Missing Person of the Week: Robert Leroy Kovack

On request, Robert Leroy Kovack is the missing person of the week. (I’ve finally changed it.) To all intents and purposes things were going marvelously for him in September 1998. He was about to finish graduate school and had already gotten a job in his field. He had some credit card debt, but that’s normal.

Then he was gone. And no one seems to know why.

I would think it was one of those “MP in car in water somewhere” cases except for the fact that his car turned up abandoned and out of gas.

Maybe Kovack had secrets in his life that no one knew about, even now. Maybe something happened to him while he was walking down the road to get gas. I really can’t speculate any more on this one. His case reminds me of Jason Jolkowski‘s in that they were both healthy, happy young men who vanished seemingly without rhyme or reason.

I sort of have a new car

My wrecked car turned out to be quite badly damaged. It would have cost over $3,000 just to make it legal to drive, never mind anything cosmetic. So I’m getting a new one instead. It cost about the same as fixing my old one would have cost, with the advantage of not looking like crap. It is the exact same make and model as my previous vehicle.

I pick the new car up Thursday Wednesday. Thank goodness. I’ve been going stir-crazy. Since I think the beginning of this month, I literally haven’t left the house except to go to the mailbox.

My wreck has a bit of a story behind it: I was driving down the interstate and the car just went off the road. Just like that. All of the sudden I had no steering. Off the road, over a ditch, through a chicken-wire fence. I was pressing hard on the brakes and it peeled sideways again and made a long track through a cornfield before it finally ran out of momentum. It could have been much worse. It could have turned left instead of right and brought me in front of approaching traffic.

A man saw it and ran over. I told him I was all right and said, bewildered, “Something happened.”

That something that happened turned out to be my serpentine belt. Something happened that rendered it nonfunctional and it was nobody’s fault, just bad luck. They did explain this to me using different words, but I couldn’t understand; I don’t speak Auto Mechanic. I focused on the “not your fault” part. Because me, I keep bumping into things. I’m just not really a good driver. I haven’t been in many accidents but every one of them had been my fault, until now.