Practice to Deceive

could be explained away. Most young athletes sustain bruises.
    Lloyd Jackson recalled that Jim’s stepfather “looked like the actor Dan Hedaya, who played Nick Tortelli—Carla’s husband on Cheers .” He was a dark and swarthy man whose eyebrows grew together over the bridge of his nose.
    Naturally, Jim looked nothing like him. One of Jim’s most outstanding features was his hair. It was dark blond and thick and shiny; he styled it like most of the teenage boys in the Langley High School class of 1971—parting it far off to one side with bangs and then plastered down with hair gel. The male students who had enough of a beard to do so affected sideburns.
    Huden was still a fairly thin kid in high school when he, Dick Deposit, Ken Kramer, Tom Stackhouse, and Lloyd Jackson were among those who turned out for football for the Falcons at Langley High School.
    “As I recall now,” Jackson said, “Jim wasn’t particularly gifted—but he was a ‘gamer.’ ”
    The athletic star of the class of 1971 was Ken Kramer, and Jim didn’t come close to his skills when they played football, basketball, and ran track. Ken was the quarterback who carried the football across the goal line so many times, and Jim was a guard. But they were both first team.
    And they were both popular. In 1970, Ken Kramer was class president for the first semester of their senior year and Jim Huden was president for the second semester in 1971.
    Jim was generous and well liked, but he occasionally got into trouble at Langley High School because he was “a little bit wild.” Although he made the honor roll in his junior year, he was also suspended in the eleventh grade for drinking.
    In the school yearbook for 1971, Jim Huden was voted “the biggest cut-up.”
    Jackson and Jim drifted apart after Lloyd’s high school graduation, although Jim remained close to some of his childhood friends, particularly Dick Deposit and Ron Young.
    Many of Jim Huden’s friends left Whidbey Island to go to college or join the service. One formerly close friend he lost touch with was Ken Kramer, who had been offered a number of athletic scholarships. True to his basic generosity, Jim never seemed to be jealous of Ken. The message he scribbled in Ken’s yearbook demonstrated that, and, in other ways may have been prophetic:
Ken—
If you had enough pages, I could almost start to write about all the junk we’ve done. Football was best of all, though. If there is one thing it’s taught us, it’s to do anything to win. You got the talent so remember that. Do the best in everything you do, and best of luck to you.
    James E. Huden
    Lloyd Jackson didn’t run into Jim again until about 1976 when Huden returned to Whidbey Island after serving in the air force.
    “I was coming off the stupidest thing I’d ever done,” Jackson said. “And getting a divorce. Anyway, we started hanging out together, sometimes where he was living, at Ron Young’s house. Ron got married and added two kids, and I asked Jim if he wanted to move in with me. I had a house with a spare bedroom. I guess he stayed with me about a year. It was the start of a long, real friendship.
    “It was good having him around. I was kind of depressed from my divorce and Jim helped me get over that.”
    After a while, Jim moved on to a place of his own. In 1980, Jim met his first wife, Patti Lewandowski. Patti worked for the telephone company as a lineman and she could scamper up the poles just as well as any man. Like the rest of Jim’s friends, Lloyd liked Patti and was happy to see Jim settle down with a nice woman. Patti was “attractive—but no beauty.”
    The couple bought a house on the mainland in the north end of King County, and Jim was working for AT&T, too.
    Jim Huden and a couple of his friends were fascinated with computers and their possible future capabilities. In the mideighties, Jim and his coworkers quit the phone company and began to write a software program for Microsoft.
    It was an extremely intense project. Patti Huden confided to Lloyd Jackson that Jim would often work himself to the point of exhaustion.
    “He was so tired at times,” she said, “that he would just start to cry.”
    But it was all worth it. Bill Gates’s burgeoning Microsoft bought Jim’s software program, and suddenly Jim and Patti were wealthy. None of their friends knew exactly how much the software netted them, but there were strong rumors that Jim’s cut was forty thousand dollars a month over