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 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 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 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
Regardless of whether Henry Moellenkamp came out of his mother’s 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 I’ve 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 company’s 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. Public’s 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 wasn’t 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 father’s 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 didn’t 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.
I myself was deeply troubled by our little family’s image problem, which was complicated when Mother broke her nose 2 days after Father got the black eye. To the outside world it looked as though she had said something to Father about the reason he had a black eye, and his reply had been to slug her. I didn’t think he would ever slug her, no matter what.
There is a not quite remote possibility that he really did slug her, of course. Lesser men would have slugged her under similar circumstances. The real truth of the matter became unavailable to historians forever when the falling ceiling of a gift shop on the Canadian side of Niagara Falls killed both participants, as I’ve said, some 20 years ago. They were said to have died instantly. They never knew what hit them, which is the best way to go.
There was no argument about that in Vietnam or, I suppose, on any battlefield. One kid I remember stepped on an antipersonnel mine. The mine could have been one of our own. His best friend from Basic Training asked him what he could do for him, and the kid replied: “Turn me off like a light bulb, Sam.”
The dying kid was white. The kid who wanted to help him was black, or a light tan, actually. His features were practically white, you would have to say.