Hocus Pocus - Kurt Vonnegut [8]
It was simply the Moellenkamps who first challenged the new little college to do what it could for a seemingly hopeless case of plutocratic juvenile incapacity, namely Henry. Not only would Henry graduate with honors from Tarkington. He would go on to Oxford, taking with him a male companion who read aloud to him and wrote down thoughts Henry could only express orally. Henry would become 1 of the most brilliant speakers in a golden age of American purple, bow-wow oratory, and serve as a Congressman and then a United States Senator from Ohio for 36 years.
THAT SAME HENRY Moellenkamp was author of the lyrics to one of the most popular turn-of-the-century ballads, “Mary, Mary, Where Have You Gone?”
The melody of that ballad was composed by Henry’s friend Paul Dresser, brother of the novelist Theodore Dreiser. This was 1 of the rare instances in which Dresser set another man’s words to music instead of his own. And then Henry appropriated that tune and wrote, or rather dictated, new words which sentimentalized student life in this valley.
Thus was “Mary, Mary, Where Have You Gone?” transmogrified into the alma mater of this campus until it became a penitentiary 2 years ago.
History.
ACCIDENT AFTER ACCIDENT has made Tarkington what it is today. Who would dare to predict what it will be in 2021, only 20 years from now? The 2 prime movers in the Universe are Time and Luck.
As the tag line of my favorite dirty joke would have it: “Keep your hat on. We could wind up miles from here.”
IF HENRY MOELLENKAMP had not come out of his mother’s womb dyslexic, Tarkington College wouldn’t even have been called Tarkington College. It would have gone on being The Mohiga Valley Free Institute, which would have died right along with the wagon factory and the carpet factory and the brewery when the railroads and highways connecting the East and West were built far to the north and south of Scipio—so as not to bridge the lake, so as not to have to penetrate the deep and dark virgin hardwood forest, now the Iroquois National Forest, to the east and south of here.
IF HENRY MOELLENKAMP hadn’t come out of his mother’s womb dyslexic, and if that mother hadn’t been a Tarkington and so known about the little college on Lake Mohiga, this library would never have been built and filled with 800,000 bound volumes. When I was a professor here, that was 70,000 more bound volumes than Swarthmore College had! Among small colleges, this library used to be second only to the 1 at Oberlin, which had 1,000,000 bound volumes.
So what is this structure in which I sit now, thanks to Time and Luck? It is nothing less, friends and neighbors, than the greatest prison library in the history of crime and punishment!
It is very lonely in here. Hello? Hello?
I MIGHT HAVE said the same sort of thing back when this was an 800,000-bound-volume college library: “It is very lonely in here. Hello? Hello?”
I HAVE JUST looked up Harvard University. It has 13,000,000 bound volumes now. What a read!
And almost every book written for or about the ruling class.
IF HENRY MOELLENKAMP hadn’t come out of his mother’s womb dyslexic, there would never have been a tower in which to hang the Lutz Carillon.
Those bells might never have gotten to reverberate in the valley or anywhere. They probably would have been melted up and made back into weapons during World War I.
IF HENRY MOELLENKAMP had not come out of his mother’s womb dyslexic, these heights above Scipio might have been all darkness on the