These structures bore the names of wealthy families
as grateful as the Moelhenkamps for all the college had managed to do for offspring of theirs whom conventional colleges had deemed ineducable. Most were unrelated to the Moehlenkamps or to anyone who carried the Tarkington gene of dyslexia. Nor were the young they sent to Tarkington necessarily troubled by dyslexia. All sorts of different things were wrong with them, including an inability to write legibly with pen and ink, although what they tried to write down made perfect sense, and stammering so severe as to prevent their saying a word in class, and petit mal, which caused their minds to go perfectly blank for seconds or minutes anywhere, anytime, and so on.
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 Tarkinglon. 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 Henrys friend Paul Dresser, brother of the novelist Theodore Dreiser. This was 1 of the rare instances in which Dresser set another mans 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?¨ transmogrifled 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 mothers womb dyslexic, Tarkington College wouldnt 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 ScipioXso 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 hadnt come out of his mothers womb dyslexic, and if that mother hadnt been a Tarkington and so known about the little college on Lake Mohiga, this library would never have been built and ifiled 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 I 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 hadnt come out of his mothers 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 mothers womb dyslexic, these heights above Scipio might have been all darkness on the cold winter night 2 years ago, with Lake Mohiga frozen hard as a parking lot, when 10,000 prisoners at Athena were suddenly set free.
Instead, there was a little galaxy of beckoning lights up here.
4
R
egardless of whether Henry Moellenkamp came out of his mothers womb dyslexic or not, I was born in Wilmington, Delaware, 18 months before this country joined the fighting in World War II. I have not seen Wilmington since. That is where they keep my birth certificate. I was the only child of a housewife and, as Ive said, a chemical engineer. My father was then employed by E. I. Du Pont de Nemours & Company, a manufacturer of high explosives, among other things.
When I was 2 years old, we moved to Midland City, Ohio, where a washing-machine company named Robo-Magic Corporation was beginning to make bomb-release mechanisms and swivel mounts for machine guns on B-I 7 bombers. The plastics industry was then in its infancy, and Father was sent to Robo-Magic to determine what synthetic materials from Du Pont could be used in the weapons systems in place of metal, in order to make them lighter.
By the time the war was over, the company had gotten out of the washing-machine business entirely, had
changed its name to Barrytron, Limited, and was making weapon, airplane, and motor vehicle parts composed of plastics it had developed on its own. My father had become the companys Vice-President in Charge of Research and Development.
When I was about 17, Du Pont bought Barrytron in order to capture several of its patents. One of the plastics Father had helped to develop, I remember, had the ability to scatter radar signals, so that an airplane clad in it would look like a flock of geese to our enemies.
This material, which has since been used to make virtually indestructible skateboards and crash helmets and skis and motorcycle fenders and so on, was an excuse, when I was a boy, for increasing security precautions at Barrytron. To keep Communists from finding out how it was made, a single fence topped with barbed wire was no longer adequate. A second fence was put outside that one, and the space between them was patrolled around the clock by humorless, jack-booted armed guards with lean and hungry Dobermans.
When Du Pont took over Barrytron, the double fence, the Dobennans, my father and all, I was a high school senior, all set to go to the University of Michigan to learn how to be a journalist, to serve John Q. Publics right to know. Two members of my 6-piece band, The Soul Merchants, the clarinet and the string bass, were also going to Michigan.
We were going to stick together and go on making music at Ann Arbor. Who knows? We might have become so popular that we went on world tours and
made great fortunes, and been superstars at peace rallies and love-ins when the Vietnam War came along.
Cadets at West Point did not make music. The musicians in the dance band and the marching band were Regular Army enlisted men, members of the servant class.
They were under orders to play music as written, note for note, and never mind how they felt about the music or about anything.
For that matter, there wasnt any student publication at West Point. So never mind how the cadets felt about anything. Not interesting.
I was fine, but all kinds of things were going wrong with my fathers life. Du Pont was looking him over, as they were looking over everybody at Barrytron, deciding whether to keep him on or not. He was also having a love affair with a married woman whose husband caught him in the act and beat him up.
This was a sensitive subject with my parents, naturally, so I never discussed it with them. But the story was all over town, and Father had a black eye. He didnt play any sports, so he had to make up a story about falling down the basement stairs. Mother weighed about 90 kilograms by then, and berated him all the time about his having sold all his Barrytron stock 2 years too soon. If he had hung on to it until the Du Pont takeover, he would have had $1,000,000, back when it meant something to be a millionaire. If I had been learning-disabled, he could easily have afforded to send me to Tarkington.
Unlike me, he was the sort of man who had to be in
extremis in order to commit adultery. According to a story I heard from enemies at high school, Father had done the jumping-out-the-window thing, hippity-hopping like Peter Cottontail across backyards with his pants around his ankles, and getting bitten by a dog, and getting tangled up in a clothesline, and all the rest of it. That could have been an exaggeration. I never asked.