing and personal effects he didn’t recognize as his own. Among those items was a T-shirt from a marathon in Wisconsin.

Having that T-shirt could mean almost anything: Kubacki could have borrowed it, bought it, found it, stolen it, or run the Paavo Nurmi Marathon in August 1978 while in the throes of a profound, sustained episode of amnesia. Running itself demands only muscle memory, but running a marathon requires some form of registration if you’re going to get a T-shirt. The Paavo Nurmi Marathon in Iron County was the only marathon in Wisconsin at the time; the current organizer generously tracked down the race results from 1978 and sent them my way.

Of course I wouldn’t find Steven Kubacki listed, even if he’d run the marathon. If he had amnesia, he wouldn’t have known his own name; and if he was pretending to be forever lost in Lake Michigan, he wouldn’t have used it. I found one runner with the surname Kubacki, a handful of Stevens, and a few names that sounded as though they could have been made up (including one Edward Hopper II), but they are all pretty much accounted for. 

There was another name I was looking for. After Kubacki’s re-appearance made national headlines, a divinity student at Berkshire Christian College in Lenox contacted the Associated Press. He said he picked up a hitchhiker with a “remarkable resemblance” to Kubacki on May 5, 1979, the same day Kubacki re-appeared. The student, Ron Curtis, said this hitchhiker told him he had flown from San Francisco to Boston and taken a bus to Pittsfield. And he called himself Nathan.

“He never said anything to me about waking up on a grassy hill,” Curtis said. 

Curtis said he drove “Nathan” to a house in Great Barrington. It was the home of Kubacki’s aunt, but the hitchhiker told Curtis she was a “friend” he was visiting “with news of a mutual acquaintance who has been missing for some time.”

From his aunt’s house, Kubacki reunited with his family in South Deerfield. His mother told reporters at the time that she hadn’t gotten an explanation for her son’s long absence, and didn’t need one. 

“It’s really just grand,” she said. “The world is a great place again.”

Kubacki’s parents, who were divorced by that time, have both since died. According to his mother’s obituary, she had remarried in 1979. She had her second husband’s name by the time Kubacki re-emerged that year, which means she must have gotten remarried while her son was still missing. In one interview, Kubacki marveled at the amount of money his parents spent on a private investigator to look for him. He said he would try and retrace his steps to figure out where he had been. 

I didn’t find any Nathans in the Wisconsin marathon results, but I did find a “Nat.” This person was listed as several years younger than Kubacki would have been, and from Tokyo. That was curious, as the vast majority of runners were local. Still, if Kubacki were to create an international alias, I figured he’d be from Germany. Kubacki had oft made reference to a girlfriend there. His brother urged police to check flights to Germany after his disappearance. And in an interview with detectives, Kubacki’s roommate said Steven had taken off to Europe for two weeks the year before, and that the roommate had paid for the trip. (The roommate hasn’t yet responded to requests for an interview.)

Tom Renner, who was a public relations officer at Hope College at the time of Kubacki’s vansishing, believes Kubacki owes an explanation to his former classmates and others at Hope College who were shaken up by Kubacki’s disappearance.

“People were worried for his well-being,” Renner said. Eventually, Renner and fellow Hope College staff came to conclude that Kubacki must have drowned. As he was just a few credits away from graduating when he went missing, Kubacki was awarded a Bachelor’s degree in absentia.

“The [1978] commencement was mournful because of Kubacki,” Renner said.

“I would hope a person of conscience would by this point in time come forward to say what happened.”

I’ve been told that Kubacki contacted the school after he reappeared and asked to have a degree reissued, minus the “in absentia.” But those who are in a position to confirm the details of any resulting arrangement have been unable or unwilling to speak about it.

A former member of the administrative staff declined to discuss anything involving Kubacki’s academic or enrollment record, citing FERPA laws. Only Kubacki himself can grant permission to release any records, the source said.

“I hate to leave you in the dark, but he’s left us in the dark for years.”

Photo credit:

Pittsfield, MA, 1977; Jim Joseph video screenshot