Armageddon In Retrospect - Kurt Vonnegut [8]
What can we do about global warming? We could turn out the lights, I guess, but please don’t. I can’t think of any way to repair the atmosphere. It’s way too late. But there is one thing I can fix, and fix this very night, and right here in Indianapolis. It’s the name of another good university you’ve built since my time. But you’ve named it “I.U.P.U.I.” “I.U.P.U.I.”? Have you lost your wits?
“Hi, I went to Harvard. Where did you go?”
“I went to I.U.P.U.I.”
With the unlimited powers vested in me by Mayor Peterson for the whole year of 2007, I rename I.U.P.U.I. “Tarkington University.”
“Hi, I went to Harvard. Where did you go?”
“I went to Tarkington.” Ain’t that classy?
Done and done.
With the passage of time, nobody will know or care who Tarkington was. I mean, who nowadays gives a rat’s ass who Butler was? This is Clowes Hall, and I actually knew some real Cloweses. Nice people.
But let me tell you: I would not be standing before you tonight if it hadn’t been for the example of the life and works of Booth Tarkington, a native of this city. During his time, 1869 to 1946, which overlapped my own time for twenty-four years, Booth Tarkington became a beautifully successful and respected writer of plays, novels, and short stories. His nickname in the literary world, one I would give anything to have, was “The Gentleman from Indiana.”
When I was a kid, I wanted to be like him.
We never met. I wouldn’t have known what to say. I would have been gaga with hero worship.
Yes, and by the unlimited powers vested in me by Mayor Peterson for this entire year, I demand that somebody here mount a production in Indianapolis of Booth Tarkington’s play Alice Adams.
By a sweet coincidence, “Alice Adams” was also the married name of my late sister, a six-foot-tall blond bombshell, who is now in Crown Hill along with our parents and grandparents and great-grandparents, and James Whitcomb Riley, the highest-paid American writer of his time.
You know what my sister Allie used to say? She used to say, “Your parents ruin the first half of your life, and your kids ruin the second half.”
James Whitcomb Riley, “The Hoosier Poet,” was the highest-paid American writer of his time, 1849 to 1916, because he recited his poetry for money in theaters and lecture halls. That was how delighted by poetry ordinary Americans used to be. Can you imagine?
You want to know something the great French writer Jean-Paul Sartre said one time? He said, in French of course, “Hell is other people.” He refused to accept a Nobel Prize. I could never be that rude. I was raised right by our African-American cook, whose name was Ida Young.
During the Great Depression, African-American citizens were heard to say this, along with a lot of other stuff, of course: “Things are so bad white folks got to raise their own kids.”
But I wasn’t raised right by Ida Young alone, a great-grandchild of slaves, who was intelligent, kind and honorable, proud and literate, articulate and thoughtful and pleasing in appearance. Ida Young loved poetry, and used to read poems to me.
I was also raised right by teachers at School 43, “The James Whitcomb Riley School,” and then at Shortridge High School. Back then, great public school teachers were local celebrities. Grateful former students, well into adult life, used to visit them, and tell them how they were doing. And I myself used to be a sentimental adult like that.
But long ago now, all my favorite teachers went the way of most of the polar bears.
The very best thing you can be in life is a teacher, provided that you are crazy in love with what you teach, and that your classes consist of eighteen students or fewer. Classes of eighteen students or fewer are a family, and feel and act like one.
When my grade graduated from School 43, with the Great Depression going on, with almost no business or jobs, and with Hitler taking charge of Germany, each of us had to say in writing what we hoped to do when grown-ups