The End of the Dream Read Online Free PDF Page A

their own little “fraternity” during high school. Still, over the years, the age difference between Kevin and Randy shrunk.   Kevin’s friends become Randy’s friends and vice versa.
    Maybe it had something to do with the spirit of Reston, Robert Simon’s dream that all kinds of people could live together in harmony and friendship. Even though there might be periods where they didn’t see each other and lived thousands of miles apart, so many of those boys from the early days in Reston would remain linked throughout their lives. Oh, but they would go into adulthood kicking and screaming, some of the gang tag group simply didn’t want to grow up. It wasn’t that they wanted to be Peter Pan. They modeled themselves, instead, after Captain Hook. With the wisdom of retrospection, their hedonistic, foolhardy adventures which continued long after they should have outgrown them quite possibly set them up for tragedy.
    Nobody can take as many risks as they did and emerge unscathed .
    The piper must be paid. Both fate and circumstance would dictate who they would become. One of the boys of Reston would develop a deep social conscience and a belief in God that pulled him continually away from the games that never stopped. Another would go in an entirely opposite direction. Even so, not one of them would escape chaos and disaster. It is the way fate singled them out and wrote the scripts of their lives that is baffling. Steve Meyers suffered the most damage from living with a father who seemed unable to give much of himself to his boys. His father laughed at Steve’s dreams of being an artist and told him he had better face reality if he expected to earn a living.
    He showed little, if any, admiration for Steve’s talent. Gordon Meyers’ words hurt Steve far more than the whippings he administered.
    Despite Joanna’s pep talks and her belief in Steve, his father constantly undermined his self-confidence. After his mother and brothers moved to Virginia, Steve followed them to Reston and enrolled in college at Northern Virginia College in Fairfax. He stayed close to the family until 1970, studying political science and literature at Northern Virginia College. Most of the young people who lived near Washington, DC, were interested in politics because they had matured in the shadow of the Pentagon. There were people living in Reston whose names were household words in American political circles, living so close to the national center of government, local kids formed opinions early on about politics.
    1970 was a year filled with disenchantment with old values.
    Richard Nixon was in the White House, students were demonstrating against the war in Vietnam, and National Guardsmen shot into a crowd of students at Kent State, killing four of them. Young men either went to college, to Canada, or to war, many of them decried big business as much as they did big government. Steve stayed in college and tried to conform, to study subjects that would lead to the kind of job his union-man father would approve of. But it didn’t last. He longed to work with his hands and create objects of beauty. In the summer of 1970, Steve traveled to England to attend Emerson College in Sussex where he studied his true love, art. He was an incredibly talented young ma nand already possessed the gifted hands of an artist twice his age. He was a sculptor. He studied sculpting and art in England for two years, where he also worked with developmentally disabled children.
    In 1972, while his brother, Kevin, was graduating from high school back in the States, Steve Meyers met a German architect, Ingleberg Schule, and moved to Vinterbach, Germany, where he would serve an apprenticeship in furniture design and cabinet making. He studied with Schule for three years. Steve carved and smoothed tables that had no legs, but were rather intricate puzzle pieces of ash and maple that nested together to make a base for smooth tabletops. His chests and armoires were