Hershey classmates recall a troubled Andrew Stack

There was always something a little odd about a onetime classmate who gained national notoriety this week by flying an airplane into a Texas building, a former student at Central Pennsylvania's Milton Hershey School recalled yesterday.

"I knew he was off," said William Mottin of Sewell. "When I really look back, I can see him snapping like that."

Still, neither Mottin nor other former classmates ever expected things to come to what happened Thursday, when Andrew J. Stack 3d slammed a single-engine plane into the Austin IRS office, setting off a blaze that ravaged the building and injured two workers. Stack and one person inside the building were killed.

"He was quiet, and really kept to himself," said Mottin. "He would talk your ear off, or he would ignore you completely. You didn't know which Andy would show up on any day."

Mottin said he, Stack, and other students who studied at the strictly regimented boarding school for orphans in the early 1970s had what he called limited preparation for the outside world.

"In 1974, you basically were handed $100 cash and a suitcase full of clothes and sent on your way," Mottin said, noting that the policy had been changed. "It takes four or five years to really to get your feet under you and get on with your life."

Lawrence Staab, who bunked with Stack, said the lack of preparation could be especially difficult for long-term students like Stack, who spent a decade in the orphanage started by the chocolatier and philanthropist Milton S. Hershey.

"You really didn't have much of a transition to what we called the 'free world,' " said Staab, who was at the school, in Hershey, near Harrisburg, for eight years.

After Stack left, he spent two years at Harrisburg Area Community College, majoring in engineering. A spokeswoman said Stack earned 59 credits, just shy of what was needed for an associate's degree.

Staab, who works as a corporate training executive for an aircraft company in South Carolina, said Stack might have snapped because of the lack of a strong support network.

"If you didn't have that," Staab said, "you were pretty much on your own."

Connie McNamara, a school spokeswoman, said, "We're saddened. We're shocked." She said that Stack was at the school for 10 years, but had not maintained a relationship with it. "He hasn't been in touch. He hasn't been involved in the school."

Other former students said young people there got plenty of training for the outside world.

"They taught you everything you needed in life. It was good," said Richard Castore, a 1975 graduate and now a carpenter in North Jersey.

Henry McGovern, a psychologist in Asheboro, N.C., said opinions about the Hershey School are mixed because the experiences there varied widely.

"I had a house mother who was cruel," said McGovern, who ran away from the school twice and left before graduation. "I carried memories about her for many years."

But he said he had good adult supervision in another Hershey unit. McGovern eventually received a master's degree and wrote about his life. His book: A Suicide Note of Hope.