Rbbm. Easy to imagine PW living under the radar, perhaps unrecognizable as a street person, although certain traits like his food preferences ect. might help him stand out. Maybe he did try to head towards Texas? imo, speculation.
Peter Winston: Vanished Prodigy
By
Sarah Weinman • 07/18/12
The Mysterious Disappearance of Peter Winston
"What makes the case of Peter Winston so baffling is that at one time he was fairly well-known. The cover of the December 19, 1964, edition of The Saturday Evening Post bears the words “BOY GENIUS,” and inside, not far removed from a short story by Thomas Pynchon, is Gilbert Millstein’s account of a very special 6-year-old child attending one of the earliest of the schools for gifted children that popped up around the New York City area, Sands Point Elementary in Long Island.
Peter was, Millstein wrote, “a wiry, intense-looking youngster with dark-blond hair and hazel eyes, big ears, a wide vulnerable mouth and a somewhat oracular manner of address that is in peculiar contrast to both the shape of his mouth and his childish treble.”
"He could tell people—as he did Sands Point’s headmaster—what day of the week their birthday would fall on in any given year using the “calendar in his head.” At age 5, Peter stood up in class and gave a detailed precis of the assassination of President Kennedy, cobbled together from newspaper and TV accounts. He even argued about the existence of God with a classmate, Richard Brody, now a writer for The New Yorker, fascinating the teacher who overheard a snatch of the conversation."
Mr. Brody and other Sands Point classmates remembered Peter as the smartest person they ever knew, and a total eccentric. While the other kids ate cafeteria food,
Peter brought the same brown-bag lunch—“salami wrapped in tinfoil, a container of milk and a banana,” Mr. Brody said—every day. He wore hunter boots where others wore penny loafers, and at baseball games he would generally broadcast the action to himself."
The Mysterious Disappearance of Peter Winston
"As the meal went on, they grew increasingly worried by Peter’s demeanor.
He was disheveled, his long curly hair even more unruly than usual. He was muttering something about going to Texas to see Walter Korn, author of the chess bible Modern Chess Openings, and said Korn “was God.” His friend’s parents were so disturbed by Peter’s comments they called his mother, according to Mr. Polowan.
Winston left not long after. No one ever saw him again."