Many of the freshmen believed it, and were watched to see how long they went on believing it, just as they had been watched when they were little, no doubt, to see how long they would go on believing in the Tooth Fairy, the Easter Bunny, and Santa Claus.
Vietnam.
Most of the letters to The Musketeer protesting the modernization of the Lutz Carillon are from people who had somehow hung on to the wealth and power they had been born to. One, though, is from a man who admitted that he was in prison for fraud, and that he had ruined his life and that of his family with his twin addictions to alcohol and gambling. His letter was like this book, a gallows speech.
One thing he had still looked forward to, he said,
after he had paid his debt to society, was returning to Scipio to ring the bells with ropes again.
Now you take that away from me,¨ he said.
One letter is from an old bell-puller, very likely dead by now, a member of the Class of 1924 who had married a man named Marthinus de Wet, the owner of a gold mine in Krugersdorp, South Africa. She knew the history of the bells, that they had been made from weapons gathered up after the Battle of Gettysburg. She did not mind that the bells would soon be played electrically. The bad idea, as far as she was concerned, was that the sour bells, Pickle and Lemon and Big Cracked John and Beelzebub, were going to be turned on lathes in Belgium until they were either in tune or on the scrap heap.
Are Tarkington students no longer to be humanized and humbled as I was day after day,¨ she asked, by the cries from the bell tower of the dying on the sacred, blood-soaked grounds of Gettysburg?¨
The bells controversy inspired a lot of purple prose like that, much of it dictated to a secretary or a machine, no doubt. It is quite possible that Mrs. de Wet graduated from Tarkington without being able to write any better than most of the ill-educated prisoners across the lake.
If my Socialist grandfather, nothing but a gardener at Butler University, could read the letter from Mrs. de Wet and note its South African return address, he would be grimly gratified. There was a clear-as-crystal demonstration of a woman living high on profits from the labor of black miners, overworked and underpaid.
He would have seen exploitation of the poor and powerless in the growth of the prison across the lake as
well. The prison to him would have been a scheme for depriving the lower social orders of leadership in the Class Struggle and for providing them with a horrible alternative to accepting whatever their greedy paymasters would give them in the way of working conditions and subsistence.
By the time I got to Tarkington College, though, he would have been wrong about the meaning of the prison across the lake, since poor and powerless people, no matter how docile, were no longer of use to canny investors. What they used to do was now being done by heroic and uncomplaining machinery.
So an appropriate sign to put over the gate to Athena might have been, instead of Work Makes Free,¨ for example: Too bad you were born. Nobody has any use for you,¨ or maybe: Come in and stay in, all you burdens on Society.¨
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former roommate of Ernest Hubble Hiscock, the dead war hero, who had also been in the war, who had lost an arm as a Marine on Iwo Jima, wrote that the memorial Hiscock himself would have wanted most was a promise by the Board of Trustees at the start of each academic year to keep the enrollment the same size it had been in his time.
So if Ernest Hubble Hiscock is looking down from Heaven now, or wherever it is that war heroes go after dying, he would be dismayed to see his beloved campus surrounded by barbed wire and watchtowers. The bells are shot to hell. The number of students, if you can call convicts that, is about 2,000 now.
When there were only 300 students¨ here, each one had a bedroom and a bathroom and plenty of closets all his or her own. Each bedroom was part of a 2-bedroom, 2-bathroom suite with a common living room for 2. Each living room had couches and easy chairs and a
working fireplace, and state-of-the-art sound-reproduction equipment and a big-screen TV.
At the Athena state prison, as I would discover when I went to work over there, there were 6 men to each cell and each cell had been built for 2. Each 50 cells had a recreation room with one Ping-Pong table and one TV. The TV, moreover, showed only tapes of programs, including news, at least 10 years old. The idea was to keep the prisoners from becoming distressed about anything going on in the outside world that hadnt been all taken care of one way or the other, presumably, in the long-ago.
They could feast their eyes on whatever they liked, just so long as it wasnt relevant.
How those letter-writers loved not just the college but the whole Mohiga ValleyXthe seasons, the lake, the forest primeval on the other side. And there were few differences between student pleasures in their times and my own. In my time, students didnt skate on the lake anymore, but on an indoor rink given in 1971 by the Israel Cohen Family. But they still had sailboat races and canoe races on the lake. They still had picnics by the ruins of the locks at the head of the lake. Many students still brought their own horses to school with them. In my time, several students brought not just 1 horse but 3, since polo was a major sport. In 1976 and again in
1980, Tarkington College had an undefeated polo team. There are no horses in the stable now, of course. The
escaped convicts, surrounded and starving a mere 4 days after the prison break, calling themselves Freedom Fighters¨ and flying an American flag from the top of the bell tower of this library, ate the horses and the
campus dogs, too, and fed pieces of them to their hostages, who were the Trustees of the college.
The most successful athlete ever to come from Tarkington, arguably, was a horseman from my own time, Lowell Chung. He won a Bronze Medal as a member of the United States Equestrian Team in Seoul, South Korea, back in 1988. His mother owned half of Honolulu, but he couldnt read or write or do math worth a darn. He could sure do Physics, though. He could tell me how levers and lenses and electricity and heat and all sorts of power plants worked, and predict correctly what an experiment would prove before Id performed itXjust as long as I didnt insist that he quantify anything, that he tell me what the numbers were.
He earned his Associate in the Arts and Sciences Degree in 1984. That was the only degree we awarded, fair warning to other institutions and future employers, and to the students themselves, that our graduates intellectual achievements, while respectable, were unconventional.
Lowell Chung got me on a horse for the first time in my life when I was 43 years old. He dared me. I told him I certainly wasnt going to commit suicide on the back of one of his firecracker polo ponies, since I had a wife and a motherin-law and 2 children to support. So he borrowed a gentle, patient old mare from his girlfriend at the time, who was Claudia Roosevelt.
Comically enough, Lowells then girlfriend was a whiz at arithmetic, but otherwise a nitwit. You could ask her, What is 5,111 times 10,022, divided by 97?¨
Claudia would reply, Thats 528,066.4. So what? So
So what indeed! The lesson I myself learned over and over again when teaching at the college and then the prison was the uselessness of information to most people, except as entertainment. If facts werent funny or scary, or couldnt make you rich, the heck with them.
When I later went to work at the prison, I encountered a mass murderer named Alton Darwin who also could do arithmetic in his head. He was Black. Unlike Claudia Roosevelt, he was highly intelligent in the verbal area. The people he had murdered were rivals or deadbeats or police informers or cases of mistaken identity or innocent bystanders in the illegal drug industry. His manner of speaking was elegant and thought-provoking.
He hadnt killed nearly as many people as I had. But then again, he hadnt had my advantage, which was the full cooperation of our Government.
Also, he had done all his killing for reasons of money. I had never stooped to that.
When I found out that he could do arithmetic in his head, I said to him, Thats a remarkable gift you have.¨