Ilgvars Kārlis Lelis

Ilgvars Kārlis Lelis (aka "Starlight" and "Karl" Lelis) Starlight was born, Ilgvars Kārlis Lelis, on February 28, 1959, to Joseph & Mirdza Lelis, at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston, Massachusetts, and spent the first two and a half years living in Cambridge, where his father was finishing his Ph.D. in Linguistics at Harvard University. Upon graduating, his father accepted a teaching position at Howard University in Washington D.C. in 1961, and the family joined him a year later in September of 1962, and settled in College Park, Maryland.

Ilgvars was the fourth child out of five in the family. He had three brothers: two older, and one younger, and a sister, who was the oldest child. I was the middle child and turned five years old about seven weeks after Ilgvars was born. Our older brother didn't live with us (which is another story in itself), but the two of us (Ilgvars & I) were very close during the formative childhood years, and spent a lot of time together.

Ilgvars was a very bright kid and had many interests, which he pursued with great zeal and enthusiasm. He learned about the planets and stars as soon as he was able to read, which was around age four or so. This was no doubt an early foundation for his later love and fascination with astrology. The proximity of our ages made it ideal for us to hang out together (not to mention that the 3 youngest brothers, myself included, shared a room). When Ilgvars was about 5, I started creating adventures I called "Expeditions", where I would put him on the handlebars of my bike, and we would go down by the railroad tracks, the junkyard, construction equipment depots, sand and rockpile quarries, which all were adjacent to a swampy lake with loud bullfrogs. I'd fill a plastic canteen full of Kool-Aid, make a couple of peanut butter & jelly sandwiches, put them in a backpack, and off we went! We wouldn't be seen again until evening.

He would later help me out with my paper route, and we would go to the movies on Sundays and sit through the feature up to three times. It was quite a hike, but we still took the familiar route of our earlier expeditions, and cut through the industrial areas, coming and going. The most notable movies we saw during that era were the early Clint Eastwood "Dollar" movies, and the James Bond flick "You Only Live Twice".

Our parents were refugees from Latvia, who had fled communism, and had landed in one of the many D.P. (Displaced Persons) camps in Germany, after World War II, which is where they first met. They both opted for America, and under the Marshall Plan, they came over in effect as "indentured servants", which meant that someone in America had to sponsor them, and then they had to work for the person(s) who sponsored them. Though they decided to keep in touch with each other, they had no say on where they would be placed. Our father ended up as a cowboy on a ranch near Bismarck, North Dakota, while our mother was sponsored by a doctor's family in Akron, Ohio, who needed a nanny for their children.

Our mother was treated well, whereas our father was not. As soon as he had the resources to break free, he joined our mother in Akron, where he got a job as a janitor in the church where they were married. That was the best job he could get at the time, not knowing English very well. (He ultimately ended up teaching English and Comparative Literature at the college level.) Our parents were strangers in a strange land, and they wanted to keep their heritage alive, to remember their lives before being completely uprooted. So, they gave all of their children Latvian names, and we were only allowed to speak Latvian at home.

Some names were easier to pronounce than others. "Ilgvars" was a particularly unusual name, and the difficulty was compounded by the Latvian nicknames for it. "Ilgvars" (which literally means "long-power" or endurance, tenacity, etc.) was shortened to "Ilgucis" (pronounced "il'-goo-tziss" – "oo" as in book or cookie), and even shorter, "Gucis" ("Goo'-tziss"), Gucī ("Goo'tzee"), and just plain "Guc" ("Gootz"). Somewhere around age twelve, Ilgvars decided that none of those options suited him, and he started going by the name, "Carl", which was an anglicized version of his middle name, Kārlis. (Kārlis was our mother's father's name.) Carl eventually started spelling it with a "K", but not before he had applied & received a Social Security Card with the name, "Ilgvars C. Lelis", which created further complications for him down the road.

He also had a love for music at an early age, as did all his older siblings. He listened to the radio a lot, and was exposed to a lot of cool music, as it was happening, i.e. the British Invasion (Beatles & Stones, Animals, Yardbirds, etc.) and the Psychedelic, hippie era (Jefferson Airplane, Jimi Hendrix, Cream, Buffalo Springfield, Doors, Steppenwolf, etc.). Even though we didn't have access to a real piano, Karl had figured out most of the Major & minor chords on the keyboard before he was ten. And he started figuring out chords on the guitar soon after. By the time he was thirteen, he was a solid rhythm guitarist, and was able to figure out songs by ear. (He started learning electric lead guitar soon after, and had gotten fairly proficient by the time he was 15 or 16, but he ultimately settled for playing acoustic guitar. It was more practical; it required less equipment to haul around, and it was conducive to ad hoc public performances when the mood and crowd was right.) Early on, he was also drawn to and enamored of the whole hippie scene, and rock star personalities. Brian Jones had the same birthday as him (Feb. 28), so at one point Carl decided his stage name would be "Carl Brian". And of course, part of that whole scene was the celebration of psychedelic drugs.

Karl already had issues, even before he got into psychedelics, but they were largely ignored because he was intelligent. We both had severe ADHD, but there was no diagnosis for that back then. Our teachers simply said "we weren't paying attention". Karl's issues ran deeper than mine, however, and it was noticeable that he was lacking certain abilities, even though he excelled in other areas. And he did get into psychedelics – too much, too early – long before he could really handle himself, and way long before his brain was fully developed. Add a touch of OCD to the mix, along with an extremely addictive personality, and the resulting compound was a recipe for disaster.

Karl managed to fail 9th Grade English, and in lieu of Summer School, or being held back, he was promoted to 10th grade, with the understanding that he would make up those credits in Evening classes that fall. As fate would have it, Karl's new high school was so disorganized that no one could tell him initially what his class schedule was, or whom his teachers were. So, instead of trying to unravel the bureaucracy to sort it out, Karl decided it was official permission to not attend school anymore (including his night classes). Needless to say, when all of this finally came to light months later, it did not go over well. But ironically, and much to Karl's credit, he took it upon himself to study for his G.E.D., which he completed six months before his class graduated.

Entering the job world was difficult for Karl, and he quickly developed a pattern of sabotaging any chances for succeeding at any particular vocation. He would start out strong and willing, but grew tired of the grind very quickly or suddenly. He never stayed at any one particular job long enough to get a reference, so he was perpetually working the same type of menial, entry-level jobs, with no chance for advancement. His options were also further limited by the fact that he never got a driver's license. He did learn how to drive, but was too overwhelmed by all the moving parts, and having to focus all of his attention on this singular task for so long.