#title Dartmouth Professor Had Known Unabomber As A Boyhood Friend
#subtitle He alleges they made small bombs
#author David Moore
Associated Press
#date
#lang en
#pubdate 2026-08-25T00:21:13
#authors David Moore
#topics old news stories
#source <[[https://archive.org/details/img-3953_202607][www.archive.org/details/img-3953_202607]]>
HANOVER — As teenage friends, Dale Eickelman and Theodore John Kaczynski experimented with bits of wire and household chemicals to make small bombs they set off in a field near their homes in a Chicago suburb.
Eickelman, 53, now a Dartmouth professor, said he had not thought much about his old friend until Kaczynski was arrested this week as a suspect in the deadly Unabomber attacks that have baffled authorities for 18 years.
“We would go out to an open field, and I remember Ted had the know-how of putting together things like batteries, wire leads, potassium nitrate and whatever, and creating explosions,” Eickelman told the Daily Southtown in Chicago shortly after Kaczynski’s arrest Wednesday in Montana.
On Thursday, Eickelman had withdrawn into his classroom, refusing to speak to reporters as a security guard kept watch over his lectures.
A written statement from the college said Eickelman had not seen Kaczynski since 1959, and that Eickelman is willing to cooperate with authorities.
“Professor Eickelman does not at this time plan to make any statement,” Roland Adams, director of the Dartmouth College News Service, said Thursday afternoon.
“We’ve had calls from news organizations across the country non-stop since the start of the day and they’re still coming in,” he said.
Telephone calls to Eickelman’s office were immediately transferred to Adams, and a uniformed security guard at the building where Eickelman was teaching directed reporters to the news service.
On Wednesday, Eickelman, an anthropology and human relations professor, said he remembered Kaczynski was good at chemistry, “and we would do the things that kids do when they’re learning about chemicals and what they can do.”
“We would go to the hardware store, use household products and make things you might call bombs,” he said.
“We would just blow up weeds, nothing more,” Eickelman said. “Once we created an explosion in a metal garbage can. Nothing much happened.”
A day after taking Kaczynski, 53, into custody so they could search his 10-by-12-foot mountain cabin in Montana, federal authorities charged him with possessing the components of a bomb found inside. The initial charge made no mention of the Unabomber’s string of attacks that killed three people and injured 23 others over an 18-year span.
Eickelman said he and Kaczynski were closest in the mid-1950s, when the two were in junior high school. Though Kaczynski was quiet and somewhat of a loner, Eickelman did not consider him antisocial.
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